Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to Ms. Walker and Ms. Hawranik for being here today. I greatly appreciated your testimonies.
I'm a member of Parliament from Manitoba, and we know that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted women, as you have both outlined, and in Manitoba we're facing a quite dire situation.
Ms. Hawranik, as you mentioned, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were facing some of the highest rates of domestic violence against women in the country. We have over 12,000 children, from my last count, in child and family services, which is the most per capita in the world, and for those reasons and many others, I've been advocating to the wage officials and the minister that we get an office in Manitoba, which we don't currently have, and there have been a number of alarming things that have popped up lately in the media.
We had a report from Shared Health Manitoba that there were over 90 cases reported of sexual assault involving the date-rape drug in 2018, and of course we know that very few sexual assault cases are reported.
This is clearly a rampant issue in Manitoba, and I just want to say that I really appreciate the work you're both doing. We take this very seriously as members of Parliament.
I want to speak to you first, Ms. Hawranik, about the GBA+ work that you do. I want to get your take on some of the programs the government has announced over the last number of months. We know it acted very quickly to bring forward these programs. My concern is that we're not aware of any GBA+ that was put on some of these programs, and I was wondering if you could comment on the CECRA program, the commercial emergency rental assist program for commercial properties. I may have got the acronym wrong there, but it's the program where the government will pay 50%, the tenant 25%, and then the landlord would take a 25% cut specifically.
We're seeing very little uptake of this program, and anecdotally I'm hearing that women entrepreneurs are having a much more difficult time getting this program. I'm wondering if you've had any experience with that and if you could elaborate on what a GBA+ may have shown on this program, had it been done.