Status of Women committee  What information...?

Status of Women committee  No, it's not an opinion. I reached that conclusion after having followed the Reform Party's platform for years, and then reading the Alliance Party's platform and then reading the Conservative Party's platform. Income splitting has always been something of importance to that particular sector of the political landscape, and the reference to the United States in a lot of these political discussions has been frequent and recurring.

Status of Women committee  As to the first question, how many people would have to be hired and how much would it cost, I really don't know the answer, but it is not surprising that there is a tremendous amount of research already in existence in Canada on a whole range of issues. Take, for example, defence spending.

Status of Women committee  I think the first one you mentioned is income splitting. Income splitting as it has been introduced with respect to retirement income is an attempt to imitate the United States' method of income splitting, which is a system of reporting income that was deliberately enacted after World War II in order to stop the states from enacting community property laws.

Status of Women committee  Repeal it, repeal it, repeal it—all three. They're all gender discriminatory. They all have negative effects on women. Income splitting in particular is increasingly being repealed in every jurisdiction that has the political ability to take a look at it. In Germany right now, the government is spending something like two billion euros a year on income splitting, most of which goes to the high middle class and upper classes.

Status of Women committee  I have not seen a meta-study that correlates budgetary responses with movement in the global indicators like the human development index, the gender development index, or anything, but it's very clear just from looking at the correlations that such a study would produce the evidence you are looking for.

Status of Women committee  I think at this point budget consultations should be held with as many women's groups as possible and with as many pro-poverty groups as possible as well. We should not focus only on gender, because one of the big interfaces is poverty. I think that any group that feels negatively affected by the way the fiscal functioning in Canada is conducted should be allowed to make submissions.

Status of Women committee  With respect, I believe that with the extraordinarily high level of understanding available to the Canadian government about gender-based analysis, it is not possible that it is difficult to identify who receives what benefits. Canada was one of the architects of gender-based analysis at the very outset.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  Yes, budgets are inherently political. I'll give you the example of the gender budget in Australia. It started out in the early 1980s with the Labour government. It was enacted at that time and was the product of the hard work of Yuri Grbich and a group of tax policy experts there who were committed to bringing gender budgeting out into the open.

Status of Women committee  I think annex B, which was distributed to you, lists a number of tax measures that, if they were disaggregated by their impact on women and men, would help reveal the extent to which innocent-seeming tax provisions have a disparately negative impact on women. That's one set of examples to simply break out some of those tax measures.

Status of Women committee  That's a very important question as well. The simple answer is because you have the tax department running the program. If your goal is to deal with poverty, you do not want to put the tax department in charge of solving a problem of poverty. If your problem is inequality between men and women, you do not want to put the tax department in charge of solving that problem.

Status of Women committee  Yes. Definitely any suggestion that, starting in 2008, any new measures should be scrutinized through a gender perspective is not good enough. What's already in place is doing the damage. That needs to be scrutinized first, I would say.

Status of Women committee  Is your question what is the overall social economic outcome, or are you asking more concretely what pieces of paper should be generated?

Status of Women committee  Ideally--well, it shouldn't be ideally--I think Canada has been committed for a long time on paper to achieving the full social economic equality of women, and I think until all of those differences are eradicated, gender budgeting should continue to look at, quantify, analyze, and eliminate every single one of them.