Well, it's a tall order.
What strikes me most about the work that we put together, to pull out very specific things related to women from the overall work that the council's doing, is that you really do have to take a life cycle approach. That what jumps out most, that if you're looking at any area of poverty, you can't take one population or one moment in time. There's a tendency to talk about “poor people” or to talk about “lone parents”, thinking that there's this group of lone parents who are always lone parents, or that somebody living in poverty now is always going to be living in poverty.
Those groups move in and out. A woman who's a very contented middle-class woman is going to be a lone parent tomorrow. In a few years, when her children age, statistically she's not counted as a lone parent any more, she's an “unattached older woman”--but she's experiencing the legacy of her earlier years.
For me, one of the critical things would be to take a really holistic and long-term approach. There are a few underlying things. For example, the whole unpaid work question that's come up in different areas in different ways is obviously new on the political agenda.
We had mentioned the business of time poverty. Ironically, Canada is in the situation of being a world leader in time use measurement. We have an incredible amount of data that's so rich in telling us things, and it's not used. It's not used for policy development. It's not factored into the work we do--and it can be. That one underlies so much of women's vulnerability to poverty and their risk of not having economic security.