Bear with me for a second.
Jean, this is the executive summary of a much bigger document.
We see there are four pillars to maintaining a viable farm and a viable rural Canada. We see financial stability as being a foundation pillar; a domestic food policy, a made-in-Canada food policy for Canadian farm families that is a true agricultural policy, not a trade policy; healthy food and the environment are of the utmost importance to us, because it's where we live; and then there's strengthening the social and community infrastructure.
You're absolutely right, Jean, when you talk about the public infrastructures that we assume would certainly be there in the urban setting. Whether or not you can access them is another matter. They're not available in rural Canada.
In fact, my home province of Prince Edward Island has changed significantly over the last 20 years. When I was first having children, we had two day care centres in a little village of 100 people. They were seasonally run because of the farming, fishing, and resource-based industries we had. But they were there, we could access them, and we were subsidized because of our low economic status on the totem pole. They're no longer there.
To say you can access child care in a vacuum is really ludicrous. If the child care spaces are not there, you can't access them, whether you need them in July or whether you need them in January.
As for public transportation in Prince Edward Island, the only city that has public transportation is Charlottetown. If you live outside the greater Charlottetown centre, there is no public transportation. You're almost held hostage by your friends and neighbours. If you want to escape an abusive situation, you have to get on the phone in the strictest confidence and ask to be picked up and taken to the women's shelter or to the hospital.
Access to services, the public infrastructure that most of you around the table would assume exists, does not exist.