MP Patty Hajdu touts gender-based budget at breakfast for female leaders

Thunder Bay-Superior North MP Patty Hajdu spoke to female community leaders in Thunder Bay, Ont., Tuesday morning at a breakfast gathering focused on the Federal budget.

Women's equality is a key theme of the budget, and Hajdu touted a number of its provisions at the event at the Scand Restaurant, including an additional $2 billion in funding for Indigenous skills training over the next five years and an additional $28 million for FedNor, of which $6 million will be devoted to female entrepreneurship.

FedNor has never focused on gender before, but that's about to change, Hajdu told CBC.

"Just because people can apply from both genders doesn't mean that women are going to have the equality of access, and so making sure that women entrepreneurs at the table knew that there would be a specific focus for them, I think that was something that was very specific to northern Ontario," she said.

As Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour, Hajdu said, she fought hard for the extra funding for the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy (ASETS), adding she was distressed to find the program had not had an increase since its creation in 1999, despite the fact that provincial education transfers rise with inflation.

"What that effectively meant was that Indigenous skills training had declined in value, and that as the population grew and as dollars remained stagnant in fact there was less to go around," she said.

The additional funding for ASETS was well received by the Ontario Native Women's Association, according to its executive director, Cora-Lee McGuire-Cyrette, who was at the breakfast.

"That's how we can begin to see change in our communities, so education is key to all of this," she said.

Among the 15 other guests who attended the breakfast were city counsellors Shelby Ch'ng and Rebecca Johnson,Amina Abu-Bakare of the city's Anti-Racism Committee,Cathy Woodbeck of the Thunder Bay Multicultural Association, and Chamber of Commerce PresidentCharla Robinson.