Thank you very much. Thank you for your excellent presentations.
My questions, overall, focus on the unconscious and structural barriers.
Ms. Smallman, you had mentioned systemic barriers.
Kate, looking at the issue of women in trades, here's my scenario. If we look at trades training in Canada, largely through the college system, a student would go in and study so many hours and then they go into the field. To get the next block, they have to come back to school. In my home province of New Brunswick—I'll speak to that as an example—the individual comes back, but when they come back to school to finish the second block, they have to be, first, maybe eligible for EI, and if they're not, they pay for it themselves, and it goes on and on. Over the course of the four blocks to a journeyperson's specialty, so many of them drop out.
In your experience, are the drop-out rate higher for women? We know the difficulty of getting to the first block. I've seen, at the college level, a significant increase in the number of women, but I do not see the same trend at graduation because of the blocks. If someone has a child or two children, could you speak to their ability to go back to school and collect only EI, not a regular salary.