We identified, I believe, in paragraph 1.58 of the report, what we refer to as barriers, barriers that prevented departments and agencies from imbedding gender-based analysis within the development of their policy initiatives. Those barriers were, number one, the absence of mandatory government requirements.
While the central agencies are looking to see whether the memorandums to cabinet indicate whether there are any gender implications of a particular policy, there is no actual underlying policy that says what you have to do and when you have to do it. There's the guidance coming from Status of Women Canada, but there aren't cabinet directives or Treasury Board policies for them to have to follow.
Something else—and even if there were policies, this is something that would have to be sorted out as well—is tight deadlines for developing policy initiatives. Sometimes a government is trying to put a policy in place within a short time frame and getting all of those types of analyses done can sometimes be a challenge in those types of time frames: how to prioritize, how to ensure that these types of analyses are done when dealing with short decision bases.
The other one was limited capacity within the department about knowing exactly how to do a gender-based analysis. That was the third obstacle.
We've identified those three, and those are fundamentally the things that need to be dealt with.
If I could just follow-up a little bit on the last question, I think it's often the case.... In this case we did an audit of this in 2009 and we found weaknesses. We've come back and we've seen weaknesses again in the way this is put in place. We have seen in the meantime that there has been some activity. Status of Women Canada has done more things. It has provided more guidance. There have been some activities done.
I think what's concerning about that is the activities aren't resulting in better results. They're resulting in more policies, more training, more things being done, but they're not necessarily resulting in this now actually happening.
It's important to deal with these barriers, but it's important to keep the focus on this. When we deal with these barriers, is that going to mean we're actually going to have better results and these gender-based analyses are going to be done, they're going to be done well, and they're going to be considered in our policy decisions?