Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all of you for your presentations this afternoon.
As I did earlier in the day, I'm going to start by saying that I don't have disagreements with anything that was said with respect to the needs and where we need to go and the issues. A lot of you have made a lot of the same recommendations in terms of legislation, in terms of the national child care program, housing--the planks of a national anti-poverty strategy, what they are and what they should be, and the determinants. So I won't go into the specifics again and bore you with them.
I will ask some questions with respect to expanding some areas and maybe just getting some stuff on record.
The first area has to do with gender. In the presentation of the Lone Mothers group you mentioned that the current system with its gender-neutral approach isn't working, and of course I agree with you. I don't know if you read the gender budgeting report that was done by the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. We did hearings a year ago and we came out with a report. By gender budgeting we mean gender analysis in all government programs, budgeting processes, and other programs the government would be involved with implementing or developing. Gender analysis is critical to being able to ascertain whether or not a program is leaving women out, whether it's intentional or not, but women are being left behind, as is the case, as some of you have mentioned, with some areas of EI and other programs.
First of all, I wanted to know if you'd seen that report and how it would fit into any work that you've done, because you obviously had some specific things to say when you mentioned the gender neutrality problem. Maybe you could expand on that. I know we did a study, but there might be some stuff that....