Thank you very much, Chair.
Before I start, I want to welcome the three women from the Ryerson Women in the House program—Meghan, Sarah and Sarah—our future leaders, I hope. Kudos to Ryerson for getting them right into the work we do.
I have a question for the South Shore Transition House Association. I don't know if we met two summers ago, but a bunch of us were on the south shore and met with someone from your group. I think 10 different organizations were at a round table together. It was really impressive and long-standing work. One of your colleagues said they had been doing this for 29 years and thought they would have worked themselves out of a job by now.
So thank you, to you and all your colleagues at home.
This is a study on domestic violence, shelters and transition houses, and I've been discouraged to hear quite a lot of people testifying at this committee saying that all we need to do is qualify more women for mortgages—some of them $750,000 mortgages—and build more housing.
That is true, but I want to hear you say that you agree—or that I've heard you and your co-workers clearly—that this is not a fix for the issue of domestic violence, and that the programming that goes with your shelter operations and then your transition operations is a vital part of what happens, especially since the point at which women choose to leave a violent relationship is the time when they're most vulnerable.
Can you give me some evidence to use in our final argument here?