What I would start with is that my most recent experience was doing this cross-Ontario project where I did go to all 11 communities, and we met with more than 250 low-income women. I think what I heard.... It was before the Occupy movement, but let me say that these women very much saw themselves as part of the 99%, and maybe even further. They really didn't have some of those basic skills, or if they had the skills, they didn't have the time and the opportunity to use them to move out of poverty.
So, what does that mean? It means that for the women in Pembroke, for example—a rural community an hour and a half from Ottawa—who are in crises around violence, there's no family shelter there. What happens when you're in a real crisis? You actually get driven, or whatever, to Ottawa for some kind of emergency measure. So, to get that woman and her family to get things together to then get settled, to find affordable housing, to get her resumé together to try to move out of social assistance into work, the other barrier that someone like that faces.... I'll tell you another example is lack of child care.
So here we have communities, in particular some of the outlying communities, where there are few opportunities, period.
I did want to make sure I said the third thing I didn't get a chance to mention earlier that women told us they needed: safe, appropriate, affordable housing. I guess that's one of our other recommendations. Canada is still the only industrialized nation without a national housing program that looks to the future, period. I think we need that.
Let me also tell you about a woman in Orangeville—a country-suburban community that is part of the greater Toronto area—with two young children, lone parent, divorced, who somehow got herself into a position where she was able to go back to post-secondary for a college degree. One year, she actually had to leave school because she couldn't get child care arrangements. By the time I met her, she had figured something out and was back in school but worried what would happen when she finished and tried to get a job, especially if it were not a nine-to-five job.
So, we have some serious holes in what used to be a robust, or a more robust, social safety net for women and children, and we're not making enough progress on it.