Status of Women committee  Absolutely. We've hired 1,500 people in Halifax. We need to continuously be growing and nurturing and building our workforce so that we can have the best employees. The best employees aren't necessarily all from one representative group.

Status of Women committee  I think it's the true partnership of it all. When Doreen was saying that they built their program with industry and with government and with the college, we found the same in our pathways to shipbuilding program. There are 10 partners in that program—government departments, union

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. One of the goals of the national shipbuilding strategy is to build a sustainable marine industry in Canada, and so avoid the traditional boom and bust of shipbuilding industries. Really, in order to build that industry of the future that we want to see, we have to ha

Status of Women committee  I think we certainly have seen that. I know Doreen commented that child care can be a barrier to workplace entry. It certainly has to be addressed.

Status of Women committee  The Women Unlimited program is one of our favourite things to talk about because it has been so successful, and we do think it can benefit other industries and other regions. We've seen great success to date, but I'll certainly say that we're not done. For us, true success for th

Status of Women committee  At Irving Shipbuilding, currently the percentage of our female workforce is 25.4%. The trade program, our Local 1 employees with Unifor, are 4.8%, and our staff female employees are 12.3%. It certainly changes between staff and trades. On the engineering side, those are together

Status of Women committee  I think Doreen probably spoke to that quite a bit as well, but there is that stigma around women in trades. There are not role models in place, or there are very few, for them to see themselves in those roles. It's not something that's encouraged at a young age or that students s

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for this opportunity to appear before you today. At Irving Shipbuilding we have a proud history of building ships for Canada. We've built more than 80% of Canada's current fleet and have been maintaining ships for t