Status of Women Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2007

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Members of the committee, we would like to begin.

Our witnesses today are Ms. Ellen Russell, professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University; and by video conference, Dr. John R. Bartle, professor and director of the School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska.

You'll be doing ten-minute presentations.

Do you have any time constraints, Mr. Bartle?

[Dr. John R. Bartle, Director and Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha]

No, I don't.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay, fine.

We will start off with Mr. Bartle, and then once Mr. Bartle has finished his presentation, Professor Russell will do her presentation.

I welcome you both and I thank you for giving your time at such a short notice, and especially Ms. Russell in this weather.

Mr. Bartle, you may begin.

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

Thank you. It's a great honour to appear before you today.

My name is John Bartle, and, as mentioned, I am a professor and the director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

The title of my presentation is “Administrative Considerations in Implementing Gender Budgets”.

For definition, what is a gender budget? The definition I'll be using is that it's a government budget that explicitly integrates gender into any or all of the parts of the decision-making process regarding resource allocation and revenue generation. This is a broad definition, and I think that's an appropriate way of approaching it. Thus defined, more than 60 countries have undertaken gender-responsive budgeting initiatives at either the national or subnational levels of government.

To go directly to the lessons we've learned from the experience of other countries, there are five. The first is that there needs to be a buy-in of government and civil society stakeholders. That buy-in is crucial for gender budgeting to succeed—again, both on the government and civil society sides.

The second lesson is that gender budgets can be integrated into budgets at all levels of government. It's not something that can only work at the local level, or only at the provincial level, or only at the federal/central level.

Third, the political environment and social values in place are important factors affecting its acceptance. I think that in many of countries where it has worked, it worked in large part because the political environment and social values were conducive to it working.

Fourth, and I think maybe most important—I'll discuss this further in a bit—gender budgeting can be incorporated into each phase of the budget cycle: the preparation of the budget, the consideration of the budget, the execution, and the audit or evaluation of it. To stress that even more, I would say it really needs to be incorporated into each of those four phases for it to really work.

Fifth, technical expertise and data availability are crucial. Without these, the effort is very difficult, if not doomed to failure.

Now, I want to give you examples of how a gender focus can be brought into the four different phases of the budgetary cycle. First of all, in preparing the budget, the goals can be set forth by the treasury or department in preparing the instructions; just as with any executive set of instructions, those can be part of what the budget message conveys.

In the budget approval phase, you can use gender-specific goals in legislation and appropriations. It can be part of the legislation to establish specific goals.

Third, in the budget execution phase, there can be guidelines for discretionary spending by the agency. In other words, the legislature can give the agency specific guidelines in terms of how discretionary funds can be spent.

Then in the audit and evaluation phase, gender audits, as I think you know, are fairly common. You can do an audit to see if there was compliance with gender goals.

Those are just examples. There are many more. In the paper I wrote—which I think the committee researcher, Dr. Morgan, knows about—we give more examples, and I'd be glad to elaborate on those.

In analyzing spending, you need some tools, and gender budgeting tools are there. Analytical tools need to be developed and applied to determine the differential impact of fiscal decisions on gender. The conceptual framework for this was established long ago, and it is not that difficult. Budlender and Sharp have done some work on this, creating three spending categories to determine the differential gender impacts of public spending.

The three typologies or three categories of spending are: one, the expenditures specifically identified as gender based; two, expenditures for equal opportunity goals designed to change the gender profile of the workforce; and three, what they refer to as mainstream expenditures, which are far and away the largest part.

To focus on mainstream expenditures, a variety of analytical techniques can be used. I won't go into detail on this now except to list them. Again, I'd be glad to talk about this more later.

You can do what's known as an expenditure incidence analysis, looking at what the actual effect of spending is on individuals. You can do a gender-aware policy appraisal; that's looking at a policy in a broader context than just the budget. There can be gender-responsive budget statements, statements that are a little bit outside the budgetary process but that would be an analysis of spending in a particular area. There can be beneficiary assessments, showing how beneficiaries are affected and assessing the impact on them—on women, men, girls, and boys. Also, there are time use studies: how do people use their time, and how do changes in policies affect how people use their time?

The important point here is simply that there are a number of tools that can be used in analyzing spending.

In the U.S., really, the only to-date gender budget initiative that I know of is in San Francisco. There is just the very beginnings of one in Georgia, but not much has happened on it yet.

In April 1998, the City and County of San Francisco required departments to apply gender analysis. The public works department found that as a result, there was greater awareness of the gender effects of service delivery. Since then they've applied it to some additional departments, so I think it has had an effect in that case.

I know your last hearing was more about the revenue side, so I won't focus on it too much, except to say that there has been less focus on the revenue side of the budget in most gender analyses.

