We love giving our pay equity training session because we go out into the regions—I was the one who was lucky to set it up—and you meet secretaries out in regions in Quebec who are earning $11 an hour and who know something's wrong in the small business they're in. Through their questions, when they finally understand what pay equity is, they say things like, “The mechanic is earning this, and maybe I should be earning more than $11 an hour. My work is so much more than being a receptionist. I'm meeting clients, dealing with the database and all of this stuff, doing accounts receivable. My economic worth is much more than I realized.” You see their eyes open.
By doing this, we get so much information from what women's economic reality is across Quebec. It just feeds our work in a concrete way, in terms of us being better equipped to then answer them and give them even better information and tools, and answer their needs more satisfactorily. But it also equips us in terms of our policy analysis, in terms of knowing what the needs are of women who are out there, just how precarious their jobs are, and just how little choice they have. Hopefully, that's where a lot of the work is grounded and where our capacity is coming from.