Status of Women Committee on April 1st, 2008

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Order, please.

We have with us Professor Kathleen Lahey, Armine Yalnizyan, and Nancy Peckford.

The deputy minister was supposed to come today, but since the deputy minister couldn't make it, the deputy minister will be coming on April 15. That's for sure.

We thought we would have the three panellists help us through this. We gave them the 2006 and 2007 budget analyses, and I know Armine has prepared a 2008 analysis that has been distributed to the committee.

We've heard from the PCO, the Treasury Board, Status of Women, and the gender experts at Finance, but we are still very confused, so we have asked them to help us through the process. Perhaps it's because of the way we are questioning that we are not getting the answers we need.

So without further ado, I would like to give the floor to Professor Lahey. Are you going first, or are you waiting for your tables?

[Professor Kathleen Lahey, Professor, Institute of Women's Studies, Queen's University]

Do we know how much longer the tables will be?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

They should be here any minute.

So Armine, please start. Thank you.

[Armine Yalnizyan, Senior Economist, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives]

Excuse me for only speaking in English; I feel more comfortable.

I appreciate very much the opportunity to address the committee again, and the great work you're doing in trying to get some of these issues practical and actionable as you move toward the development of a gender action plan.

My colleagues and I were asked to review the budget analysis done by Finance using a gender budget lens, because you were having some difficulty understanding why Finance was telling you that everything was fairly well functioning from a gender neutrality point of view.

I have too many notes on the individual items, so I have stuck to the most high-level discussion, which I think will help you prepare questions so you can have a more solid frame for what you're looking for when Finance submits something to you.

I think you have received the document I submitted on Friday. It's dated March 28, if you want to follow along with me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Everybody should have it.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I'll go through this, and if you have any questions....

Kathleen's analysis is much more technical. Mine is much higher level on what you're looking for in a gender budget analysis.

The first thing that is really apparent, looking at the finance department's analysis, is that there's no raison d'être. Why are you doing this? What is the goal of a gender budget analysis? The minimal test of doing a gender budget analysis is to ask two questions, which all parliamentarians should ask when they are preparing budgets. First, what can a budget do—

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

It's dated March 28, 2008. It was circulated in advance. Didn't you get it in your package?

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Is it the one dated 2007?

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I'm sorry, that's my typo. It should be 2008. I was still functioning in last year.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay, we are all on the same page now.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

My apologies.

The very first thing that all parliamentarians should ask themselves as they're preparing budgets is, what can a budget do to advance women's equality, and do the proposals we're putting in front of the government meet these objectives? It's a simple question: what can we do to advance women's equality through a budget, and does this budget do it? That question is missing in the finance department's analysis.

To be truthful, this government doesn't have an action plan, so what you want it to do is not there yet. But we know what the simple things are that can advance women's equality, and these things have been repeated over 20 or 30 years. They include anything to do with affordable housing, child care, access to post-secondary education. These are not gender-specific things, but we know they improve the position of women. So there is a short list of things that open up opportunity for women and reduce barriers. But are any of those things in the budget? And to what extent is the budget focused on advancing women's equality?

That leads me to the second point. The finance department's analysis is all about tax cuts, but budgets are more than tax cuts. It's a shopping list of tax cuts, whether for women or for men. This, though, doesn't address a large part of what we're trying to do all over the world when we talk about advancing women's equality, which is giving substantive change to women's daily-lived lives.

So a tax cut may put more money in your pocket. But the question is, does that little bit of more money in your pocket lead to anything substantively better in the basics of a woman's life—more access to being able to go to work, better education to be able to get a job, access to decent affordable housing?

I have that little list here. I have training and employment services. I include legal aid. You can't have fundamental justice if you can't get access to the system of justice. I also list freedom from abuse. Do we make sure that in our society we have options for women fleeing violence? Are there safe houses for people to go to? If that's not the case, then you have to ask yourself if there is something we can do that enhances women's positions by providing freedom from violence and freedom to pursue economic security.

The third point is that policy impacts are differentiated not only by gender, but also by income group. One of the biggest glaring processes here in this finance department thing is that it basically says, we're spending $50 million on this measure, and women make up x number of people who get it, so we've done our job.

Frankly, you don't need gender budget analysis that tells you how rich women are advancing. You're trying to protect vulnerable groups. The point of doing gender budget analysis is not just to see whether some women get it and some men get it. You want to see the distribution, the effects of these tax measures according to income class and gender.

