I thank the member for his question and I appreciate that you had that many women working in your workplace. So it astounds me that you would have voted in favour to discharge Lydia’s Law to committee, because I can’t imagine that in a workplace of that many women you didn’t see issues of intimate partner violence; you didn’t see issues of gender-based violence or trauma. Because the stats will say that you did, whether you recognized it or not.

While showing up with a big cheque is important, as I said, these organizations are starved for funding. You need to do more. You need to dig deep and have the courage of your convictions to vote what is appropriate and vote what is just, not just what you’re told to do.

I really want to talk particularly about women workers, women who work in precarious jobs, women who work piecework. They’re very often afraid, even if they know what their entitlements are. They’re often afraid to speak up about the wages that are being stolen from them, because they fear reprisals.

The associate minister for women’s issues said that in the skilled trades sector, women feel that they are treated differently. Well, that’s no different from all women across all sectors. If they really wanted to help women in the workplace, as she has said in her speech here, you need to look at women having their wages stolen—the most low-income women in our province, pieceworkers, garment workers. You need to address that. The government’s job is to make sure that women get the wages that they deserve.

I would also remind you that intimate partner violence and the issue of sexual assault perpetrators, rapists, going free is not the same issue. This is a problem with the courts, and this is a problem with your government’s failure to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic.

You pass bills here in a day, in two days, and we have all kinds of time here to debate your bills and debate bills that you’ve made mistakes on. Why did you not want to hear from the voices of women in this House that were prepared to come here? Instead, you dispatched it to committee where you know—

I met with a child care organization called Today’s Family in my community, and they shared with me that they are completely committed to the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care program, but that they’re struggling to implement it because they can’t afford to pay the workers what they deserve and they can’t continue to retain workers who cannot work on starvation wages, and I will just say that I had a question in the House the other day about women and families that can’t afford baby formula.

So this is a government that’s completely tone-deaf, is in their own bubble when it comes to the impact that women are facing, the economic difficulties that women are facing in this province under your government’s watch.