Most tax law is not gender-neutral, but rather gender-blind; that is to say, it has effects, but we don't pay attention to or know what they are, and ignoring these differentials can at least potentially lead to some serious inequities.

In closing, to the question of whether gender budgeting can work, the answer is, yes, it can. It does not require a new format. There is not a single, uniform approach that has to be used in order to implement it. It can be applied across existing budgetary formats, so you don't need to throw out the old format that you have to bring in a new one; you can use the existing one, and I think that helps. Gender measures can be incorporated into existing formats--for a line-item budget, a performance-based budget, and so on.

The lessons learned that I mentioned earlier—the five lessons—suggest in turn the obstacles that need to be removed in order to make it work. Those are important factors to keep in mind.

As with any administrative reform, I'm sure you all know that there are many challenges to full implementation. It needs to be incorporated into the standard budgetary process to be institutionalized. I think if it's an add-on done outside of the budgetary process, it's not fully woven into the fabric of the budget.

The test, really, is whether it can survive a change of administrations. That's always been the issue. It needs to justify the work that it takes to do it, but we've seen it work, and I think it's more a matter of commitment than it is anything else.

With that, I'll conclude my statement and thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bartle.

We'll now go on to Professor Russell for ten minutes.

[Dr. Ellen Russell, Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University]

Good afternoon, everybody.

My understanding is that your committee is embarking on the study of gender budgeting. Thus, my comments are oriented to my understanding that you are still contemplating doing this rather than being actively in the midst of doing it.

I am here, I suppose, largely because of my experience as the senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, where I was deeply involved in preparing the alternative federal budget. Currently, though, I'm at Carleton University, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration. I've not been around CCPA lately, so if you have any current questions about what CCPA is doing, I can refer you on.

My background was largely focused on budgets per se rather than gender budgeting. I did not start my work dealing with the alternative federal budget that we prepare with any particular knowledge of or commitment to gender budgeting. My commitment was to improve on budgeting in general and to advocate for both effective and fair tax and expenditure measures.

But what I realized in the course of immersing myself in federal budget issues was that there were some serious and even debilitating omissions and flaws in the way we typically design our federal budget. And these omissions are costing us. We make inferior fiscal decisions, and we make a hash out of some potentially promising ideas because we are not using all the tools at our disposal to make sensible public policy. More troubling still, we do not have to be making these mistakes.

So I came to gender budgeting because I think it is a powerful tool to improve public policy, and it is well within our reach to make significant improvement in public policy in Canada with a fairly modest and doable gender budgeting initiative.

I'm going to cover three things for you today: number one, why you should advocate on behalf of gender budgeting; number two, why you should not be dissuaded by the naysayers; and number three, what is a modest and doable first step you can entertain right now?

First, why will gender budgeting make a difference?

Every time the government collects taxes or spends money, this has consequences for all Canadians, and different Canadians are affected differently by the various tax and spending measures.

You know this better than anyone else in Canada. You are members of Parliament. It is fine to say that a given measure is great for Canadians. But as members of Parliament, the first thing I expect you do when you hear of a new policy is think, “How does that affect my riding?” Because each particular riding has unique attributes. Is it rural? Is it urban? What sort of economic base does your riding have? Is it a very affluent riding or not so affluent? All of these things will matter when you analyze how a certain measure may affect your riding.

If you do budget analyses from the perspective of your riding, you must understand the reality on the ground to appreciate how a policy will affect your riding. So whatever the goal of public policy is, whether it will work or not depends on that reality on the ground. And gender is a huge reality on the ground. Policies may sink or swim, depending on how gender dynamics interact with the policy.

In other words, you can have the best-intentioned policy that flops because gender context is not taken into account. Or you can have a policy that seems to sound okay, or at least doesn't sound overtly gender biased, but turns out to reinforce gender inequality and maybe even thwart other policy objectives, because people haven't done the digging to understand the gender budgeting analysis of that policy.

Any policy in Canada that purports to care about families, or poverty, or inequality, or most labour force issues, or a host of other important issues is very likely to badly misfire--and expensively misfire--if gender issues aren't taken into account.

Now, I care about gender inequality, full stop. But even if your commitment to gender equality isn't such that it persuades you of the importance to do gender budgeting, I still think you should embrace gender budgeting. It's a powerful tool to make sure all policies are well designed, cost-effective, and accountable.

I will move on to my second point, on why you should not be dissuaded by any naysayers. In your investigations, you will likely hear objections--that we don't have the right data available, that it's going to cost too much money, that it's going to be too cumbersome, and so on. Do not waver in your commitment to gender budgeting for any of those reasons. I do not find them persuasive.

Do we have the right data? If you ask any of the professionals who devote their life to looking at data whether they have enough, they will always say, no, they wish they had more data about this, that, and the other thing. The fact is that we all cope with life despite the fact that the data is not always ideal. Certainly it would be better to have more data, and certainly that would cost something.