We have huge confusion in the discussion of income classes and income brackets. The top of the first bracket is about $37,800. Right? It's not very high. If you are taxable, that's the top of the first bracket. Some 68% of taxable women fall into this group, and 50% of men. So if you do a measure targeted just to those people, you're hitting the majority.

A lot of the measures in this list will target people, men and women, but they tend to be in the second, third, and fourth income brackets. That's where most of the benefits of the tax cut go.

So if you have a great big bag of tax cuts—$100 billion, $200 billion of them—it's essential to ask who is getting what amount of that big bag of tax cuts, and do they need help the most? If more men are getting it than women, you can't actually say that tax cuts are gender neutral. And if more affluent people are getting it than less affluent people, you can't really say you're helping the vulnerable.

So it's not just the disposition of the tax cut, but how the benefits are distributed. This is a $200 billion lost opportunity to do something else, right? If you are spending, say, $200 billion on tax cuts, it means you're not spending $200 billion on other things. So how is that lost opportunity translating to who benefits from this expenditure?

If I'm not being clear here, I want to take a moment with you. If you have any questions about what I'm saying, I want to take a moment, because this is incredibly critical.

We don't have unlimited resources in government. If you do have the opportunity to make big change—and a $200 billion price tag on anything is a big change—it's very important to say we're doing this because we're not doing that, and we're doing this because it is benefiting somebody--being very clear on who benefits. That's an incredibly important part of the public democratic process—who benefits from these changes of government.

I'm going to go on, since I'm not.... Yes?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Since you raised this, I think Mr. Stanton would like to ask you a question.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I see where you're going, and I understand the context of the argument that you've put forward. Isn't there some consideration of the fact that there are also numerous upside opportunities, not just for women but for all Canadians, through the liberation of taxes on individuals and businesses?

When you take the weight of taxation from the economy, other good things happen--for example, greater job creation and more opportunities for wealth creation--which in turn provide more resources for government to make those policy investments.

To take the argument that if you left the $200 billion in, the very best way to address priorities for women is to keep taxes high and find other ways to distribute that public investment...and that's basically your argument, to keep the $200 billion in and distribute it out by way of support programs, other investments, education, income support, and those kinds of things. Aren't there also some downside risks, that this would curtail the opportunities for the Canadian economy, jobs, and other things?

I was at an event and did an announcement for immigration support at the Learning Enrichment Foundation in York Southwest—one of the poorest ridings in the country. Some of the new Canadians, newcomers to Canada, said that the very best income support they could get is to have access to a good-paying job. That has stuck with me.

You have to find a way to balance those two things, I would say. Would you give some consideration that it's not all bad?

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I'm sorry, I didn't think my approach was saying that tax cuts are bad. I think what I was saying is that if you are going to spend $200 billion on any given initiative, indicate who benefits from it.

Anything you do in government has an opportunity cost. If you spend, it means you can't cut taxes. You have three things you can do with resources: you can spend, you can cut taxes, or you can pay down debt. So in any kind of fiscal analysis that you are asking the Department of Finance to do, it should indicate who benefited from any one of those choices. This is why I said in my second item that budgets are more than about tax cuts. This analysis that we were asked to discuss was simply about the shopping list of this year's tax cuts. That's not good enough. If you have a series of initiatives on how you are going to, in this instance, spend the surplus, then you need to say, we did this, we did that, and we did that in these three areas, and here are the beneficiaries of these things; we chose this balance between tax cuts, spending, and debt reduction for the following purposes. That's what you do with a surplus.

I'm going to get to the difficulty of assessing the benefits from either tax cuts or spending in a moment.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Ms. Yalnizyan.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I did submit, and you do have at your disposal, “Budget 2008: What's In It for Women?” As an example, if you do have it in your packet, I just want to show you the tables on pages 14 and 15. The only reason I want to point this out is that you will see in these two tables how easy it would be to do the work that Finance did by simply showing the distribution of the population that benefited from the tax cut in each of these categories. You see the entire population, what portion of the taxable population is in these different income classes, and who benefits from these different tax measures.

You can see on the top of page 14 that 68% of women are in taxable income categories of less than $40,000. That is very close to--not coincident with, but very close to--the top of the first tax bracket, which is my point. If you've got tax cuts to give, are they primarily flowing to people at the bottom or not? That's where the majority of the population is.

