Thank you very much.

My name is Chi Nguyen. I am the executive director, as Mr. Carr mentioned, of Equal Voice.

We are a multipartisan organization focused on electing women to all levels of government in this country. For more than 20 years, we have been advocating for gender parity by working with the parties and equipping women with the skills they need in order to help retain them in elected office.

We have been doing some work in this space and researching these issues. Our research shows that with the increasing and shifting culture of harassment and violence in politics, there are real challenges in recruiting people and supporting them so they stay engaged. We're very delighted that you have been taking a look at your own internal practices and are considering how to continue to create a workplace environment that's safer for all involved.

There are two pieces of work we've been involved in that touch directly on your area of study at the moment.

One of them is a piece of work on systemic change and how to create more gender-inclusive legislatures, which we released in 2020. One of the three pillars in that work is a focus on safe and respectful workplaces.

Following that work, we continue to explore and try to better understand the sexual harassment policies that are in play in some of the provinces and territories. We released a report this spring. It's called “Combatting Sexual Harassment in Canada's Legislative Assemblies”. Let me tell you that it's a page-turner.

I would like to share a few of the findings from this work. There are eight key themes in it, but there are things most relevant for your context today.

The first is that there are certain risks that increase the likelihood of sexual harassment in Canada's legislative assemblies. We know we have under-representation in nearly all of the legislatures in this country, though we might see some changes in B.C., and that's very exciting, and in Quebec, of course, as well.

That under-representation means there isn't the mass culture or the numbers for women to feel safe. That is an area where we think we—