This does not mean we can't attempt gender budgeting today given what we know. There is some very low-hanging fruit within our reach, and we could make many important contributions to understanding the distributive effects of many existing policies with the data we have. Data issues are no excuse for not getting started.

It also speaks to the cost issue. We could have a lot of important impact with very little additional cost. We may not do everything we would ideally like to do and answer every question we would like to answer, but we would get further than we are today.

We could devise some fairly routine gender filters to apply to policies that are easy and pretty cheap. They have the added bonus that we could stop spending money on policies that are creating obstacles for gender equality. It has the potential to make budgeting much more precise and efficient, even if we can't achieve all the potential gains of gender budgeting right away.

I'm going to present you with a first step that could be done right away, and at bargain basement prices. It would have a very meaningful impact on gender equity, as well as on a number of other policies. Here is what I suggest you do as your very first step. The next time there is a federal budget, ask the finance minister to insert one page into that document. That one page would be a summary of any new tax measures that are contained in the budget. Never mind for a moment that there are existing problems in the tax system; I'm speaking only of any new tax policies that are enacted. On this one page in the budget, the finance department would write the following things: the cost of any new tax cut, and a projection of the distribution of the benefits of that tax cut by income and by gender.

This is not rocket science. There is software out there that will help people create the distributional analysis of a tax cut. In fact if you were to wander down the halls at Finance Canada and shout, “Hey, does anybody know the couple of software packages I'm speaking about?”, you would get more than enough people who could run this through in a very short time.

The tools we have today aren't perfect, but they should be used because they exist and because we can do better than we do currently. It's a first step that could be done today.

The finance department already prepares charts like this. You often find them in the back of budgets. All I am demanding here is that they stick in there the gender and income information that is easily available. It would be a big step forward. The only thing that is required is the political will to do it.

Sure, we could aim for more, we should aim for more--there's a lot more richness available to us if we would embrace gender budgeting fully--but for sure, this would be an easy first step, and it would be very meaningful.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

I'll just let you know, members of the committee, that Professor Bakker, who is from York University, has submitted her presentation, but it is in English only, so we cannot distribute it. Unfortunately she hasn't been able to come because of the weather.

Mr. Bartle has his presentation as well, but it is in English only. Once it's translated, we will give it to you.

We'll start with the first round of questions.

For seven minutes, Ms. Minna.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Bartle, and Ms. Russell, whom we've met before around various discussions and tables.

Actually, this is very interesting. We all know that we've not done gender budgeting properly in this country. We know that the tax expenditure side of things, which has been a bee in my bonnet for a very long time, is actually quite often to women's disadvantage, certainly the way they're applied. We don't actually do a proper analysis of any of this stuff in the long term.

To Mr. Bartle, you had mentioned a number of analytical tools, and you mentioned to us a couple of things about the expenditures. I'm wondering if you could you be a little more specific about the kinds of tools and the kind of expertise that would be required to implement a proper gender budgeting process, and about whether or not the whole of the budget needs to be done or we could start doing it sector by sector to some degree.

My concern with sector by sector, of course, is that it may never get to the full budget. It may take a few years. But it's better than doing nothing.

So I would like you to tell us a bit more about the kinds of tools that are required. You mentioned some of them, but I'm wondering whether there's a bit more that you could share with us just to understand the needs.

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

Thank you.

I would agree with what Dr. Russell said. I think you could use a variety of approaches, starting with whatever data, whatever information you already have. I think that is the most logical way to proceed.

If you were to go to your treasury, say, or any other office and ask them to do some analysis for you, again, the easiest thing for them is existing software, existing methods, existing data that they start to work from. That's what I would encourage, first of all, to make it practical and as simple as possible for them to proceed.

The second thing I would encourage is that different types of analyses or approaches are appropriate for different types of expenditures areas, and I think that's okay. There will always be good ways to improve upon existing work that has been done. Again, I think Dr. Russell's remarks are really quite good and I would echo them, that you start with what you have, you do what you can, and you try to improve as you move along.

As to analyses that are done, people might criticize them and say, well, they could have been done better. And that's great, because then other people will try to improve those.

That's how I would proceed, quite frankly.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Dr. Bartle, I know you've said that in the U.S. there's only San Francisco, but even that, if it's being well done, would be worth looking at. Do you know of any jurisdictions besides San Francisco, or outside of the U.S., any other jurisdiction that in your view would have done gender budgeting reasonably well, or at least are way ahead of some of us, where one could get not a template but at least a good view of what is being done, so that it might be transferable or at least adapted to our situation?

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

I think Sweden has done a very nice job. There's a recent report by the IMF that details some of what they, as well as a variety of other countries, have done.

