Status of Women Committee on May 3rd, 2016

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

How is it measured? We talk about having success stories, but when we are looking at GBA+ and then we are actually following up, how do we know whether it was actually implemented or whether it was how things rolled out in the first place? Is there a measurement of that?

[Vaughn Charlton]

That is the million-dollar question.

[Justine Akman]

It gets back to what I—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Do I get a million bucks?

[Justine Akman]

It gets back to what I was referring to earlier. We are planning on doing a better job of monitoring and reporting out on GBA, so that will help.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Excellent.

As you said, you are very small, but are we taking this and putting it on the road? Is it something that we are showing out to not-for-profit organizations and small businesses?

We talked about the marketing, and I mentioned that, but is it something that we are trying to promote to small businesses or to charitable organizations so that they too are having the GBA done?

[Vaughn Charlton]

Our online training has been accessed by many civil service organizations, universities, and provinces. I think most of the Government of Alberta's deputies have taken our online course and have done training under our MoU, so it is widely used.

In terms of whether we have concertedly trotted it across the country, no, but we certainly use all the.... For example, when we fund groups through our women's program, many of them end up taking our GBA training because they need to conduct a GBA as part of their reporting back on their projects.

Yes, it is part of our civil society engagement, and it is certainly widely accessed.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

You mentioned that you don't want to make it mandatory. The AG indicated that maybe reporting and making it mandatory it might work out better. I know it is too difficult to enforce. What can we do as parliamentarians to make sure that it is being done within our Parliament and within our departments? How is it that we can move forward and do that?

[Justine Akman]

I wouldn't want to say that we, as an agency and as officials, have views about whether or not it should be mandatory at this point. I just wanted to make sure that was clear.

We certainly encourage all parliamentarians to take the course and to raise gender issues in the work that they are doing.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I have one more minute.

The AG report said that Status of Women had drafted a strategic plan from 2015 to 2020, in consultation with the central agencies, to enhance SWC's ability to provide advice and assistance on implementing GBA.

What are your next steps, and what do you expect to come out of this plan?

[Justine Akman]

I talked about the plan in my opening remarks. We are going to be looking at barriers, doing strategic initiatives, upgrading our training and tools, and improving on our monitoring and reporting. That is what we are expecting.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

What are the strategic tools, exactly? Do you have any idea what that actually looks like?

[Justine Akman]

Are you asking about the enhanced tools and training, or the strategic intervention?

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I'm sorry. I mean the strategic intervention.

[Justine Akman]

We have just started a process whereby we are trying to identify what those might look like. We are going to be dedicating some of the new resources that we have through budget 2016 towards this work.

We are looking for a combination of resources. Sometimes they call it the “low-hanging fruit”; we make sure that we can explain GBA and its importance to Canadians and to federal officials. We will be looking at everything, from government priorities and initiatives that have a particular impact on women in diverse communities to some operational environments where we think GBA is really important. We are going to be looking at a variety of different initiatives and determining how we can ensure that GBA is part of the policy or program development process—not at the end of the process, as an afterthought, but all the way through, from the beginning of the development process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good. That is your time.

We'll now go over to Ms. Vandenbeld for five minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to pick up on the strategic interventions, and in particular the answer you gave to my colleague Ms. Sahota about Security Council Resolution 1325 and the work that is being done with the armed forces. Obviously, as somebody who has been in two peacekeeping missions on the civilian side, I am very interested in that.

Would there be synergies with other areas? For instance, you are working with the armed forces, but Canada also deploys a number of civilians to peacekeeping missions, either directly as a secondment or through funding different organizations.

Is part of your strategic intervention to do with the armed forces right now? If not, would that be something that you would be expanding to, because of the application that it would have if you have the best practices?

[Justine Akman]

Vaughn and her team members have been spending an awful lot of time with the Canadian Armed Forces in the past year because of the importance of this issue and the women, peace, and security initiative. It's definitely something we see continuing in terms of our operational funding going forward, not just with the Canadian Armed Forces but through using that as a model for other like-minded agencies, other security agencies. Those might include the RCMP, etc. They have to come forward and want to be part of that, but the goal is that when we have a model that's working, which we think others can learn from, we can bring this cluster of departments together so they can actually learn from each other.

Did you want to add to that?

[Vaughn Charlton]

If I understand correctly, I think your question was about whether this would be applied to civilian personnel as well and to the DND side of the Canadian Armed Forces. It's not a question we're well equipped to answer. I know that the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence are not always totally on the same track, but certainly we've reached out to the deputy minister at DND to encourage this type of collaboration.

If we might make a suggestion, it would be great to bring DND and the Canadian Armed Forces here to ask them that question. I do know that the implementation of Resolution 1325 and this new directive are also meant to be working in tandem with a number of initiatives they have. Obviously, Operation Honour is one. They have a new diversity strategy that's being rolled out. I think the idea is that the lines of effort under the directive will be meant to organize efforts across the Canadian Armed Forces and DND.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Often when we're looking at Security Council Resolution 1325, we're talking about the blue berets and the military aspects of peacekeeping, but Canada is actually very much involved in deploying civilians to peacekeeping missions, often through Global Affairs and formerly through CIDA or even through Canadian-funded organizations like WUSC and others. For instance, the mission I was on was a UN mission in Kosovo under a deployment through CIDA through the OSCE.

We're deploying personnel who are funded and paid by the Canadian government to peacekeeping missions. It would not necessarily be through DND. It would probably be through Global Affairs. Is this something that would be applied to that?

[Vaughn Charlton]

As I understand it, Global Affairs is the lead on the implementation of the women, peace, and security initiative, and this directive relates specifically to the implementation of Resolution 1325, so I would say yes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

You mentioned the Centre for Intercultural Learning. Is that something that even NGOs that are deploying Canadians would be able to access?

[Vaughn Charlton]

Yes, in theory it would be. We get a lot of questions from all over the place about training and who can access it. More recently I think it was a university that asked us whether they could access training. We directed them to CIL, and as far as I know, they were open to it. I don't want to speak for CIL, but my impression is that they are open to developing training for whoever wants to hire them.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

You mentioned that internationally there are countries looking to Canada for leadership on GBA, so if we have these models, particularly in areas like peacekeeping, would we be able to share those with intergovernmental organizations such as the UN or the OSCE so they could replicate those models?

[Vaughn Charlton]

I know that the Department of National Defence is very involved with a nordic training facility that has some excellent GBA training. I know that there's been a lot of cross-pollination there. Again, I couldn't speak to it. It's a little bit outside our area of expertise, but I do know there's ongoing dialogue on these tools and on making sure that our tools are on par with, or better than, what is available internationally.