Mr. Speaker, actually that statement is made repeatedly, and I always think that when people repeat things over and over, they think that even if it is not a fact, people will believe it, and they are absolutely right. One can repeat misinformation and the more it is repeated, the more people believe it.
This is not so. I was the minister at the time when we put in an extra $11 million toward assisting in issues such as gender based analysis across every department. We brought this forward because we knew that the lens through which we looked at the disparity that gender brings to equality was key. That was an extra $11 million put into the programs. We brought in the research project, which took an extra amount of money as well.
There was new money put into those issues so that overall, there was an increase in funding. We certainly did not close down regional offices, which not only denies women access to funding but denies them access to support in every single region of this country.