We are, I think, officially called a departmental agency, whatever that means. The coordonnatrice reports directly to the minister responsible for status of women and heritage. While we are part of the portfolio that the heritage minister has responsibility for, we are an independent agency.
We tend to work more with groups in terms of providing the funding through the women's program and also working on systemic barriers, which takes us into other governments' work around policy and their program and evaluation.
Although we don't have a tremendous amount of resources to do this, we do attempt to assist a number of individual women who call us with personal issues. For example, we have had women who call because they've been beaten by their husband and they don't know where to go. If we possibly can, we try to direct them to the appropriate resources.
Unfortunately, we don't have psychologists--and some days I feel like I would need that.