Let me start off by saying that we need a national child care program in Canada. Regardless of where women arrive in Canada, child care continues to be critically important to their labour market participation, but even to their being able to access settlement services. In Ontario, but I think this is true across the country, our language program funded by Citizenship and Immigration provides some child care spaces, and women have absolutely found that incredibly important. We also need to look at the hours of service so that funding allows agencies to deliver programming at all hours so that they're able to accommodate how families have to work and pay the rent, feed and take of their children, and all of those kinds of things.
For immigrant women, what we find often is that they put off their settlement needs while their spouse—and I'm speaking here for heterosexual families—who is often male goes ahead and does the upgrading first, the credential recognition first, while women take survival jobs to feed the families. We have to be able to see how we can support women's faster integration into the labour market if that is what they choose to do.
We also know there are many women who want to start their own businesses. We have many cottage industries, very much on the periphery, what John calls the informal economy. There has to be some way for us to begin to identify those opportunities and provide funding support for those women to be able to grow their businesses where there's an opportunity to do so. When we talk about entrepreneurship, when we talk about self-employment, you also have to look at the needs of immigrant women.
Often in terms of violence against women, which continues to be an ongoing concern for us, it's a concern for all women here in Canada. It's also true for immigrant and refugee women, and the kinds of programming that needs to be in place beginning at the settlement agency level is critically important. Citizenship and Immigration Canada absolutely has to be a partner, along with Status of Women Canada, in terms of providing funding support for those kinds of services.