Status of Women committee  Excellent. Thank you, Madam Chair and honourable members. I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today. It's a real privilege to address you. I understand you're considering, as a committee, doing a study on gender budgeting. I'm going to limit my comments to

Status of Women committee  I think one would never want to advocate it as a measure to help the poorest seniors, because it will leave them out. However, it is true that currently we do allow people to split their CPP, for instance, with a spouse, and we allow that to be reflected in a lower tax burden for

Status of Women committee  I'm afraid I can't answer with a precise number off the top of my head. However, I can tell you that England has moved increasingly to do it. It started with an external group, but the government is increasingly internalizing it. The U.S. does not do very much of this, to the bes

Status of Women committee  I think you're absolutely right, and this really goes to what I said about external involvement. There have to be civil society agencies that will create expectations, insist upon gender analysis, and provide independent analysis to review what the government does in order for th

Status of Women committee  I have done some work on that, which I would be happy to pass on to the committee. My major concern about tax expenditures is that the form in which they're delivered often excludes women because so many of them are low income or no income. If you're not paying income tax, if you

Status of Women committee  I must apologize. My French is not good enough to fully understand your question or to respond in French. Is there anyone who could translate for me?

Status of Women committee  I don't believe I have an earphone for translation. I apologize.

Status of Women committee  Yes, I did understand the question posed in English. My answer would be that the Department of Finance needs to incorporate a gender analysis and to explain to the public how it has done that and where. It hasn't been able to. It needs to reveal that. We need to know that the D

Status of Women committee  Is that a question for me?

Status of Women committee  Thank you. There are many different ways of going about measurement of outcomes. I suppose one would have to think about what one means by an outcome. One could measure who receives the benefit of a spending program, comparing men to women, who receives the benefit of a tax cut

Status of Women committee  In some cases, it may need to collect more information. It may need to actually gather more data about the effect on men and women. We don't always have the information we need. This is part of the reason that governments have to be involved. It can't just be done by NGOs, becau

Status of Women committee  I would be happy to respond. First, I think what you said at the end is accurate, that “gender budgeting” is a term that captures the application of gender analysis to the budget as a specific government policy instrument.

Status of Women committee  I think it's true that many problems of equality require direct spending by government to address; not everything can be done through the tax system to address women's inequality or the problems of low-income people. This is one of the reasons we need to examine the budget from

Status of Women committee  I believe it could, and I'm sorry I can't put a figure on it for you. But I strongly believe that making tax policy in a gender-blind way means it's going to be poor tax policy, in terms of achieving the government's own stated objectives, whatever those objectives are, because

Status of Women committee  We've made a start on that. The Canada Revenue Agency does publish some gender disaggregated data; however, it is limited, and we would need to enrich it significantly to do a thorough gender analysis. There may be new kinds of data that would need to be produced about, for ins