Status of Women committee  Yes, I'd like to just add a couple of points. First of all, I know this has ended up being an exercise very heavily focused on taxes, not spending. I'm not too sure how that happened, but I would like to just emphasize that as somebody who compulsively monitors what everybody else is doing on gender analysis of tax law, Canada has now, with the work of this committee, sort of burst into the forefront internationally--because that is usually the last thing to get looked at.

Status of Women committee  Okay. I'll just finish the point I was making in relation to the tax-free savings accounts, because in addition to the Statistics Canada data that is available to the Department of Finance, there is, of course, also the data from the tax returns themselves, income statistics from the Canada Revenue Agency.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I would like to congratulate you on the tremendous amount of information that is now on the record, compared to, let's say, a year ago. What is happening in this committee is truly historic. I would like to make some brief comments. Obviously there are so many issues now on the table that it would take the report to canvass all of them in detail.

Status of Women committee  By “model”, are you talking about a model for doing a full-scale gender-based analysis?

Status of Women committee  Right.

Status of Women committee  I think you start with the eight steps that Nancy Peckford outlined. You make sure you have somebody who can do research on the realities of women's lives, which is the piece that is missing, assumptions of gender neutrality, etc. That's where this all goes off the rails. To give you a really quick example, the recommendations regarding the green tax levies on certain vehicles and the repeal of the excise tax exemption for bio-favourable fuels, the Department of Finance simply says both men and women drive, so this has no gender impact.

Status of Women committee  Just to clarify, the detailed analysis has already been delivered to the clerk's office. It's just pending translation.

Status of Women committee  My understanding is that you would like one or two of these items broken down with a really detailed kind of way.

Status of Women committee  Sure.

Status of Women committee  That's table 1, the gender impact score by Finance. The positive signs there, the crosses, mean that the Department of Finance—

Status of Women committee  “By KL” is me, Kathleen Lahey.

Status of Women committee  I'll take the first run at that. It's becoming increasingly well documented that using the individual as the basic measure of tax liability and the basic unit for giving tax credits or tax cuts of any kind is very important to the status of women. Detailed studies have been carried out in the OECD showing that as any form of income splitting, joint filing, or joint taxation measures has been eliminated, women's overall economic equality has increased.

Status of Women committee  I can briefly respond to that. Other countries that started out when Canada was number one in the mid-1990s and the second half of the 1990s are still there, because they are still doing what they were doing then, and they are working very diligently to try to close the gap even further.

Status of Women committee  Right. I contacted all the people involved in the earlier updates, and they're all in different government departments. We've all attempted to contact people in Status of Women Canada to find out why they haven't been updated. So far there has been no answer. It may have something to do with internal allocations within Status of Women Canada.

Status of Women committee  To quickly answer your first question, which is what are the definitions of these types of gender analysis, you will be receiving a document that gives the written criteria. To give you an example--these are based on the International Labour Organization, the UN, and some of the Status of Women Canada publications, a distillation of types of gender analysis--a gender-specific analysis acknowledges that men and women have at least some gender-based resources and needs that are different because of their gender, but it still works within existing gender allocations of resources and does not try to change anything.