Yes, on financial literacy, students, regardless of whether they are boys or girls, are graduating from high school without any sort of knowledge around managing a budget or credit. Financial skills in general are just not things they are taught in school or at home, so they are going into university with very limited knowledge. In fact, our baseline study showed that over 32% of young people polled in our baseline study had absolutely no knowledge of financial literacy whatsoever, zero. Over 32% had zero, and those who said they knew a little bit about financial literacy bring that number up to over 50%.
Young people are graduating from high school without any knowledge of how to manage their money. Girls are especially affected, of course, because as Ms. Coté pointed out, they are not negotiating their salaries and then when they do get their salaries, as limited as they are, they don't know how to manage them.
These are very fundamental skills that certainly would provide prosperity for girls and women across the country. It's not just girls, by the way. It's women too. Economic security relies on knowing how to manage your money. In our module on financial literacy, the information was provided to us by Visa Canada because they spent millions of dollars developing financial literacy programs, which we've leveraged—everything from understanding how to balance a budget, knowing the difference between need and want, and knowing how to get a credit rating in this country by managing credit card debt. How does one apply for a student loan and manage that loan effectively? These are all very basic, fundamental skills that young people are not graduating high school with. They are going into university with absolutely no knowledge of financial literacy.