Status of Women Committee on April 1st, 2008

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Can I just get clarification on the question? Is the question which of the Department of Finance items will help women, or is the question which of the new Status of Women Canada projects are going to help?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I am talking about new projects that have been approved by Status of Women Canada.

I would also like to know if it would help to have a minister solely responsible for women's issues, instead of a minister responsible for heritage, official languages and status of women.

[Nancy Peckford]

I can start.

We've thought a lot about whether or not a dedicated minister of Status of Women Canada would help or hinder the cause, and we've had this discussion internally and externally. As I think both sides of the table can appreciate here, one of the rationales for having a joint minister is that she actually has another portfolio at the table and, often, that portfolio can enhance her negotiating power. That's one of the arguments against a dedicated minister.

What we've seen in the past historically are secretaries of state prior to 2004. That's what we had for some time. The secretaries of state, even though they were fully dedicated to the task of the status of women, were often quite marginalized. A dedicated senior minister may produce a different outcome, but it may not, all depending upon how that minister is observed or regarded. Sometimes having another portfolio helps, and sometimes it might not help. I really think it depends on the individual minister.

We do believe, however, that Canadian Heritage is a very demanding portfolio, for a variety of reasons, and having that portfolio coupled with Status of Women Canada, I think, is a difficult challenge for any person to meet. I think the structure of a shared portfolio should be revisited.

In terms of the Status of Women Canada projects that have recently been funded by Status of Women under the community initiatives fund or the partnership fund, I don't actually know the details of many of those projects. I understand that money is flowing to particular organizations on the ground, albeit with the caveat about, or prohibition against, advocacy, which in our view is not constructive. Having said that, however, there is money flowing, and many of the organizations who are receiving that money are credible and do good work, and we're happy to see that happening.

We do believe that the terms and conditions of Status of Women Canada should be further altered to allow advocacy, because part of what helps to attain women's equality is being able to exercise that voice with advocacy. Having said that, there has been a change at Status of Women Canada to include equality back in the terms and conditions—pursuit of the promotion of women's equality—which is a very good thing that we're very happy to see.

In terms of the measures that could be taken that are more objective or that could be seen as less partisan, CFAIA has been saying for some time that the establishment of a gender equality commissioner within the Auditor General's office could be a very constructive move, given how the Auditor General is perceived within the federal government structure and her fairly independent nature.

I understand the Auditor General has been invited to appear before this committee, or she certainly was an item of discussion. I think the committee may want to think creatively about how you could use an Auditor General for the purposes of this kind of analysis or GBA.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Madame Boucher.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Good day to all of you. Thank you for joining us once again.

Let me assure you, Ms. Demers, that I was merely asking myself some existential questions. I was listening to their presentations and unfortunately, despite my experience, I could not relate to anything they were saying. Therefore, I was wondering if perhaps I was from another planet, or if it was simply case of not understanding anything that was said.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I'm sure you know who you are.

[A voice]

Oh! Oh!

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Initially, when we undertook this study, the focus was gender budgeting, but along the way, it became gender based analysis. As I see it, these are two different things. First, I would like you to explain the difference to me. On listening to your concerns, I have to wonder if you believe gender budgeting is needed. To hear you speak, men get everything, and women get nothing.

I have daughters and I know that both men and women are eligible for tax credits, for example, for public transit passes. Many women take the bus because they do not own an automobile. I understand where you are going with this. We all want to see some improvements. Unfortunately, we live in an imperfect world. We ourselves are imperfect human beings, and despite that, we try to work miracles here. With all due respect, if I could work miracles, I would not be here discussing gender budgeting. The problem would already be resolved. In my opinion, there is a big difference between gender based analysis and gender budgeting.

Elsewhere, we must not lose sight of the fact that the government has a lot on its plate. That is to be expected, since we are running the country. Nevertheless, we are at the stage where we need to educate society. Not everyone understands the meaning of “gender budgeting”. I have broached the subject with less fortunate women in my riding and, judging from the looks they gave me, they seemed to be wondering what in heaven's name I had been smoking. I realized that even women knew nothing about gender budgeting.

As Ms. Demers so aptly stated, there are four political parties and even though in the world of politics, nothing is perfect, we are trying to do something that is non-political to benefit women. I hope that one day our efforts will prove successful. I would like to see some tangible solutions. I can dream, but dreams do not take a person very far. We can accomplish much, but it will take a great deal of time. I would like us to determine exactly where we want to go and what kind of solid plan we need to get there. That way, even if another government is elected to office one day, we will have a solid plan in place to ensure that women are no longer victims of the political process.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have three minutes to answer a four-minute question.

