Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for being here.
Ms. Laslo-Baker, I'd like to start with you. You brought up the banks and started talking a little about their hesitation to fund especially women entrepreneurs. Some of our regional development agencies.... I'll use ACOA as an example, because I'm from Atlantic Canada. ACOA has programs to develop and finance women entrepreneurs who want to start businesses; it may be through seed capital and other such things. But with these obstacles, are you seeing change? Is it getting worse? Is the reaction of the banks to women entrepreneurs getting better? It seems to me that if we are to expand the footprint of businesses that we want to have exporting in the next number of years, women entrepreneurs are going to be very critical to growing that mass.
Can you speak to this? I'd like to understand your viewpoint.