Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you all for coming. I think you've hit on a lot of topics that I have to tell you very much resonate in my riding of Kitchener Centre.
It seems to me that the rationale for this government's draconian ratcheting back of funding is that it wants value for money spent. Somehow they want to be able to say, we put x dollars in and this is the result we got. My understanding of how many community-based organizations work is that's just not possible.
Brenda, I think you were really eloquent when you pointed out Joanne as somebody who is working but not making enough money to advocate on her own behalf.
I also wanted to touch on the court challenges that artists brought up, because I think the court challenges program is really key. I'm not a regular member of this committee, so I don't know if you've maybe talked about this in the past, but the court challenges program is one that I have great difficulty in seeing not funded.
I know, for instance, that LEAF took on the issue of ESL for new Canadians and the fact that if you were male, ESL was funded by the federal government, because it was assumed men would go out and work, but for the women, it was not funded because it was assumed they would stay home and take care of the family. Yet when you do any community-based research, you see that among new Canadians it's often the people who are at home who are more isolated and who need that kind of outreach and those kinds of services.
That's more of an observation than a question, but I look at these cuts and I wonder who is doing the gender-based analysis of these cuts to tell us how incredibly damaging these are to women. Is there a way to discuss the value for money invested, which is what this government seems to obsess about, in any of your organizations? It seems to me that what we're talking about is an absence of some bad things happening. So to say that we're going to put x millions of dollars in, or we're now going to fund for-profit organizations instead of non-profit ones.... Can any of your quantify in any way what the ramifications are from your organization's perspective?