Evidence of meeting #17 for Status of Women in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was departments.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:05 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Good morning, everyone.
Today we have before us analysts from the Status of Women who are going to talk about their input into gender-based analysis for the budget.
You each have a presentation of 10 minutes. Are you presenting together? Perfect. They have distributed their presentation in both official languages.
With that, we welcome you. We have lots and lots of questions. Hopefully, if we don't get to questions, as I mentioned, we can submit them. Thank you.
You can begin, Ms. Dwyer-Renaud.
9:05 a.m.
Hélène Dwyer-Renaud Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good morning, everyone.
I'm going to share this presentation with Michèle Bougie.
We'll provide an overview of the activities of Status of Women Canada, the central agencies and departments in terms of gender-based analysis, and provide links between that practice and gender responsible budgets. We believe it is always a good idea to recall the role played by Status of Women Canada.
We work to promote the full participation of women in the economic, social and democratic life of Canada in three ways: by building strategic partnerships with federal departments and with Canadian and international agencies; by assisting agencies and departments in applying a gender perspective to policy development; and by funding specific projects through the Women's Program under the Women's Community Fund and the Women's Partnership Fund.
I would like to draw your attention to the Policy Directorate at Status of Women Canada, which undertakes key activities which are directly linked to the implementation of gender-based analysis. I'm going to use the acronym GBA to designate that analysis. In French, it's ACS.
The Directorate carries on two major activities: it helps include gender equality considerations in current and new policy initiatives, and generates knowledge and tools on gender issues and GBA practices.
These activities help influence and shape our work with federal and provincial/territorial partners in identifying and supporting the removal of barriers, and in meeting Canada's international commitments and obligations.
What does helping include gender equality considerations in initiatives mean? This consists in helping departments integrate gender-based analysis into the design and implementation of key government priorities.
We are currently working with key departments on issues based mainly on the areas of focus of women's economic security and prosperity and violence against women. We also review departments' Treasury Board submissions. By that, we seek to ensure, with Treasury Board's cooperation, that gender considerations are made visible throughout the process, beginning with the Memorandum to Cabinet.
This is a recent activity, which began last September. Michèle can give you more information on that subject when she takes the floor.
We also provide expertise to the various departments wishing to implement GBA frameworks. For example, we're currently working with Human Resources and Social Development to reactivate its infrastructure and develop an organizational policy on GBA practice.
Incidentally, the basic driver of these activities is the idea of making the departments accountable within an accountability framework. Many activities may be carried on in the field, but, if the departments don't seek accountability, it will be hard to determine the impact of a practice such as GBA on policy and program development.
Our activities include the development of departments' activity and program architecture. I'm sure you're familiar with this architecture. This is the instrument the departments use to manage resource allocation. This instrument is virtually set in concrete because it is provided for three years. If a department does not consider the impact of its activities on women over three years, it will have difficulty demonstrating the results it has achieved.
The architecture must be reflected in the departments' reports on plans and priorities and in the departmental reports. Here too, we're trying to integrate gender notions in order to see real results. The Treasury Board has data collection instruments. If we don't break down data collection by gender at the outset, we won't achieve the desired results. We are working on this with two departments: Indian and Northern Affairs and Citizenship and Immigration. This is a real breakthrough.
What does it mean to support the central agencies in their mandated responsibilities to assess departmental use of GBA across the government? We continue to strengthen their challenge function through training. Michèle will give you more details on that subject.
As for the government's reporting and accountability mechanisms, we must monitor the departments to ensure they collect data. If time permits, we'll talk at greater length about the Management, Resources and Results Structure and the Management Accountability Framework during the question period. At that time, we'll be able to explain to you, for example, what it means to include GBA in the Management Accountability Framework.
For us, the most important component is generating knowledge and tools on gender issues. We do that by conducting environmental scanning and identifying trends and gaps that may have impacts on gender equality. This eventually helps us target deficiencies in the system. However, it has to be based on data. For that purpose, we're currently developing a set of indicators on trends together with a number of departments. We hope those indicators will enable them to set their priorities and report. This is a long-term project.
