Thank you, Madam Chair.
To build on this a little further, I don't disagree with anything my colleague Ms. Minna said here. I think we're going in the right direction. I do believe there is more that we should look at as we go forward. We've had enough testimony in terms of scoping out what the potential project is, and I think we have a pretty good sense of that.
It occurred to me from the comments from our last meeting--and I think it was rather well put--that for the Department of Finance, really, by the time the various departmental recommendations get there, they're tasked to pull it all together, look at the financial viability, and weigh the consequences of revenue and expenditures to look at the big picture. Ultimately, the gender lens work needs to be done at the departmental level before it really gets there. It's not really up to Finance to be doing all this scrutiny. When a department is proposing a program, be it Revenue or be it HRSDC, that's where the gender work would generally be done and completed.
I think it would be inefficient, and you might be setting yourself up for a situation where the work would be so voluminous that it wouldn't get done. I think we would need to better understand the steps and look, not in all departments, but certainly in the departments that are key to areas of program delivery that the Government Canada gets involved in. Clearly we're not as large a program deliverer as the provinces and territories are. But in areas like HRSDC, EI, CPP, most of which are financial vehicles, it's the expenditure side of the program as it relates to transfers to Canadians.
That's one thing.
I do believe we need to take a look at this gender budgeting topic and drill down a little further on the notions. Notwithstanding that we set up our programs to hopefully get the right gender outcomes, there were a number of witnesses who talked about the importance of measuring the actual implications of them. It's not just making sure the balance is right for a program when dollars go out the door, but more importantly, it's what actually is derived from that.
Then we get into the question of the audit side of the equation and if the department's engaging in any of that. Let's better understand what we need to do on the back side of these programs to get a sense of what the implications of the gender budgets are.
Mixed in with that are the data tools. We heard loud and clear that if you don't have the disaggregated data, then as a starting point, the departments that do the gender-based analysis won't have the requisite tools they need to even do it in the first place. So we need to look at what's involved with getting the data tools.
Those are the three main areas we should concentrate on. I do think there's a range of witnesses we could bring in to drill down into these areas.