Thank you for the question.
This is a really important issue. It has impacts in many ways. The cuts in the long-form census will have a huge impact on our capacity to implement employment equity, because employment equity is based on the market availability of women and the other equity groups—aboriginal people, racialized people, and people with disabilities. We look at their availability in the labour market.
So a lot of the information we need to have informed social policy in the workplace, at schools, and in society will be affected by our loss of knowledge of our social and economic reality.
The cuts in research also have an impact on our capacity to identify where the social policy gaps are, where the problems that are lived by different groups of women in society are, and then to develop policy options for how we can deal with them.
We have basically lost the Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Women in the last few years. I know they're struggling to survive. They used to do research and offer information sheets that would be very useful in the labour movement and in the women's groups and I'm sure in the academic setting.
We've also lost funding for advocacy. The National Association of Women and the Law has shut its doors, and they used to do a lot of research and make law reform proposals concerning how to improve our laws and policies in Canada to ensure that we respect and promote women's equality rights.