Finance committee  To reply to that question with regard to child care, a national subsidized child care program is something that we've been fighting for over 45 years, and it would be huge. It's the last bastion for women's equality and to improve the status of Canadian families and children. It'

Finance committee  Good morning, members of the committee. I'm grateful for the opportunity to address you this morning. As the executive director of the St. John's Status of Women Council, my perspective on our economy and the budget is deeply rooted in the desire to attain economic equality for

Status of Women committee  We work very closely with the women at the native friendship centre. We let them do the work and we support them as well as we can and we work with them in a lot of different areas. We co-created a vigil to commemorate the missing and murdered women in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Status of Women committee  I think we definitely need an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, and I think that inquiry needs to be led by indigenous women leaders. I think it's very important that another inquiry is not created and downloaded on them. I think it needs to be developed by and

Status of Women committee  I agree.

Status of Women committee  We're funded by the provincial status of women office, the Women's Policy Office, with $120,000 a year. We don't have federal health care money. In fact, when we first opened and expanded into Marguerite's Place with our housing, at that point there might have been some federal h

Status of Women committee  I will absolutely do that.

Status of Women committee  Yes, we were one of the first countries to sign on to and to have done CEDAW, and I don't think that we are doing everything we can—certainly all reasonable measures, including legislation—to ensure the full potential of women in this country. I think things could change if we

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  St. John's Status of Women runs the only front-line service to sex workers in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, it's called Safe Harbour Outreach Project. We started SHOP as a pilot project in 2013, and it has been very successful. Since the introduction of the bill we

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely, a gender lens on the budget would be clear: better representation for women. But my suggestion around federal policy is please can we have a national child care strategy? Please can we have a national housing strategy? Women can't leave no matter how wonderful your pr

Status of Women committee  There are many correlations around the economy at home. If a woman doesn't have a job and child care, and is unable to leave, then she's stuck in that situation for a long time. There's also a very strong correlation between when the male partner loses his job and the rise in dom

Status of Women committee  The St. John's Status of Women Council has been open for 42 years. It opened in 1972. It was opened by 10 very strong women in our province who organized that. They opened it with very little funding, and then in that fall they opened the women's centre. Currently, the St. John'

Status of Women committee  Not really. We don't have Health Canada funding. We get small grants from our local health initiatives. We also run a housing program, which gets provincial funding. That comes from what we call the supportive housing program, which comes out of housing dollars. We have AIDS-supp