What the research tells us and what our experience on the ground in 300 communities across the country also demonstrates is that mathematically we cannot have a recovery if we don't look at the experiences and needs of women. We need all hands on deck. Any single barrier—a gendered barrier, a barrier based on racialization or a barrier against people with disabilities—will hurt all of us.
I really want to make clear that it's mathematically impossible to have an economic recovery if we don't have a gender lens and a feminist lens.
Another part of what we need to do is start to measure what matters. Every month I look at the labour force numbers and we look at whether jobs are coming back to pre-COVID levels.
In addition to that, we need to look at job quality. Is it permanent? Is it full time? Does it have good benefits and decent pay? In precarious work, people face further risks from COVID because they can't go back to work and can't be there for their families. That hurts all communities.
Another piece of it is.... I really appreciate this committee's focus on gender-based violence and on housing and homelessness, because oftentimes economic recovery is just focused on GDP and job numbers. What we've seen is that when homelessness is on the rise and gender-based violence is on the rise, this stymies economic recovery. When we look at what we want to see for our future society, we need to change what we use as measures of success so that they're more fulsome, given the actual realities on the ground.