Thank you, Madam Chair.
Even though the room is quite warm, we will try to keep a cool head and concentrate on what you have told us. However, it feels like what rural women and women in communities are experiencing is almost like a work of fiction. If we rely on what we have been told today and what others have told us in the past, women who live in rural communities, aboriginal women and immigrant women—if I can use that term to describe minorities—are at a great disadvantage.
I represent a Quebec riding that has a rural component. I understand the problems that these women must face because they are often the engine, the lifeline and the support for their family. They are the ones who must bear the extra burden if the structure is weakened by a lack of funding. Ms. Martz said that more and more farm women must become multi-taskers, without having the benefit of any type of financial compensation or salary. Women who live in rural communities have a very tough life. In recent years there has been an exodus of people fleeing the poverty of urban centres to settle in rural areas. They think that by moving out into the country, they will manage to escape poverty, but they are then sorely disappointed because there is poverty further away from the cities, and the governments are less sensitive to it. What's more, these people are located away from the services, where access is limited.
I would first like to hear what you have to say about this, because you are aware that some measures have been implemented. You spoke earlier about access to day care. Do you believe that the government move to provide families with $100 per month for each child under six will be of any help to some families? I know, for having experienced it myself, that providing day care spaces helps women gain a certain level of autonomy and it also gives them a choice. Even if they are not employed, they still have the choice of sending their children to a day care centre and do something other than housework, which allows them to break free from their isolation. We must not forget that the farther one is from urban centres, the more likely one is to be ignored by various levels of government. It is easier to be forgotten.