For example, in Sweden, each ministry is expected to develop performance measures and external evaluations. Implementation measures include appointment of strategically placed gender equality coordinators, establishing an organization for coordination in all ministries, undertaking extensive training for the gender equality unit, and training for gender coordinators.

So I think there's a variety of steps in the implementation of the process that they have already taken that would be good lessons for Canada.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Bartle.

Do I still have any time left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have two and a half minutes.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I'd like to go Ms. Russell for a moment.

In my view, it's sometimes easier to get buy-in, political buy-in or public buy-in, as was mentioned earlier, if we can actually show the weaknesses of current policy, or at least take that apart.

Do you know if anyone has done a gender-based analysis of our tax expenditures, if you know what I'm talking about, the various tax credits, the social policy that is delivered through the tax system? Do you know if there has been any analysis done on that from that perspective?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

I think there are bits and pieces of things. I'm just trying to think whether I put something out at CCPA, because I just don't remember. This was a few years ago. I'll have to look that up. But I think you can come up with, without too much problem, a reading list of certain measures.

Now, I don't know, across the whole tax system, whether you're going to find something that systematically looks at each bit. This may be the work that the committee needs to do: sewing together the different bits so that you're looking at the tax system as a whole. It's not that complicated to scan the literature and see what's out there.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay, thank you.

You have given us--

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

It will have to be a quick one.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I'll make it a quick one. It's always difficult, but okay.

With your first step--the one you say is an easy one--would you suggest that we could take one or two departments and, in addition to the tax piece, for this budget try to get all of the fundamentals right in one department and see how that works out?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

You could take that approach, but that's actually more ambitious than my first step is. My first step is just asking for a page of information incorporated into a budget, just on those tax measures.

My suspicion is that such information exists, because I'm not the only person who knows about this software. I'm sure lots of people are running around the finance department running these analyses on tax policies. I just want them to make that public. Then, if they decide or you decide that it would be wise to look at a particular part of the budget and do a more substantial gender-budgeting analysis, that's great. I just want a very modest first step.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Minna.

Madame Demers, pour sept minutes.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Bartle, Ms. Russell, thank you for being with us today.

Mr. Bartle, you say that gender budgeting should be done at all levels of government: at the municipal level, at the state level, for the United States and at the federal level for Canada.

Some 60 countries are already engaged in gender budgeting. In those countries, based on your expertise and experience, what are the best, most effective methods that produce the most concrete results? Which of those methods would be best suited to the North American or Canadian context? If we stopped talking about analyses, what measures should we include in budgets so that men and women could take advantage of them?

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

Merci. Thank you.

I don't think it has to be implemented or executed at every level of government. I think what I said was that it can be, could be, at any level. So it need not be at every level; a small city or a small province could do so without too much trouble.

Which country has the best model? I don't know that anybody really has taken it far enough to really say that they have a true gender budget that really has affected things for the long run and on a consistent basis.

Australia began it. South Africa was the second adopter. The Philippines was also about the same time. Those have not been sustained. They have not lasted.

Sweden has started some new stuff, as I mentioned, and I think it's very promising, but again, I think the true test is whether it can be maintained. That's kind of an open question.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Bartle.

Ms. Russell, I very much liked your idea of inserting only one page to explain the impact of the cuts to direct or indirect taxes so that people would realize the actual effect that had in their lives. We could do the same thing with tax credits. I'm thinking, for example, of the Universal Child Care Plan of $1,200. We'd see what real effect that has on the lives of women or men.

For example, women are often natural helpers and babysitters. They do many things that are unpaid and unaccounted for. How can we take that into account when we think about engaging in gender budgeting?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

Well, vis-à-vis the question of unpaid work that women are often performing, there are any number of ways that budgets end up impacting on that kind of unpaid work.

To give you an example, with something like child care--performed on an unpaid basis in the home, say, or performed on a paid basis in a child care centre, say--the availability of government programs that make it possible to access child care centres will affect women's unpaid work in the home. They may, for example, be able to choose to put children in child care and then they have perhaps the option of entering the labour force, for example, an option that might not be open to them if the costs of child care were prohibitive.

That's a concrete example of how a government policy could impact the choices of women based on the fact that they must make choices around the unpaid work that they are doing vis-à-vis child care.

So any number of policies have other impacts on any of the unpaid work that's done in the economy--caring for disabled, elderly, young people, and all kinds of things.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Ultimately, you're saying that we can't think about cutting a tax or granting a tax credit without ensuring that we have the necessary structures to enable people to choose what they want once the tax is cut or the tax credit is granted.

We always come back to basics: to social development, child care service structures, affordable housing and readily accessible education. All that has to go together. You can't just cut taxes or grant tax credits. You also have to consider the other side, when you take these kinds of measures.