This is not a technical point. It just does the incidence of tax expenditures by income class, which I think is a very important measure that allows you to actually say with justification that you did tax cuts and that most of those tax cuts went to people who are the majority of the population and who need the most help. If you're making the comment that the best thing a poor person can have is a good-paying job and that taxes are indeed a burden, can you make sure most of the tax cuts go to the people who need the most help? It would be a simplistic way of looking at the idea that tax cuts are good and therefore we should do it.

That's my fourth point: who's counted, and who counts? It just develops that line of thinking. For example, in the personal income tax changes that are pointed out in the gender budget analysis of 2006, you have the personal income amount, the employment credit, and the enhanced dividend tax credit, and there is an indication of how much money you're spending on these different measures. The next question would be, for the amount of money you're spending on these measures, who benefits? How many women benefit, how many men benefit, how many higher-income men benefit, how many lower-income men benefit? It's a very simple process that keeps your eyes on the prize. Are we helping the people who need the help the most in the measures we're introducing? We don't have unlimited resources. Are we helping those who need it the most?

This is just going to the question of how you know, when you do a tax cut, that you haven't actually helped people by creating a second-round effect of good jobs. It's a good question, but what's the first-round effect?

There is also, frankly, the question of whether our tax cuts created jobs. That is unanswerable from an economic point of view, because there are so many things going on in the global economy. Very much of our economic growth in Canada has been driven by commodity prices and the fact that we have become a resource contributor to the global supply chain. Was it tax cuts that created that? Arguably, it's the fact that India, China, Brazil, and Russia are growing, and they want our resources; it's not our own personal income taxes that did that. But you can never separate the two out. It's never possible to say categorically that tax cuts created those jobs.

The first order of impact, the question of who benefited, is a very important level of question. The question you raised about whether it created jobs is an important question, but fundamentally it is not clearly answerable. You can make an argument, but you're never going to get an answer, and that's the gospel on that one.

Finally--almost finally--what were the priorities of this budget, and how much did it cost? For example, with regard to this particular budget 2008, although it is nowhere in the budget plan, in the budget speech it was indicated that the priority of the current government is tax reduction, for the reasons you specified. That price tag is given in the budget speech, but there's no equivalent “and over the course of our administration we have spent this much”.

That can be done; it's easily done. I point out in budget 2003 a table wherein every initiative of every budget is rolled up together, and you see this plan that shows this is how we allocated our priorities. We had resources, we spent money, we did debt reduction, and we did tax cuts, and here's how they play out; this is how we prioritized how we were going to spend the surplus in the time we were in office.

I recommend that as a clarifying position for any government: we believe that spending is important; we believe that tax cuts are important; we believe that debt reduction is important. In what order of priority and how are public resources used to move along that trajectory?

I am not placing a value judgment on any of these things. I'm just saying that if you're going to measure something, measure it consistently. It clarifies to the population where an administration believes the priority should be placed, and that opens it up for public discourse in a somewhat clearer manner. You are using our resources; we are together sanctioning our elected representatives to take a decision, to take leadership, to move forward. It's helpful for having this clarity to say, we think this is the way we should be heading forward, but we're not going to just do this, we're going to do other things, and here's how we've prioritized them.

I hope I'm being clear on this.

My very last point is that this might be the last easy budget the federal government is going to see in a while. There's been a lot of discussion about whether the financial storm clouds from south of the border are going to blow into Canada, whether Ontario's decline in manufacturing is going to become a generalized recession, whether a surplus that was in double-digit billions of dollars is now so small that it is easier to tip over into a deficit. For that reason....

I also indicate that just as other governments have done in the last ten years, there's been program review or expenditure allocation review for about 12 years now, since 1995, on and off. Even in the context of a surplus budget you can have program cuts.

Since you're doing a budget analysis, you need to look at not just the impact of the new stuff you're doing, but the impact of the stuff you're taking away, and who's paying the cost of what you're taking away. If we had had a gender budget analysis in 1995, I think it would be exceedingly difficult to say that it was a neutral exercise. I think women paid the price of those program cuts in 1995 and are still paying it today, because those programs have not been restored. It's exceedingly important that both program cuts and tax cuts be looked at through the lens of gender budget analysis.

In the event that at some point in our history we need to raise taxes, which is a remote possibility today but may again some day occur, who bears the cost of the increase is incredibly important, by gender and by income class. We have gone from an extremely progressive system of taxation to a flatter system of taxation.