Go ahead.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I'd like to take a crack at answering the question, because I'm an economist first and I guess a feminist second.

I agree with you that most people in Canada have no clue what a gender budget analysis is, and I don't think we should be spending a lot of time educating them on what it is. I said at the conclusion of my last point that the reason we do it is to talk about who benefits from what governments do. It's that simple. For over a decade now, women have been....

The minimal test of government should be not to make things worse. That should be the minimal test. In 1995 we had a slew of budget cuts that set women back. We have had 12 years of back-to-back budgetary surpluses, and women's economic position has not advanced.

So where we, I think, agree is that when you have a business like a government, where you're spending $280 billion every year, can you spend anything to make things better for women? What can you do to make things better? If the answer is tax cuts, and actually it's not the spending side but the tax cuts side that you want to focus on, can you make sure that your tax cuts are actually doing something for the people who need the most help?

That's why you do gender budget analysis. It is not to say that it is sexospécifique. It is not to say that it is a project specifically for women. It is to say that it is friendly to women.

We ask, what do women need? They need, especially if they're worrying about violence, a safe place. If there's no market for affordable housing, they're stuck where they are. If there are no shelters due to overflowing, they can't get out. You want to make sure that things as basic as shelter--safe shelter that is available and that they can afford--are available to women. That's number one. There is a list of other things. We know what they are.

So this is not gender specific, this is gender friendly. Honestly, I couldn't agree with you more about the language being off-putting, but on the actual intent, I think you can actually get to a place that is not as ideologically divided as many areas of government. Presumably everybody wants to score points on how you're making things better for the electorate, and half of the electorate is female. Can you actually point to something you did that made it better for women? I think you can. I think you could probably come up with something that says in fact this year we're going to do that.

This government said, in its last budget, that you're going to develop an action plan on women. I don't know about my colleagues, but the reason I'm here is that I'm taking you seriously. I'd like to work with you. I'd like to work with these people as well. I would like to come up with something concrete that comes out of the action plan, something that is actionable, so that this isn't just an action plan but something you're going to do.

Across this country, poverty reduction strategies are exploding in four or five jurisdictions. At the federal level, the current minority government that is leading us has no poverty reduction plan. This could be it. This could be your contribution to the discussion that inequality has grown in good times and bad, and we have to reverse it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Merci.

We now go to Ms. Mathyssen, for seven minutes.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you very much. I too have so many questions.

There was a discussion, and it's ongoing, in regard to gender budgeting and creating budgets that help women, or that at least do no harm. It seems to me that if women are benefiting from a list of policies and the pragmatic actions of government, there's spinoff from that--a positive impact on children, a benefit for men, a benefit for an entire community.

If that's correct, I'm wondering if you could comment. What's being put out there as divisive, I don't see as divisive at all.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Could I comment on that? I think one of the most clearly accepted economic justifications for women's economic equality is that women need to be developed to be as productive as men. This will indeed have beneficial impacts, not just on women and their dependants, but on everyone, men as well as women.

One of the measures of women's inequality is the total work index. It's on page 4 of this Status of Women document, if you want to look at that. Women do more work than men do in this economy, but men have the lion's share of the paid work, and women have the lion's share of the unpaid work. One of the goals of gender equality is to bring those into line. It's not just to give women as much income as men. It's to also make sure that women do a better mix of paid and unpaid work and that men do a better mix of paid and unpaid work, so that the population as a whole becomes healthier and more productive and so on. There are considered to be great benefits from making sure that women do not have to struggle on the economic margins.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I don't know if Nancy's going to weigh in, but in the 1960s, the human development agenda was about bringing women into it. Globally there was the notion of human development for rich countries and poor countries, for women and for men. I think the women's movement is, in part, about human development. If you look at what women are asking for, it isn't specific to women; it is specific to human development.

A gender budget analysis is a portal for going into how we can use our collective resources better. I think about what happened in Quebec when they introduced $5-a-day child care. Women's labour force participation rates shot up. The actual net impact on the public treasury was negative, because women were earning more and paying more income taxes.

From a pure and minimalist economic point of view, by putting a little bit of public investment into society you can actually pull more out.

