Thank you, Madam Chair.
I welcome Ms. Isabelle from Startup Canada.
I have to recognize that a majority of the board members of Startup Canada are women. I think, including the team, the majority of them are women. It's good to know that. I know that you are not women-focused only, but it still is good to see that a majority of the board members and the management team are women.
Before my question, I just want to mention that, today, 27% of the board positions across Canada are held by women—27%. That is up from 11% in 2014. In fact, among the TSX-listed companies, 30% of the board positions are held by women. It did not happen just like that. We did pass a bill in 2016, Bill C-25, where we asked the publicly listed organizations to mention their diversity policies in their annual statements to the stakeholders. I remember that I had to fight to get the definition of “diversity”. The bill did not mention it. Even now, the legislation does not mention the definition of “diversity”, but I think I compromised when the regulation identified that diversity includes women, indigenous people, visible minorities and people with disabilities.
Though 30% of the TSX-listed companies have women on the board, only 10% of the overall number of board members, including men and women, are visible minorities, and only 1%, including men and women, of all the board members are indigenous people. When you look at the 30% who are women and dig deeper.... We don't have the statistics for this, but I'm sure that the percentage of women belonging to visible minorities and indigenous people will be less than 1%, or a maximum of 1%. It may be 2% if you want to be very generous. There are still a lot of things that need to be done, and that is where we are going.
Ms. Isabelle, I have a couple of questions for you.
I have a small objection to one thing in your speech. Again, you come before the committee like many witnesses, saying, “We need more funds. We need more funds.” That is like a broken record, and it's in spite of the government's providing a record amount of funds to various programs for women entrepreneurship and women in business. In fact, part of your statement also indicated that the problem is not with the amount of funding that is made available. Forget the cuts that some of the political parties are proposing. The problem is not with the amount of funding that is available, because in part of your statement you also said that 56% of the women founders did not know that there were programs. The problem is not with the funds; it is with the knowledge, the education.
You also mentioned that they have problems with exporting. Let's talk about exports. Before joining politics, I was part of a small company, an export-oriented company. I know that part of your funding comes from EDC, if I'm not wrong. You should know that EDC has programs for small businesses, both women-owned and not. If they get the contract, I think 70% of that is getting funded by EDC. There are funds available. EDC has hundreds of millions of dollars available to fund exports. It is the education that is required for women entrepreneurs to take advantage of the funding that is available.
Now we come to my question. You mentioned helping women entrepreneurs in different sectors, different segments of the economy. Maybe I missed it, but you didn't mention the manufacturing sector. In general, the knowledge-based sector was very small, if I'm not wrong. Am I right?