Status of Women committee  In the example that I provided on biometrics in the temporary residence process, that was a third party that we were contracting with through a formal request-for-proposal exercise, and because that gender requirement was identified before we went out with the RFP, it meant that we were able, as Maia said, to be a bit proactive with those requirements.

Status of Women committee  Do you mean with respect to gender?

Status of Women committee  I can certainly get you that information. We can provide it to the clerk. We have that available.

Status of Women committee  Yes. That work is led by our research and evaluation branch. They'll do all the multi-regression analyses across the various cohorts as well as with other classes.

Status of Women committee  Just so I understand the question, certainly when policies and programs are being developed, lots of interdepartmental collaboration happens as those policies are developed. Once the formal memorandum-to-cabinet process starts, there's a very formal interdepartmental exercise that happens.

Status of Women committee  No, we don't as a department account for the time individuals would spend on the application of GBA in that way. We're not required to report in that way. It would be very challenging to come up with a global figure. If I were to disaggregate further down, I could identify in my organization a certain quantum, but that would largely be staff time—i.e., their salaries—which for all intents and purposes are embedded in their responsibilities across a whole number of accountabilities.

Status of Women committee  I would answer your question in two parts. First, with respect to processing and settlement, I can't speak directly to processing because I wasn't abroad and as close to that. With respect to settlement, I know that when families arrived through either the government assistance stream or the privately sponsored stream, there were additional resources put in place to provide access for women and young girls in particular to understand their rights under Canadian law.

Status of Women committee  I don't actually know the answer to that question, so let me go back to the department. I will be happy to follow up with the clerk on that. I don't know if it's an area that we're investigating in any detail, so I'll find out.

Status of Women committee  No. I mean—

Status of Women committee  Yes, it is an interesting.... I think that there was a constellation of factors that led to an interest in including it as a mainstream requirement through the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. I anticipate that some of it was probably because at the time that the 1995 Beijing declaration was going through, there was a lot of discussion, both inside government and out, about gender generally and the application of a gender lens inside and outside the state, both in domestic and international fora.

Status of Women committee  Resources are always finite, so leadership is pretty critical in this regard. You need to protect some resources to have a dedicated focal point and team. Our department and others in the system have made that decision. In my organization I have an analyst who is responsible for this pretty much full time.

Status of Women committee  We decided to take the approach of making the training mandatory for all executives in the organization. What I didn't say in my remarks was that we made it mandatory for key managers as well. This is just under the executive level in those lead organizations that would be working on files, such as the folks in Maia's area, which is responsible for all selection policy.

Status of Women committee  The functional authority means that I am the lead in the department for the entire organization. I'm accountable for the policy and the organizational capacity. The GBA unit is housed in my organization, but as I said earlier, the application is very much considered to be a responsibility throughout the organization.

Status of Women committee  Yes. Again, I would answer this question in two ways. The first is structural. As my colleague from Status of Women said, there is a requirement in the memorandum to cabinet and Treasury Board submission templates to focus our attention to the need to undertake a GBA and, if appropriate, to lay out those considerations.

Status of Women committee  With respect to my previous example on biometrics, the other element that was adopted was the introduction of a family fee. Prior to the application of GBA, the fee was thought to be primarily per individual. Once the GBA was done, we quickly realized there are many parts of the world where people have much larger families, and those costs would become prohibitive.