Yes, absolutely. Having some experience in working horizontally in the federal government will certainly serve in trying to do it in Status of Women Canada. You learn how to attract people to the table and how to present issues to be able to get the best response and the best participation.
As you say, the action plan--and I will weave in part of the answer to the previous question in the response--provides us with a very clear focus, so when I meet with a department to talk about what they're doing, I can bring the focus to violence against women and what they are doing to address that situation.
When we develop partnership initiatives, and these are quite extensive partnerships that come together, we're able to say--in economic security, for example, or women in non-traditional work--that this is the area we want to work with, this is what we want to try to address. We know retention is a major issue. One of the pieces under the action plan on economic security--a key element--for us would be the retention in non-traditional work. So it allows us to say no to things that are less responsive to that focus.
And it's true in the programs and in the research. No organization has enough resources to excel in every possible area of its mandate, but what it does for us is say that we need to be doing more work, we need to be doing our own research, gathering information that already exists in those three areas. In my view, if we can achieve success in those three targeted action areas, we're going to be progressing considerably on achieving equality for women.
So yes, the past work will help in convening tables across government.
The other thing that will be extremely useful is that, having moved around in about 12 different organizations in government, I know what kinds of programs they're dealing with; I know what they're working on. I was involved in the social security reform at HRSDC in the early nineties, so I'm very familiar with the LMDAs, the labour market development agreements, that are transferred to the provinces. Work needs to be done there. I know they're doing a lot for women, and a part of their clientele is women, but I think we need to bring out the information more visibly. We need to gather aggregated data from there and understand it better to see what changes might be needed--even delivery of those funds at the provincial level.
So all of that together will certainly help in better responding and advancing the work of Status of Women.