We've been hearing some killer testimony from all the panellists and your work is in the same vein and is greatly appreciated. We are hearing things like domestic violence costing the Canadian economy $12 billion a year, yet we don't seem to be resourcing getting at the solutions to that.
All three of your organizations have been around since the late seventies to early eighties, so you've seen the spread of time from the federal government side, both Liberal and Conservative funding models.
I'm hoping that you can talk more about the impact of the lack of secure, consistent funding for your front-line operations, not just the program funding where as previous witnesses said, you have to invent a new model, or something more innovative, or you have to show you're collaborating. We keep hearing groups say that they collaborate, that it's natural, but they can't manufacture it just for the sake of spending the time on the funding application, instead of spending time with the women on the six-month waiting list. We saw the funding for immigrant support organizations cut under the Conservatives. We saw shelter funding, operation funding, cut under the Chrétien government.
I'm hoping you can humanize for us the impact on your organization of having that bit of a roller-coaster of access to funding, and what it might mean to your clients and your survivors to be able to have the doors open when they need to be open.