Okay, and I should try not to avoid your pencil going up by continuing to look down.
Thank you very much for the invitation, the opportunity, to be here. I'm not going to read the document that you've received from us before, but I will highlight some key points.
As pointed out, the Canadian Labour Congress represents over three million working women and men across this country; about half of our membership are women.
Our document says that we are extremely concerned about the reduction of the Status of Women Canada budget and the changes to the terms and conditions of the women's program. It would be closer to say that we're outraged by it. This is completely unacceptable in terms of what's happened to women's programming.
We, in the Canadian Labour Congress, don't receive funding from Status of Women Canada, but we rely very much on the work that's done by women's organizations across this country—whether it's fact sheets, research, education, or work that we might use in our conferences, in on-the-ground community-based work, and all of that advocacy work that's so important to moving women's equality ahead by the labour movement.
As well, it's used by the labour movement internally to create change within our organizations, because we too come from a history of male-dominated organizations and inequalities. So the work that's being done by women's organizations is vitally important to the labour movement.
It is about creating change. It's not simply about providing money for the problems. It's about the advocacy work that creates change, and in particular change for highly disadvantaged groups, such as aboriginal women, women of colour, and women with disabilities.
Our issues are complex and obviously they're unresolved. We should not confuse people who say, well, you don't think women are equal. Of course, we think women are equal, but what we know is that women are not treated equally and that there is systemic discrimination in this country that needs to be dealt with in an advocacy way.
Policy directions have to be improved by the full participation of women and women's organizations. You had a discussion earlier about Canada's abysmal record, in terms of parliamentarians and people in our legislatures, in terms of the percentage of women. I believe I heard on the news on Sunday that we are something like 47th, or somewhere around the same area as Pakistan and Rwanda, or maybe we are after them.
We called for an increase and originally agreed with the increase in the budget. Certainly we didn't expect to see a decrease in the budget. The administrative reduction to the Status of Women Canada's budget is disturbing, to say the least. What it's going to mean is that as well as the on-the-ground work that we just heard groups talk about, we're going to see significant losses in the government's internal capacity to achieve women's equality; loss of the independent policy research fund, which was a unique initiative supporting independent research that could be used as a basis for developing policies with positive impacts; loss of the dialogue and work between the federal government and provincial governments responsible for the status of women; and cuts that will limit our own country's ability to intervene on women's economic, social, and political equality at the United Nations and other international forums.
I would indicate here that there was a letter sent I believe by six women who are Nobel Peace Prize winners. They wrote to the Harper government, calling on it to change the actions against the Status of Women Canada and equality rights.
To the question of identifying emerging issues....
Is that one minute or am I at the end?