Status of Women committee  We have a very small amount of funding, through Status of Women, that was obtained just before the program changes occurred. We would be ineligible under the current program guidelines. We spent about two and a half years going back and forth with our program officer to come up with a project that would be acceptable.

Status of Women committee  This government has demonstrated that it can make policy shifts. It has made policy shifts in its approaches to Quebec, to the environment, and to income trusts. So far, though, it seems to have stayed consistently ideological in its position on national day care, on charter challenge funding, on pay equity, and so on.

Status of Women committee  I would say we've had limited success in Toronto. For the group that I work with, in the course of our public education work and outreach work, we have a continuing series of new women who come and go through the organization. We are coming to understand that it is in fact a necessary piece in our organization for women from the more marginalized communities who haven't been fully involved in the political process.

Status of Women committee  Yes. I'm going to make an assumption that you have brought women from the aboriginal community to address this panel, to hear directly what it is that women in the aboriginal community need. In terms of what we do in Toronto, we do outreach and we work in collaboration with the aboriginal community when we are doing our coalitions, and so on.

Status of Women committee  Well, 25 years later, women are still working. We used to talk about how women worked two shifts. Now we find that women are in fact working three shifts. We do paid work, we do family work, and we do community work. The paid work and the family work are fairly self-evident. The third piece of work is the advocacy work in the community, because services don't reflect our needs.

Status of Women committee  Thank you for the opportunity to outline the concerns of the Toronto Women's Call to Action to this committee. We are a diverse group of women who have been meeting since 2003 in this particular forum to try to restore the visibility and audibility of women in the government of the city of Toronto.