That's worrying.
I want to turn to the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women. Thank you, Linda Davis, for your work.
Your organization has noted that women are under-represented in fields such as skilled trades and science, technology, engineering, and math. Given this, I'm concerned that the federal government's spending on infrastructure—as in the focus just in last month's budget—looks as though it may leave women out of the equation so far as infrastructure spending is concerned.
We heard earlier in this study from Professor Marjorie Cohen about the Vancouver Island highway construction in the nineties, which used equity hiring to promote the participation of both indigenous people and women in the highway construction. As a result of inserting that provision into the tenders, they went from 2% of women at the beginning of the project to having women and indigenous people constitute 20% of the labour force on this major highway construction on Vancouver Island.
Do you support initiatives like that to increase women's participation in—I wanted to say “non-traditional sectors”, but I know you're saying I shouldn't say “non-traditional”—STEM and infrastructure projects?