I can say, though, that we work very closely with universities. For example, with the gender-based violence strategy, we were able to pull in researchers from a number of universities who are doing specific research on gender-based violence. The response that we got from the researchers was very touching, actually. They were very pleased to be asked by the federal government to share the results of the research that they've been conducting without a very large audience for a very long time.
We held a two-day conference, a national expert panel on the state of Canadian knowledge on gender-based violence here in Ottawa. We also commissioned three analytical research papers on gender-based violence to examine the issues such as risks, interventions, and future research priorities. We heard time and time again, speaking to some of the questions around capacity at the front line, that the front-line organizations and some of the smaller organizations that are working on mobilizing communities felt that one way the federal government could really support their work was actually collecting data, providing an analysis of that data, and conducting the research to determine what's working, what's not working, and where we go from here.
Many of them felt that for years and years they had not had the type of support needed to actually assess whether or not what they were doing was having any impact at all. In some cases they couldn't assess whether or not their programs might make things worse. They really wanted evaluation, support, and research, so as we move forward into the gender-based violence strategy, certainly that's something that we've been very thoughtful about. How do we work with academics? How do we work with the universities to tap into that research that is happening but doesn't have a very broad audience?