Status of Women committee  Thank you.

Status of Women committee  Provide access to information and increased access to the programs that are already available. Encourage collaborations between and among organizations like ours and like Julia's. I was so pleased to see this gender-based analysis finally show up in the budget. I think the use of

Status of Women committee  The biggest thing we see is financial acumen. The program, which Status of Women actually helped us to develop a few years ago and which we call My Gold Mine is essentially a program about how to create profitability and how to understand your own financial statements. It is esse

Status of Women committee  May I respond to that, especially since it concerns the women's enterprise initiative in western Canada? That was our group. It started in the 1990s. The amount of the loan at that time was $100,000, and there was an office in Kelowna, which still exists. There was one in Alber

Status of Women committee  Last January, we had Sheila North Wilson, Grand Chief of Manitoba, tell her story. The women in the room were weeping because what this woman has overcome in her life to achieve the success she has had is extraordinary. The kind of connection that you make in those venues and in

Status of Women committee  To the extent possible, we work in rural Manitoba. If this committee or anybody you know has the ability to influence your provincial counterparts, one thing is that additional provincial support to reach rural communities would be very important, because our resources are thin o

Status of Women committee  Thank you. One of the things we feel very strongly about in the Women's Enterprise Organizations of Canada is that this access to centralized information does not yet exist, and we would like to be instrumental in creating that throughout all of the provinces right across the co

Status of Women committee  I would say that we're seeing some success in the conference that we have been presenting here in Manitoba and hope to move further out into a national venue. The idea of SHEday to get women in front of women—successful women in business, in entrepreneurship, in academia, in life

Status of Women committee  Yes, I would like to add to that. For a number of years now, and through several changes in government, I have been hoping for and pushing the idea of a women's-centred capital fund in Canada. We truly need that. There have been some very successful ones in the States like Golde

Status of Women committee  May I respond to that? My understanding, from what we've seen here at the Women's Enterprise Centre, is that there's a success rate of approximately 75% across the board over five years among our loan clients when we do the due diligence and the aftercare. I don't know if there

Status of Women committee  I'm still here, yes.

Status of Women committee  I would add credibility to Ms. Deans' c-group of confidence, capital, etc., because I think women in business still have a bit of a glass ceiling in that area of developing partnerships and relationships, creating good relationships with suppliers and accessing potentially good m

Status of Women committee  Sorry, may I add just one thing? The peer support is quite important, and we found that bringing people together at early stages in their businesses to work together has been immensely successful.

Status of Women committee  In the area of entrepreneurship, this is a big question. I'm not even sure how to attack it. I think a lot of the issues are issues of socialization. They're deeper and more intrinsic in our society than simply providing loans or support services to women. We need to be looking a

Status of Women committee  That's excellent. Thank you. I would agree with Julia Deans that the requirement for specifically targeted kinds of teaching is very important. Through the WEIs and through our own work here in Manitoba over the last 20 years, we have worked with women at every stage and every a