Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Madam Minister, it's great to have you here with us. I very sincerely thank you for the good work you are doing. I may want you to do more, and I may want you to do many different things, but I thank you for what you are doing.
I have a couple of questions. I'll try to be quick because we only get one time slot here. I'd like to get short answers, but I'm probably going to ask you a complicated question and ask for a short answer that you probably won't be able to give me.
In a recent answer to an order paper question I had about the amount of money the government is spending on media monitoring, it came back that the government as a whole is spending over $30 million on monitoring responses to the government. You know what I'm talking about when I say “monitoring the media”. It's something we all do, as we want to know what people are saying and what the media is saying about what the government of the day is doing.
Frankly, that $30 million is a huge amount of money to spend on just media monitoring. Of that $30 million, you signed off on over $10.6 million, not only as the Status of Women minister but in your role as the minister of two portfolios. Can you tell me how much of that was related to Status of Women in particular? Can you also tell me what you felt you got out of the monitoring that told you about a different direction you might want to go in, whether that's from a polling perspective or about a different avenue that you might want to direct some of the funds to?