Status of Women Committee on Nov. 28th, 2007

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you very much, Ms. Philipps.

Ms. Lahey, a young intern from the University of Sherbrooke is with me today. One of her fields of interest is precisely gender budgeting. She has suggested a few questions to me. It is a great pleasure for me to put them to you.

Apart from funding problems, what other problems that impede the successful application of a gender specificity in the government's structural policies do you foresee?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

May I clarify? By funding problems, do you mean finding enough money for the federal government to do this work, or funding problems for women?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Funding problems? It's for the government to find enough money to subsidize those programs, but what other reason could there be?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

For the government to not engage in gender budgeting?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Yes.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

I believe that once the full scale of the inequities in the tax system reach the public sphere, it could raise so many more questions than the government has gotten for a long time.

To give you one example, Professor Philipps was talking about how the tax savings in income splitting go to the taxpayer with the higher income and the tax bill goes to the taxpayer with the lower income. Not only is that an unequal allocation of the benefit and the burden of it, but it also means that then the individual owner of the resulting money becomes more and more wealthy—the higher-income spouse becomes more wealthy—and this means that a woman's ability to accumulate income over her life diminishes as she has to pay this tax benefit that accrues to her husband's benefit.

This is a principle of allocation of family property that we have not accepted in this country since Irene Murdoch went to the Supreme Court of Canada in the early 1970s, and there was quite an uproar over it, that the woman should work and the husband should get the benefit. What is a good farm wife good for? It's to generate income, capital, savings, and now tax benefits for her husband.

I think that is one of the reasons any government might be nervous about this, and I would hope every party could step beyond whose fault this really is—because it's an inherited system—and go to work at it in a very serious way.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you.

I now turn to another question from Emilie. In light of foreign experience, what criteria could we adopt right now? What kind of varied results among the population could we expect? Could you give me a concrete example?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Do you mean variables in the population pertaining to gender allocation?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Yes.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

To go back again to income splitting, the government itself has estimated that it is going to spend $3.6 billion over the next six years on income splitting just for retirement income. We can do a gender analysis of that and see where that benefit is going to end up.

In the paper I did for Status of Women Canada, on page 56 in English and on pages 65 and 66 in French, for anyone who may want to look at it later, I have used micro-simulation software to model the effects of income splitting for retirement-aged people and for people of all ages. Clearly, just by changing to income splitting of retirement income, women's share of income will go down farther than it has gone down now.

I hope that's a sufficient answer.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

You know, we never get enough answers in any case.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have half a minute.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I would really like us to understand that, as you said, Ms. Lahey, this problem has been around a long time. So we can't take a partisan attitude to this problem if we want to achieve concrete results and for women to benefit from those results. I didn't ask those questions at all with a partisan attitude.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Merci.

We now go to Madame Boucher for seven minutes.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Good afternoon, mesdames. Thank you for explaining what gender budgets are.

There are a lot of things. This is the first time that we've examined it here in committee. I don't think any committee had dared address that. I think this is good for everyone.

I would like to understand one thing. It's also important for any government in power to become responsible and to ensure that there are ways of measuring the effectiveness of this kind of initiative.

Once a country has put in place a budget that takes gender specificity into account, how can a government, whatever it may be, measure and evaluate the effectiveness of that kind of budget on an ongoing basis?

[Prof. Lisa Philipps]

Is that a question for me?

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Yes.

[Prof. Lisa Philipps]

Thank you.

There are many different ways of going about measurement of outcomes. I suppose one would have to think about what one means by an outcome.

One could measure who receives the benefit of a spending program, comparing men to women, who receives the benefit of a tax cut, comparing men to women. One could also look at whether the policy achieved its objective equally for men and women. So if a policy is meant to enhance productivity or increase labour force participation, does it work equally well for men and women?

This goes back to what I said about examining both distributive and behavioural impacts. It's quite a broad question, so I'm not sure how to focus my answer. Maybe you could refine the question.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

When a country has introduced this kind of budget, which refers to gender specificity, how can the government efficiently measure this kind of budget so that it is adequate at all levels?

[Prof. Lisa Philipps]

In some cases, it may need to collect more information. It may need to actually gather more data about the effect on men and women. We don't always have the information we need.

This is part of the reason that governments have to be involved. It can't just be done by NGOs, because governments have the ability to do the data collection, for instance, or they may have confidential data that they can access in order to do that kind of assessment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Mrs. Boucher.

Mr. Stanton, you can continue.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

On the remaining time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Yes.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Okay, sure. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses this afternoon for giving us some time on this important topic.

I just want to get back to one of the purposes at hand here. You're the first to come to us today. We're embarking on a study of gender budgeting, and the focus here is to help us understand how we should scope this study that lies in front of us.

The committee has spent some time on gender-based analysis. It did a rather thorough examination of it in the 38th Parliament.

Could you comment, both of you, if you don't mind, on the difference? We're into terminology here. We have “gender budgeting” and “gender-based analysis”. Are they really the same? Is it really just gender-based analysis as it applies to tax and financial measures?

[Prof. Lisa Philipps]

I would be happy to respond.

First, I think what you said at the end is accurate, that “gender budgeting” is a term that captures the application of gender analysis to the budget as a specific government policy instrument.