I'll try, and my colleagues around the table will help if I don't get there.
It's not so much how much money is allocated to which envelope, although that obviously has an impact at the end of the day in terms of what government policy at that time happens to be. Quite often, it is how programs are then designed to spend that money and the criteria around those programs to spend the money.
I'll give you an example. I was working with some immigrant women who desperately needed training and upgrading back in the late 1980s. The program offered by HRSDC at the time required that you have grade 12 and be somewhat fluent in the English language to access it. Well, it meant that all those immigrant women were excluded. The criteria shut them out. That's why I put down “racialized”, as well as the other lines.
Another example is, for instance, a policy like the child tax credit. It's about $7,000. If you have money to spend, you can take advantage of it, but if you're a low income to poor person, and a woman, in particular, and are in under the labour force, you can't access it, because you have to have money before you can get it back. It's not a refundable credit.
Those are just a couple of examples. What I'm seeing is that the criteria and policy, and how policy is designed and then delivered, may miss the mark of what the intended objective is overall. Do we want to eradicate poverty? Do we want to address the issue? Does it miss because we didn't do the right analysis, and therefore, the criteria that was designed actually leaves out a big chunk of people? Quite often that is women, and usually minorities are the ones who are more disadvantaged.
The tools we would use would be to look at.... First what I would do is have us take some time to have hearings with people who have expertise in gender budgeting to understand the criteria that are required to do gender budgeting properly and to see a few examples of where it might have been done. Then I would move on to take a look at some of these areas we've identified and see how, if applied properly, it might have worked in some of the current policies that exist within our system. Out of that we might be able to make some recommendations about how things might be corrected, and then by extension, advise that the model be used government-wide in the preparation of budgets. If you do the right gender budget analysis before budgets are prepared, you're likely not to have the wrong outcome at the end.