If I may, the job of Treasury Board analyst is to provide ministers with fulsome advice on proposals coming forward to the board. As part of that, if the analyst believes there is an issue with the gender-based analysis done by the department, they would flag that in the advice that they give to ministers.
Ultimately, ministers then have to take into account a whole host of factors, a whole host of interests, and weigh those interests and make a decision. The decision they ultimately come to is like any policy decision: you're having to choose between winners and losers. It's a complicated set of factors that ministers are considering.
We're not the decision-makers. It's not our job to make the decisions. We're not elected representatives and there's no accountability mechanism for us to be held accountable by the public. The whole purpose of the system is that we are providing non-partisan advice on what we think are the factors and the policy issues that ministers need to be aware of and what they need to take into account and consider when they're making their decision.
Ministers ultimately weigh all of those things. They bring to the table additional context--this is the political context--that we are not able to provide advice on, and then they make a decision. Ultimately ministers are held accountable by Parliament and the institutions within Parliament, ultimately by the electorate. That's the system.
From my perspective, I think it's a very good system of government. Does it always work perfectly? Absolutely not. No system does. Is there room for improvement? Sure. There always is. I think we're always struggling to be better at our part of that equation, which is providing the most robust policy advice we can to make sure that all of the information ministers need is on the table.
Certainly GBA and the work that was started in 1995 was putting forward an emphasis for us, that as part of our policy consideration we need to make sure we are looking at and performing GBA so that we are providing a view to ministers on whether or not there are GBA impacts. Ultimately ministers will decide what they're prepared to accept or not accept as far as that goes.