Thanks very much, all of you, for being here today.
I made some comments as I've been listening to you, so I'll just go through my notes here. Many times I have actually spoken on the changes that we're making with respect to the funding and it's always been my understanding that the money would be redirected. I'm not sure how there could be a miscommunication out there, except for a lot of rhetoric and politics at play here. Unfortunately, you didn't get that message, but the message has always been there, and it will be redirected. My colleague spoke a bit about where that money will go.
When you're talking about the $10.8 million that will continue to be maintained in the spending and in the programs, that $5 million we found in savings is almost 50% of the $10.8 million that you're going to see that goes back out into the community. I'm hearing such doom and gloom here as I'm listening to all of you. I'm hearing these questions come to you that, “What do you think is going to happen?” Or, “What is going to happen?” And I don't have a crystal ball. I've got to tell you I'm a bit disturbed that you just all of a sudden have just decided to write off any plan that we may have in place, to write off any of the women who are in this caucus and think that we're not going to stand up for women and that our plan isn't going to produce some results. Why are you so determined to completely write off any change?
What's wrong with the Internet? Everybody is using it now. Why can't we have an application? Why can't they go to libraries in the small communities and use the Internet? They still have access to the other offices to give them services and take them through that. That's very forward thinking. If you want to talk about grassroots, you have to be able to reach out to those smaller organizations, to others who want to apply for this money at the same time. So I would like you to comment on that and see if you can try to be a bit more positive about where you think we, as Conservative women, may be going.
Thanks for that, very much. But you know something? We also were elected to take a look at spending. We weren't elected to continue with all of the Liberal programs the way they were. That's not what we were asked to do. We were told very clearly, “Take a look at the spending and if you can do it better, please do it better.” And for anyone to expect to believe that every Liberal program and every program that was in place was actually delivering on exactly what it was intended to do is just not realistic. And Canadians know that's not realistic.
Now to give you a bit about me, before you decide that I have no clue about what I'm talking about, I was a volunteer at rape crisis and trained in crisis intervention. I did seven and a half years and this was about thirteen years ago. And I can tell you that nothing's changed. I don't see any substantial changes, in speaking with even the volunteers who continue to do some of the work that I did with them back them. We haven't seen real hard-core change on the front line in terms of who's been violated and what we're doing to solve that problem. We have some great ideas and we are going to move forward with them. And I do hope that we would have your support when we do that because I think it would be very important to do that.
Please don't just write us off and think that anything we're suggesting here is not valuable or not with the greatest intentions, because it absolutely is.