Thank you. It's an honour and a pleasure to be here today.

As was mentioned, my name is Fae Johnstone. I'm a 28-year-old trans woman, and I live here in Ottawa on unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinabe territory.

In my day job, I'm the executive director of Wisdom2Action. We are a small consulting firm that works predominantly with non-profits and health and social services in the private sector, and though I live here in Ottawa, my firm is based in Kjipuktuk Mi'kma'ki, colonially known as Halifax, Nova Scotia. Although I've never lived there, part of my heart definitely does.

Over the past six years, I've had the absolute honour of leading my firm and helping build a successful business in a difficult and increasingly challenging economic environment as a trans person and as a woman, often defying the odds and often defying expectations as well.

I like to look back to when I was a little bit younger. I don't think most folks in my world would have expected that I'd be here today or that I would be the owner of a successful business.

My firm is a small one, and we predominately employ queer folks, women and folks from other marginalized communities. We lead with our values. Most of our clients are small non-profits that often can't afford the services and supports of larger consulting firms that often are based in Toronto. We help organizations scale their impact and bring inclusion to life in their work while strengthening their connection to the communities that they serve.

As a firm with a social enterprise commitment, we also leverage our platform and resources on 2SLGBTQIA+ advocacy and other causes that are near and dear to my heart and to the hearts of my co-owners.

We are proud to be a living wage employer and to be an inclusive workplace for our team, often employees and colleagues who haven't had access to workplaces with the freedom to be themselves and who can show up as their honest selves in their work environments.

I'd like to speak in my time today to the economic inequalities and barriers facing queer and trans people and business owners. I also want to touch on the threat of rising hate and share recommendations on how this committee and the federal government can respond to both the economic issues and the human rights crises queer and trans communities are facing in Canada today.

I want to start by emphasizing the unequal playing field queer and trans workers and business owners face.

We are more likely to live in poverty and more likely to be homeless. We actually make, on average, less annual income than our cisgender and heterosexual peers. We know that is particularly true for trans and gender-diverse people, where almost 48% of trans people in this country make under $30,000 a year. That means almost half of trans people live in poverty or close to it.

We have made immense progress in the past few decades, but inequity is still our everyday reality. My community is simply trying to survive. Even as our country talks about how much of a champion and a trailblazer we are, I have friends who are struggling to pay their bills. I have friends who are struggling to pay rent and for whom the dream of owning a home is further out of reach for them than it would be for our cisgender and heterosexual peers.

Structural factors make it harder for us to make ends meet. Those barriers are multiplied for Black, indigenous and racialized queer people, disabled queer people and for transgender people as well. We need economic and public policy interventions that lift up our community and improve our social and economic circumstances.

We are also more likely in this age to be targeted by hate. I have too many friends and colleagues in the entrepreneurship and business development space who have been subjected to hate and hate mail. I have had friends who have had the pride flags they display in their coffee shops burned or torn down or vandalized in other ways.

As queer people, we also know that we lose business by being out as who we are. Folks will not come to our shops. They will not buy from our business, and we are often tokenized as just those folks who do queer and trans things. While I'm proud to own a queer and trans business, I have to insist every time that we don't just do the queer and trans stuff, that we're also able to help organizations scale their impact, connect with their communities and do the work they do better.

For some in our communities, that risk is heightened. Just think of the discourse right now around drag performers. These are small business owners and entrepreneurs, and they're receiving death threats for doing the work that they do. They're also having to have bodyguards in front of their events. They're seeing a real risk that they will have their livelihood, their identities, their privacy violated by groups that hate them for being who they are.

I also want to speak to government laws and policies that make some members of our community more vulnerable. We still have legislation that makes it difficult for queer and trans people who are engaged in sex work to do the work that they do. We still live in a context of partial criminalization that makes it harder for folks to screen clients, makes it harder for folks to unionize their businesses and makes it harder for them to be safe and to succeed as entrepreneurs.

In this age, we are seeing a staggering rise in hate, and I'm going to speak quickly and summarize briefly.

I guess what I would say is that we cannot underestimate the threat of rising hate in this country. We need our government to listen up, and we need to make sure that we're responding fully to the threat of anti-queer and anti-trans hate and its impact on our queer people and their businesses.

Thank you.