Thank you for the question.
As I said, Status of Women Canada is focused on providing opportunities for women to take on these great jobs. In addition to the support we will have for programming, which I'll come back to, we've developed a plan to address this. First and foremost, we have a group of leaders who are advising Status of Women Canada, including me and Meena Ballantyne, my agency head, on what we should be focused on. This is a group of individuals who represent everyone who would be in this field, whether it be Bob Blakely of the Building Trades, or Jerry Dias from Unifor, or Lorraine Mitchelmore, the president of Shell Canada. It is a group of individuals who cover the span so they can provide us great advice.
From their advice what have we done? We've moved forward on a number of initiatives. First, we're developing a business case. What is the business case for making sure that women should be part of your workforce? We know on the Women On Boards initiative and Women Entrepreneurs that it is only good for business. We believe this is the case with regard to women in skilled professional trades, but we're going to make sure we have that business case, and launch it to make the case.
We're supporting an invitation or call for proposals not only to encourage women to enter skilled professional trades, but also to retain them, because we know that so many of them enter into this or into apprenticeships and then don't complete them or don't stay in their trade. We want to know the answer to that so we can address it.
Finally, I've made this a priority at our federal-provincial-territorial meeting that we'll be having in June. We need to make sure this is on the national stage, that as a group of leaders at the provincial, territorial, and federal levels we take this very seriously and that we know we need to move the numbers to provide those opportunities to women.
We've taken a comprehensive approach to this, and Meena and her team are doing an outstanding job of implementing it. Our goal is similar to Women on Boards and Women Entrepreneurs, where we've moved the numbers, to do the same in this area as well.