The OECD actually made a report about two weeks ago that said that of the 30 countries in the OECD, 15 nations raised personal income taxes in the last 10 years, and 13 of them lowered taxes. Canada was one of five nations, including the U.S., Australia, Germany, and I don't remember the other one, that, when they cut taxes, shifted the balance to most benefit the rich.

There are all sorts of tax cuts. You can benefit those who are already most affluent, and this is certainly not just your government I'm talking about, because it's over the last 10 years. There are different formulas for tax cutting. It is extremely important that when you raise or lower taxes you look at the incidence of who is paying the cost and who benefits.

And that's why you do gender budget analysis. That is the reason: so that you can say to your electorate, this is who benefits. And you can do it with clarity, so that we are all on the same page, seeing who is benefiting.

That's my presentation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We now have the tables translated. Are they being distributed, or have they been distributed already?

Okay, you have already received the tables that Professor Lahey is going to make reference to.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Thank you.

I'm going to be making reference to the two tables that were just distributed, table 1 and table 2. There was also another—

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Does everybody now have table 1 and table 2, so that we have no confusion while the presentations are being made?

Armine, did you get yours?

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I don't have table 2.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

The other item that was previously distributed is a copy of a Status of Women Canada publication entitled Economic Gender Equality Indicators. If you have that, I'm going to make brief reference to a passage on page 3.

The focus of my presentation and the materials you will get in support of the tables after this meeting is on exactly what the Department of Finance did in its gender analysis of the 2006-07 budget. I'm going to organize my brief comments around the key questions I think this committee might want to ask the deputy minister, when that event takes place.

The first question is to ask the Department of Finance for a statement of the purpose for which the gender analysis was carried out. The federal plan for gender equality, adopted and implemented beginning in 1995, says that the key elements of a gender analysis are, first of all, the differential impact on women as a class, and second, any negative impacts that policy might have on women as a class, all in the context of the different social realities of women. I have outlined in the submissions that will follow some of the different types of gender analysis that can be used to put that purpose into play. But I think the second question that needs to be asked of the deputy minister is exactly what methodology of analysis, what type of analysis, was carried out.

As you look through the 2006-07 documents from the Department of Finance, you will see repeated references to their assuming that women will be affected more or less the same as men, or assuming that women will get a slightly smaller benefit but that there will be a larger proportionate reduction for women. One of the hallmarks of a proper gender analysis is not to make assumptions, not to use stereotypical thinking, but to use the actual data that are available to a department such as the Department of Finance. So the second question that I think needs to be asked is, what is the Department of Finance's definition of gender analysis, and what is the definition of gender neutrality? What is the definition of gender equity?

In the two tables that you have, I've gone through and scored the two Department of Finance documents, using a simple plus, minus, or zero method of scoring, because what I wanted to do in the table was to contrast how the Department of Finance assesses what these various tax measures do and what a person trained in gender analysis would do with these specific items. I'm just going to look at the first item for an illustration.

In table 1, the policy measure that I'm talking about right now is the reduction in the lowest tax rate paid under the personal income tax rate structure. This was addressed by the Department of Finance in both of its documents. In both of its documents, it basically came to the position that there would probably be a gender neutral impact on women, or the impact would be positive because women would experience a greater proportionate reduction in their total tax load.

As I've explained at length in the technical notes that will come afterwards, this is just a numerical way of turning upside down something that's negative for women and claiming that, when you have it upside down, it's helping women.

In the March 13 submissions I distributed to this committee--in table 2 on page 6 of that item, should you wish to make reference to it later on--I demonstrate in a detailed analysis of male and female beneficiaries of this 1% cut to the lowest federal income tax rate that men are the overwhelming beneficiaries of this in terms of dollars, so that even women who are in a taxable category such that they can get some benefit from that tax cut will only get $171 worth of tax benefit from that rate reduction, but men who are in the same class will receive a tax benefit of $196.

As you compare where women are versus where men are in terms of income, it becomes increasingly obvious that the lion's share of this tax benefit, as well as other income tax cuts, are all going to the benefit of men. So table 1 demonstrates how the Department of Finance has overstated the benefit to women of what it has done item for item for each of the 42 tax changes it has outlined in its document.

