Madam Speaker, I was discouraged in this budget to see an awful lot of window dressing: we are going to fund a corporate award for the best performers who hire the most women; we are going to establish a think tank; we are going to do two conferences; or we are going to do what we can to encourage and inspire more women to move into the STEM industries. What we were hearing at committee is that all of that fancy stuff, which honestly feels kind of like elite feminism to me, does not do anything for the women who need the help the most on the ground. We are hearing from women in university saying that they are in STEM but their student debt is impossible and they cannot get affordable child care.
As well, the government has failed in its infrastructure spending, which it keeps delaying, to put in equity hiring provisions. The government has not put in place the conditions for anybody who gets a contract for infrastructure to say that they must hire a certain number of apprenticeships, indigenous people, or women. That is where the government could use its spending power to make a difference, to get some of these people their first jobs and then they could carry on in construction and engineering.