Lastly, we're drawing on the research and statistics of other departments and stakeholders to gather quantitative information on the situation of women in Canada.
9:10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Yes. You're at nine minutes and 15 seconds.
We can continue with you, but I think people also have a lot of questions they need to ask.
Can we just wrap up what you have? Then the questions and answers can help that process.
9:10 a.m.
Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
Yes. In fact, I wonder if I could offer another option. I was finished, and I was going to pass it to Michèle, who's going into the more technical process.
So take it away, Michèle.
9:10 a.m.
Michèle Bougie Senior Policy and Program Analyst, Status of Women Canada
And I'll do it quickly. How's that?
9:15 a.m.
Senior Policy and Program Analyst, Status of Women Canada
Basically, we support the three central agencies in a variety of ways. They also have a GBA steering committee, with the three GBA champions from each agency with our coordinator, so they oversee, they discuss, and they consult. We have a working group with the three agencies to get into the nitty gritty, which is what I'm going to quickly get into.
With the Department of Finance, for example, the training allowed them to do a GBA of tax policy measures in 2006-07, and you have that from last time. It also allows the finance department to consult with other departments, bringing forward items related to the budget to ensure that they're all thinking GBA. Their analysts have to demonstrate that they are actually applying GBA within their work in the Department of Finance across the board. Again, the central agencies will go into details with you, so these are the grandes lignes.
Also, all three agencies are now having GBA training as a central component in their in-house curriculum for staff so that the knowledge is not lost. The Department of Finance in the next few months will be putting up an information site for their employees on best practices on GBA and budgets.
Treasury Board is very technical. As Hélène said, they work with accountability tools. So we've been working on two ends: how to help Treasury Board, through training and experimentation, understand how their tools apply to picking up gender equality outcomes and gender-related outcomes; and working with departments so that they take up their responsibility of articulating their objectives and outcomes in their reporting so that the Treasury Board accountability instruments can pick up the data.
PCO is really intellectual capital, so they are focused on a memorandum to cabinet. Again, we're working with them so that they know how to identify in a memorandum to cabinet if in fact the department has looked at GBA throughout the entire development.
As Hélène said, we also work with the other federal departments, and there's a slide 10, which I'm not going to go into detail in the interest of time, that gives you an idea of what some of the departments are doing. There is a real continuum from gender focal units to networks to business plans to strategic visions and policy guides, and all of them do training. Most of them started with ours, and some have customized for their own needs, but those are all ongoing activities.
I'll pass it back to Hélène, who will conclude very quickly.
9:15 a.m.
Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
The conclusion is simply that if we have all of the right pieces of the puzzle and we have the right players all working together, we can actually see at the end of the day how GBA, if it's done in a systematic fashion with an accountability framework and with everyone playing their role, could certainly help ensure that we have accurate information.
It helps decrease the probability of after-the-fact types of measures, and certainly it helps with analysis to allocate the resources that one would see in a budget for the right populations and the right issues.
Thank you.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you very much.
We will now go to the first round of questions, starting with Mr. Pearson.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair, and welcome this morning. I'm glad you're here, and I have a lot of questions for you—all of us do.
We haven't really seen if the GBA within the Ministry of Finance has been effective or really works yet, and I know this takes time to assess and to see.
In your estimation, from the work that you have done there, do you feel it has been effective? Is it moving along in a timeframe that you would hope to see?
February 14th, 2008 / 9:15 a.m.
Senior Policy and Program Analyst, Status of Women Canada
As Hélène said earlier, some processes are very lengthy, and gender-responsive budgets are one of them. It's an incremental process. You need to understand the tools, you need to get the training, and you need to know how to apply it.
It's also incremental in the sense that you can't necessarily apply it to revenue and expenditure at the same time. At this point, the Department of Finance has done actually quite a complete GBA where they have the data to do it. More importantly, I would say to you that although the outcomes and results are yet to come, in fiscal outcomes you don't necessarily see the policy change very quickly. It's more important, from our perspective, that the Department of Finance is thinking outside the box, they're thinking in terms of gender, budgets, and the repercussions. I would have to say, at this point, yes, they are doing quite well.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
We also don't quite know how things are being monitored. How is that being done?
