I guess I would respond in this way: I would be very careful—and I don't hear people doing this—about asking for more action plans and more audits of whether gender-based analysis has been done and more reports telling us after that fact that you've done a gender-based analysis, and putting that into a report and sending it somewhere. In some reports, I've even seen recommendations that the analysis be sent to parliamentarians. Well, parliamentarians already get a thousand reports a year. I don't know whether you read all of them; I doubt you do. All I can say is that if I had 1,000 term papers every year, I would have a lot of difficulty doing a very good job grading those term papers. So I think we need to be very careful that we don't unleash a bureaucratic approach to this.
I think the initiatives that have been taken are good ones. The requirement that Treasury Board submissions—which are really interactions between a spending department and Treasury Board for getting new money for something, usually of a small amount—have a gender-based analysis is important. It becomes embedded in the normal decision-making process. I think we need to find new ways of doing that, particularly around the tax areas, which tend to be done almost exclusively in the Department of Finance, as I've indicated. I would strengthen some of the tax capacity of some policy units across government, so there'd be better interaction, and hence better gender analysis across these issues as they are being done.
I'd be very careful about the checklist approach to gender-based analysis, in other words saying, aha, show me your analysis and we will check it off as if you've done it. That's not the objective. Gender-based analysis is a tool to a broader end, not an end in itself.