I'll have to admit that this is a relatively new tack for the National Farmers Union to take, looking at pensions for farm women.
Because we're so few and spread across a large country, we do a lot of networking and a lot of coalition work. The B.C. Farm Women's Network has taken it under their wing to look at exactly how pensions for farm women would look. They are the group of women who are analyzing this and are coming up with some very workable solutions.
As I said, this is my second round of being an elected official with the National Farmers Union. Back in the early to mid-1990s, I worked with women like Linde Cherry from the interior of British Columbia, as well as Carolyn Van Dine in New Brunswick. We pushed, first of all, for a recognition of farm women as professionals equal to any other women in professions out there in which women are working, and we deserve our own pension plan.
Many of us are working three jobs. We are working at raising a family, so we're stay-at-home moms; we are working at our jobs on the farm; and we are working off the farm. Then we are volunteering to keep what's left of our little rural communities alive.
So if there is some way of having all of that valued in terms of the monetary or financial contribution, and then looking at how to set up a pension that captures all of that economic activity we've generated and all of that wealth we've produced, that's the type of stuff the British Columbia women are working on, and it is certainly a project that I'm willing to undertake.