Status of Women committee  Could I comment on that? I think one of the most clearly accepted economic justifications for women's economic equality is that women need to be developed to be as productive as men. This will indeed have beneficial impacts, not just on women and their dependants, but on everyone, men as well as women.

Status of Women committee  I think it is symptomatic of a pervasive problem. Gender-based analysis, as outlined by Nancy Peckford and as initially designed by Status of Women Canada, was implemented quite aggressively during the second half of the 1990s and into the early 2000s by a growing number of government departments, but it seems as if the political will to pursue that has fallen off.

Status of Women committee  Can I just get clarification on the question? Is the question which of the Department of Finance items will help women, or is the question which of the new Status of Women Canada projects are going to help?

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  The important thing about this document is that beginning in 1995 a federal-provincial-territorial committee led by Status of Women Canada calculated each of these different gender gap measurements. Page 3 lists the measures that were developed for incomes. If you look on the left-hand side of page 3, you will see that this index has already been calculated for 1986, 1991, 1994, and 1997.

Status of Women committee  Yes, but the problem is that they were very cursory. A supplementary question that you might want to consider asking them is whether this is a summary of a more extensive analysis that may be sitting in their files somewhere, because they are saying things that even the best mathematicians could not really meaningfully work out in their heads.

Status of Women committee  Table 1 is my scoring of what they did. It incorporates a report on what they said. That's the gender impact score by FIN, which is the Department of Finance, and then the gender impact score by KL, which is me. That's my grade.

Status of Women committee  Yes. You will have some written materials that give numbers and spell it out, but I'll go through it orally. Think of it this way. Say somebody gives you $100 and says, “Here, we're giving this to you because you're a woman and we know you need more money.” Then they turn around and give $1,000 to a man and say, “Here, we're giving you $1,000.

Status of Women committee  Yes, written examples of it. But unless there was more to your question, there is another part to my answer that I'd like to drag in here.

Status of Women committee  It relates to these economic gender equality indicators here. I agree with everything that Nancy Peckford has said, because the most important thing is to develop substantive gender analyses, not just the numbers. But what's important about this document is that—

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I'm going to be making reference to the two tables that were just distributed, table 1 and table 2. There was also another—

Status of Women committee  The other item that was previously distributed is a copy of a Status of Women Canada publication entitled Economic Gender Equality Indicators. If you have that, I'm going to make brief reference to a passage on page 3. The focus of my presentation and the materials you will get in support of the tables after this meeting is on exactly what the Department of Finance did in its gender analysis of the 2006-07 budget.

Status of Women committee  Do we know how much longer the tables will be?

Status of Women committee  I would add to that a national child care program, because three-quarters of all women now work for money outside of the home, to some extent. OECD studies have shown that is the single biggest change that could be made to immediately begin to close the gender gap. And it will also affect the quality of generations of lives.

Status of Women committee  To answer the first question, I can give you a partial analysis of some of the main features of the 2005 budget, because as table 6, which I handed out earlier, demonstrates—and I apologize for the typographical error because each of the two pairs of columns should be marked 2004 and 2008.