9:15 a.m.
Senior Policy and Program Analyst, Status of Women Canada
There is constant talking at the working level, which is why we have the working group. The steering committee of GBA champions—obviously chaired by our coordinator at Status of Women Canada—can also look at things where perhaps we might say, “We're not sure about this, maybe you need to check with the champion”. So it's a constant process of dialogue and information sharing.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
One of the things we found from a teleconference we did with somebody from another government in the world was that when they had tried to do GBA amongst their various departments, some of those departments had felt it was sprung on them, that they weren't quite prepared for it and therefore weren't quite as responsive as they had hoped to be.
Do you have any plans within Status of Women for doing a pre-GBA campaign in which you move out into the various departments and say, this could be coming to you, and here's what we're doing within the Ministry of Finance? Are you spreading out to others to get them ready, if we seek to move it in that direction?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
As you know, in Canada—at least in the federal government—the GBA policy has been in existence since 1995. So we have some key departments that have been undertaking GBA on their own and producing their own training packages and those kinds of thing. But to be honest, the Treasury Board submission requirements now and the language of Treasury Board call it a compliance, which has given us a boost to be able to go to the other departments now and basically say, this has been in existence for a while, and although you may have had good reasons in the past not to undertake this....
Also, what has been happening internally in Status of Women Canada is that our policy analysts are now reorganized to do the support for each department as the submissions go through the system. This means that when a department comes calling, they are like a client, and we're giving them a suite of services to make sure they can sustain their practice of GBA, so that they don't come back over and over again. This can be a problem with departments; if you're working with distinct parts of a department, sometimes the points don't get connected inside the department.
So this is something we're starting now. It's a new way for us to operate in terms of ensuring that GBA is indeed being fanned out, if you like, to the different departments. It has made a big difference for us to have the central agencies behind us asking for accountability from the departments.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
Yes. Part of our concern as a committee is that we have to make sure you have the resources to get the job done. That leads to my next question.
If you are fanning out and trying to move into these various departments, do you actually have the resources required to do that, or do you require more?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
I guess it's important to understand the role we play, because you will hear from the central agencies that they do not do the GBA, but they are trained to detect it. We are not doing the departments' GBAs; we are supporting them.
In that sense, the resources make a lot of sense the way we have them right now. You may or may not know that before the expenditure exercise there was a governance exercise at Status of Women Canada, where it was felt that it was time to integrate the practice of GBA. We had been doing a lot of capacity-building, tool development, testing of model delivery, but it was time to put it into practice.
9:20 a.m.
Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
We don't do training ourselves. We have 11 anglophone trainers and nine francophone trainers, who we have used these past five years.
Right now our suite is ready to go, which is what we offer to the departments. If they say yes, they'd like some training, they go to our trainers bank to find who they would wish to have—the trainers have all been licensed by us. We give support to the departments in terms of the practicalities around the training. We are now engaging them to do training, not by itself, in some kind of....
9:20 a.m.
A voice
[Inaudible--Editor]
9:20 a.m.
Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
Exactly, but tied to some kind of an initiative. That's important, because we can then see that initiative evolve; we can see them report that initiative to Treasury Board and in their departmental reports.
This is a whole new way for us to move into the departments. And like a small central agency, you need the will of the other partner to do this.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
Yes. And how do you report back, then, as to the success of these training and other initiatives? Do you have a way of compiling that and bringing that back?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Gender-Based Analysis, Status of Women Canada
Yes, we do it in our own report to Parliament, our DPR, our departmental report. That is how Status of Women Canada reports, but we have also asked departments, when we are doing the training under the initiatives, to also report this in their DPRs.
So at one point the dots should connect. Treasury Board should be reporting on a more strategic level. We report on the practices. The departments report on the results.