A short term paper could be written about each of these 42 items. Each one merits its own very detailed, complex analysis. That analysis can be done. I've done some of it in my March 13 submissions and the submissions that will be following from today, but from your perspective looking at this submission, you ask the deputy minister to explain how it can be that women receive fewer dollars as individuals and as a class from the reduction in this lowest tax rate, yet it is described as a gain for them.

That's a very specific, concrete question that should be answerable or, if it ends up being contradicted, will help disclose to you the way in which the department has gone through its analysis.

The other point I wanted to make--and then I would like to briefly touch on this question of tax cuts versus who really benefits--is that if you look at table 2, which was also distributed today, I've attempted to convey in numerical terms the overall impact of having budgetary documents, even though they're cast in the form of tax cuts, that consistently hurt women, that consistently give more money to men than to women or that take more money away from women proportionate to what they have than they do from men.

I've broken down into categories the 42 tax items that were analyzed in table 1. Over $16 billion worth of personal income tax items were proposed in these two budgetary documents that were given to you by the Department of Finance. Only one of those items has a beneficial impact on women, and it's a very limited beneficial impact. Ninety-four per cent of that $16 billion in tax cuts is now out in the economy working against the interests of women.

The cumulative effect with each year that passes is that these $16 billion worth of tax cuts are going to be incrementally benefiting men at the expense of women in widening the after-tax income index that measures the gaps between women and men. Similarly, only one item in the corporate and business tax category can be considered to have any arguable benefit for women. The other 96% of over $11 billion worth of tax cuts are going to overwhelmingly benefit male members of Canadian society.

It is similar to the sales and excise tax items in pension income splitting, which was not in the document but which was addressed by Finance when they were here last year.

The bottom line here is that we have nearly $42 billion worth of tax changes. We're not looking at the spending part of the budget at all, just the tax changes. And 96.3% of those are having a negative financial effect on women. The gender gap is growing with the impact of each of these items that add up to this 96.3%. No gender gap in the world can be closed with a budgetary impact like this.

So the final question that I would suggest you ask of the Department of Finance--and you may want to ask this ahead of time or during the actual testimony--is that they please calculate the total impact of each of these tax changes by gender, by age, and by income.

The Department of Finance has access to everyone's tax returns. It has access to all of the fiscal data generated by the operation of the government in Canada. It routinely makes use of the data it gets from these files to carry out complex analyses like this. So the Department of Finance ought to be able to give you a detailed table for each of these 42 items without any difficulty.

As part of that, you might want to give them a copy of these economic gender equality indicators from 2000 and ask that they please also calculate the total after-tax income index that's outlined on page 3 of that publication. Ask them to calculate that for each of these two years and show you what the overall cumulative impact of these items is on women. The Department of Finance is uniquely situated to carry out that analysis.

Now I'd like to make a final comment about corporate income tax cuts. The claim the government has made is that these are intended as economic stimulators, and the Department of Finance produced a detailed analysis purporting to show that cutting income tax rates for corporations increases the amount of investment in corporations. I won't go into the methodological problems with those tax incidence studies, but the basic problem is that the analysis that was carried out was based on very questionable comparisons that should not have been made, and the results are at variance with most of the long-standing research on the incidence of the benefits of corporate income tax cuts.

There is a working paper referenced in that explanatory memo that is attached to the 2007 tax expenditures budget. I'll send the reference to the clerk. That working paper, which is the authority for the study that the Department of Finance is relying on, still has not been published. They're basically footnoting as their primary authority a study that as yet does not seem to exist.

So I would just say that certainly in the area of corporate income tax cuts, it's absolutely true, it is not possible to claim that you can willy-nilly stimulate an economy by simply running into the tax system and slashing various kinds of taxes. It just doesn't work that way.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Nancy, do you have some introductory remarks?

[Nancy Peckford, Director of Programs, Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action]

Yes.

Thank you once again for the opportunity to be here. This is an elaborate and detailed process for all of us, so we appreciate having the occasion to come and share with you some of our thoughts.

My thoughts aren't as technical as Armine's or Kathleen's, but they do speak to some of the process issues raised in the two documents we've been given to analyze.

The first thing I'd like to ask is, to what degree did they adhere to the eight steps of gender-based analysis that are outlined by Status of Women Canada? Status of Women Canada undertakes the training of all officials for all departments on gender-based analysis. I would strongly encourage you to ask the Finance officials about this when they come before you.

