First of all, I was also a city councillor and was first elected in 1994. I ran on a platform of affordable housing and women's equality rights. Here I am, 25 or whatever years later, still advocating for the same positions.
It's easy to say that there needs to be more collaboration among all levels of government. It's much harder to do that, because every level of government has its own policies and rules around governance and around legislation. It's much easier for us to work within the federal system, removing the silos, so that we understand the impact of financial investment on the lives of women who live in poverty.
When I work with women and they go to a shelter, it's the best thing they can do for that first six or eight weeks, because it provides them with enough safety and enough time to seek legal support and family income support and to go and look at apartments or housing strategies to rent, but when we put all of the subsidized housing into one area so that we create stigma for anybody living there, we are failing women. That's been our approach, historically, as a country.
What I'm saying is that we need to have affordable housing. It needs to be legislated that every single developer who builds a building sets aside a certain number of units for affordable housing so that all women can access services across the country and their children can go to all schools and experience life, and other children can learn from their lives.
We're just ghettoizing women right now, and when you ask what we're going to do about it and how we address it, we need to really be setting legislation from a woman-first perspective—something that's not about patriarchy, not about benefiting men, but something that's going to really benefit women, however they identify themselves as women.