Thank you, Madam Chair. I thought you weren't going to give me a turn.
I have no questions. Instead, I would like to give an overview of my understanding of what all the people we have heard from have told us—whether they be government officials or outside experts who came to present their vision of gender-based analysis or gender-budgeting of revenues and expenditures.
I have prepared sort of an overview, which I intend to call fiscal policy or social policy 101. I would like you to evaluate me at the end.
The federal government has limited means of intervention in spending programs that are primarily the responsibility of the provinces. Until 1994, the federal government maintained some control over provincial spending through transfers for health care, education and social programs. In 1995, provincial transfers were severely cut back. The government has stopped making those transfers.
When that happened, the federal government had to increasingly rely on its tax powers, as laid out in the Constitution, in order to do indirectly what it could no longer do directly. The result is a growing number of tax expenditures designed to support certain categories or foster certain activities that are good for the economy or society.
Nowadays, social policy is often implemented through tax reforms, rather than through program initiatives developed by departments spending government money. That trend seems to have become far more pronounced in this last budget, and others as well. The tax system is now being used as the central instrument for implementing social policy, the consequence of which is to place a heavy burden on the Department of Finance, whose role it becomes to conduct a more detailed analysis of the impact of current tax spending on men and women.
However, gender-based analysis—which could be called a social policy—funded using taxpayers' money has at least three disadvantages for women: these tax measures generally do not benefit low-income women, tax deductions and exemptions are not of equal value for women taxpayers, and tax expenditures may foster male type revenues and spending.
What can we do to remove that unfairness?
So, that was my analysis.