When we looked at the eight steps of GBA mandated by Status of Women Canada—and we assume that the finance department would have received some training in this regard—it was not obvious to me that most of these steps had been followed. I will provide to the committee the links to the Status of Women Canada website where these eight steps are outlined, but I'll just refresh your memory.

The first step is identifying, defining, and refining the issue. Step two is defining desired anticipated outcomes. Step three is defining the information and consultation inputs. Step four is conducting the research. Step five is developing and analyzing options. Step six is making recommendations, and decision-seeking. Step seven is communicating policy. And step eight is assessing the quality of the analysis.

I think it's incumbent upon you to ask the finance department to what degree they followed these steps and what information they can provide on the efforts they expended to ensure that their GBA was sufficiently thorough and rigorous.

Kathleen and Armine have both said that there doesn't seem to be a clear objective for the gender-based analyses that are currently being done by the finance department. I would entirely concur with that.

Further, I think step two, defining desired and anticipated outcomes, is absolutely crucial to this process if it's going to be worthwhile and if it truly advances the goals of gender budgeting, which is done to determine the impact on women of particular policies, programs, and cuts, and which is then considered in making a decision about whether or not to proceed, given the analysis available to you.

Those eight steps led me to take a different kind of journey in thinking about a framework in which good GBA could be done. I think that both Kathleen and Armine have made reasonable cases that the kind of GBA being done is for the most part superficial. In some cases it is not based on reliable data; in others it appears to have been done after the fact.

This could be incorrect, but I would encourage you to ask the Finance officials themselves to give you some indication of the process by which they came up with certain conclusions about how women were to be affected. Also, where the evidence related to levels of program spending or a particular tax cut suggested that the impact would be negative, you should ask them to describe the process by which the decision was made to proceed. I think that would be a worthwhile exercise for all involved.

In thinking and reflecting upon how good gender-based analysis could be done and the framework within which it could be done in Canada, I referred to a number of documents, including the federal plan for gender equality introduced in 1995. It is really the reason we're talking about gender-based analysis.

In 1995, the Beijing Platform for Action was signed. This was a global document agreed to by over 130 countries. Canada at that time took its own steps to put into place a plan of action called Setting the Stage for the Next Century: The Federal Plan for Gender Equality.

GBA was the main thrust of Canada's effort to comply with the Beijing Platform for Action. So I looked at, in fact, objective two of the federal plan for gender equality, which is women's participation in the economy. I also note that the document that Kathleen shared with you this morning, Economic Gender Equality Indicators, from 2000, is a useful document.

I looked at the World Economic Forum's global gender gap index, which has a series of indicators that measure the degree to which there is gender inequality within a country. They don't measure countries against each other; they measure a gap within a country, which is a more obviously reliable indicator, given the very different kinds of resources and capacities governments have.

I looked at something called the Social Watch gender equity index. That's a newer index that's come from a group called Social Watch, which is a very credible, internationally well-recognized body that's been monitoring countries in terms of particular human rights commitments.

I also looked at the more recent review of Canada under the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. In 2003, a set of recommendations was forthcoming from the United Nations that spoke to aspects of women's economic equality.

As a consequence, I've come up with what I think may be the beginnings of or components of a framework within which we believe gender-based analysis could be done reliably, could be done well, and could be a fruitful and useful exercise for all involved.

I will read my list of items that I think are particularly crucial. I will provide it to the committee along with references to all the documents I have mentioned here.

In my view, a framework in which GBA could be done would ask the following questions, and I should say that I think this list is not complete, but I think it represents the beginnings of a potentially very good set of indicators, if you will, in terms of GBA.

The first is whether it increases women's economic autonomy—i.e., their capacity to generate earned income, and if they have limited or no capacity to generate earned income, their access to non-earned income.

All of the reference materials I've mentioned here, including the global gender gap index from the World Economic Forum and the Social Watch index, look very specifically at women's participation in the economy and also look at what happens when a woman can't fully participate in the economy for reasons of child care, disability, violence, and other kinds of societal disruptions.

So that should be one of the first questions, in my view, being asked when you're looking at the effects of a budget.

The second question is whether it helps low-income women get above the low-income cut-off. Does it actually raise the standard of living, especially for those women who are occupying the positions in the lowest income tax bracket? Obviously you've heard from Armine and Kathleen that it's a very high proportion of women. So one of the questions needs to be whether we are actually facilitating helping women get out of poverty. Obviously no one budget can accomplish that for all women, but there are particular measures, on both the tax side and the spending side, that can make an enormous difference.

