One reality that COVID has highlighted is that in our economy, the care work that's done is disproportionately borne on the shoulders of racialized women and newcomer women, women whose work is essential to our survival, yet whose work is not compensated according to the incredible amount of labour that we ask of them. The precarity of their situations means that personal support workers, for example, have to have two or three jobs to try to manage, to make ends meet.
We can do better in Canada. The work that my department has been doing over the past few years, as well as our government as a whole, is to recognize that there are groups of Canadians across the country who are underserved and under-represented. Not only is that unfair, but unless we maximize the potential of those who have been on the margins of our societies and economies for too long, Canada won't reach its full potential.
We did begin to take into account and measure things. For example, 20% of our funds support women in rural communities. Also, a portion of our funds supports indigenous women and those organizations that are supporting them. We are doing more to dig deeper and figure out what percentage is supporting black women's organizations, indigenous women's organizations and racialized women's organizations, but we have so much more work to do.
Perhaps one positive outcome of COVID has been a recognition across the country that, unless the data that we collect as a nation in different orders of government is disaggregated by gender, race and other identity factors, we're not going to be able to count every single person and measure our impact.