Perhaps I could just answer that question. The on-line questionnaire, the electronic consultation, was a first for us. What we wanted to do was to try to reach out to a greater number of Canadians than we had been able to in the past, and also in terms of that, we could through in-person consultations. So that was a first.
It was by no means a scientific survey, and I think that's important to put down. It's not of the Statistics Canada variety in terms of where we could say that out of 2,000 people, this was a representative sample in terms of women, men, age groups, the diversity of Canadians throughout.
Through the Government of Canada website it was advertised as one of the new initiatives of the government during the period of time it was up last fall.
We had between 2,600 and 3,000 responses, which we considered actually a very good first start in terms of finding out what people were thinking. When you get into a little more of the detail as to the themes, we weren't able to, as I would say, peel the onion in terms of more detail in the differences from one region to the other.
We did certainly find a correlation of the key themes. Obviously, poverty was identified. The issues of aboriginal women were strongly identified and then underneath those, for example, under poverty...older women, women with disabilities....
One of the things we did that was a little unique was to try to reach out. One of our staff was in the north at a conference on aboriginal women's issues, and because some of the participants in the north were unfamiliar with using the technology, this person made herself available for a number of hours or days to sit down with the respondents to help them in terms of navigating the technology. That was also done in some cases in each of the regions of the country.
It's certainly something we experimented with. It was a good experiment and we would like to try to do it again.