As you've heard from both Armine and Kathleen, some of the tax cuts and tax credits in this particular budget—and they're not exclusive to this budget, but in this particular budget and budgets 2006, 2007, and 2008—are non-refundable tax credits. That means that many women who have no tax liability cannot access those tax credits. They're meaningless for those women.

So we have to revisit how you reach women without tax liability and how you ensure that you can get more women out of poverty. In Canada, one of the standards for measuring poverty is the low-income cut-off.

My third item on the list is whether the tax credit, in the instance you're using tax credits, is refundable—i.e., cashable, another way to understand refundable tax credits.

Fourth, does it consider women with limited access to the workforce? Again, a lot of the women who live in poverty in Canada are women who can't fully participate in the economy because of child care, because of disability, because of abuse, because of language barriers, because of a lack of access to training.

So we need to consider what we are doing for those women, both at the federal and provincial levels. Are there things that can be done with a federal budget that will better facilitate their access to the measures required for them to fully participate in the workforce? If that's not possible, and it isn't possible for many women, how do we ensure that those women aren't living in abject poverty?

So my fifth question is, do these measures increase access--i.e., affordability, equality--to essential services on which women rely? Armine made reference to some of those services and programs. They include legal aid, health care, and a variety of other things--education, obviously. I think it's an appropriate question to ask, in part because Canada is a signatory to a myriad of international treaties that speak very specifically to the programming side.

Of course, some of those programs are in provincial jurisdiction. We recognize that. However, historically Canada has had some role in ensuring that those services and programs can be accessed by Canadians wherever they may live in the country. Given the federal government's fiscal capacity, which in many instances rates better than some provincial governments' fiscal capacity, it's still incumbent upon a GBA to ask that kind of question. Does it meet Canada's international obligations? I've named here the Beijing Platform for Action and CEDAW, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

The seventh point, have indicators been developed in consultation with women's equality groups and other experts? That's why I'm reluctant to offer this up as a final list. I think there is a lot of room for consultation and there's a lot of expertise out there, and we're availing of some of it at this table. So I think we need to do this as a somewhat transparent exercise and as something that we can all feel some ownership over.

So the consultation that would have to happen, the dialogue that would need to happen between credible, well-recognized experts and some women's equality organizations that have something to offer in this process, I think, is absolutely crucial to the success of GBA.

Another question is, at what point has the GBA been integrated into the process? Have senior officials been able to respond to the GBA by adjusting policies or spending initiatives before the federal budget is released? Again, that speaks to methodological considerations in terms of how the GBA is being done internally and at what point the assessment is being done. Is there an opportunity to revisit in the event that certain assessments are being made that suggest that women will not primarily benefit?

Our experience, our understanding, and certainly other sessions of this particular committee have looked at GBA accountability structures. We know that often GBA is not well integrated into the overall decision-making process, and that needs to be revisited.

Finally, I would suggest that in terms of a good GBA process, we need to ask which organizations have Finance officials or the finance committee heard from in the pre-budget period.

I've said to this committee before that our access to either the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance or finance committee officials--and by “our” I mean women's equality-seeking organizations--has been incredibly limited to date. As a consequence, in my view, without a more ongoing and rich dialogue between Finance officials and finance committee members and some of the groups and expertise you see here, it's very, very difficult to do good GBA.

So finally, I think it's important to remind you about the federal plan for gender equality. I recognize that the 2008 budget now suggests that a new action plan for women's equality will be developed. I would strongly encourage you to ensure that there is some continuity between the federal plan for gender equality and any new action plan, because otherwise I think, sadly, you'll not be building upon the very, very modest efforts that have been made and some of the analysis that has been done. The federal plan for gender equality, identified as objective number two--women's participation in the economy--outlined a range of measures that they felt were important to women's equality.

I would think that the finance department, at minimum, would be incorporating some of these measures into their current GBA. These include women and housing, Canadian women's relationship to the economy, creating the conditions necessary to support women entrepreneurs, fostering changes to the workplace to promote equitable sharing of work and family responsibility, improving women's access to and progress in the paid labour economy, and onward.

I'll provide all of this to the committee, but in closing, I think what the finance department must do, in consultation with you, in consultation with civil society groups and experts, is develop a rigorous and credible framework, and that will ensure a better GBA process.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We'll start with a round of questions.

Ms. Minna, you have seven minutes.