We have had a strange last ten years, however. Even with a strong and growing economic environment and with public coffers growing, we have failed to reinvest this and reap the rewards, whether you're talking about making sure that there are community centres where kids can play, or that women are getting assistance in child care, or that there's enough health care out there so women are not taking care of the elderly or the disabled or the ill at home. There are so many things we could be investing in that actually are win-win for everybody. But the current environment is that investments are best left to the private sector and that the public shouldn't be investing; it should be getting out of the way of the market.

Human development is about public and private investments. It is not specific to women, but when you invest in the things that help women, you automatically see this huge multiplier effect in communities, which then, curiously, leads to greater economic growth. It is a virtuous circle that we have lost track of in the last ten years.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have two more minutes.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Ms. Lahey has highlighted that the gender analysis done by the Department of Finance was inadequate and misleading, some might think by design. Where do you think the root of the problem is? Is it in the training? Is it in the gender mainstreaming approach or in lack of accountability? To what extent do you think this problem appears in other departments, and how can we solve it?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

I think it is symptomatic of a pervasive problem. Gender-based analysis, as outlined by Nancy Peckford and as initially designed by Status of Women Canada, was implemented quite aggressively during the second half of the 1990s and into the early 2000s by a growing number of government departments, but it seems as if the political will to pursue that has fallen off.

I am reluctant to assign any negative motivations to the people responsible for the documents that we have seen, but I do know for a fact that the Department of Finance is better situated than perhaps any other department except HRSDC or CIDA to do very high-level gender-based analysis or gender budgeting or gender-sensitive analysis--whatever you want to call it--so where do you start? I think you're doing exactly the right thing. I think you need to go back to the Department of Finance with a detailed critique that says we have people who say there are gaps, that there are things that haven't been taken into consideration, that there may be an improper emphasis on protecting men's high incomes, that this is not about how to close the gender gaps that pervade Canadian society.

I believe the Department of Finance might be willing to enter into a discussion and to respond with a more detailed analysis. The only way to go forward in this area is to hold out the model and say we know that this is what can be done and ask people to do it.

I would just add, as sort of a comparison point, that Canada is falling very much behind the rest of the world in this kind of analysis. Canada's own international development research commission, IDRC, has provided millions of dollars' worth of funding to do this kind of detailed analysis. There is one project going on right now that has funding of over $600,000 to look at just the impact of the GST in countries like Pakistan or some of the African or South American countries, but IDRC is not allowed to fund a study like that for Canada. Yet here we are, cutting two percentage points from the GST in Canada in a very short period of time with no sense as to what the gender impact or any other impacts of the GST cuts are on people in Canada. We are, in a sense, really preventing ourselves from being able to act effectively in this area.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Ms. Neville, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you to the three of you for coming back again.

There is so much information, both verbal and written, to absorb and try to understand. I have a number of questions.

I don't disagree with anything you've said, but it wasn't all bad, and I'm wondering if you have done any analysis on the introduction of the parental leave program similar to what you talked about with the Quebec $5-a-day daycare. I would guess that has had a significant impact, as have a number of other items that I could mention.

On this particular document here, I can see the Department of Finance coming back in and critiquing this document. What were the criteria you used to identify gender unaware, gender neutral, and gender specific? That would be important for us to know.

I am just asking all my questions.

I would also like to know this. The gender equality indicators have not been updated for some period of time. Can you speak to that at all?

Those are my questions, and I'll see how much more time I have.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

To quickly answer your first question, which is what are the definitions of these types of gender analysis, you will be receiving a document that gives the written criteria.

To give you an example--these are based on the International Labour Organization, the UN, and some of the Status of Women Canada publications, a distillation of types of gender analysis--a gender-specific analysis acknowledges that men and women have at least some gender-based resources and needs that are different because of their gender, but it still works within existing gender allocations of resources and does not try to change anything. So for example, the program to give a tax credit to businesses that set up child care spaces within work sites that was outlined in the 2006-07 documents is an example of a gender-specific analysis on the Department of Finance's part because they said women need child care. But it's working within existing structures, and it doesn't really go further and say what impact they think this will have on women. It just says we're assuming that if we throw some money in this direction it might help. So it is a type of gender analysis. It doesn't go the whole substantive distance that Nancy has outlined.

But in terms of the actual scoring guides, that will be provided to you in writing.

What was the second point?

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

I was asking about the equality indicators not having been updated since 1997, I think.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Right. I contacted all the people involved in the earlier updates, and they're all in different government departments. We've all attempted to contact people in Status of Women Canada to find out why they haven't been updated. So far there has been no answer. It may have something to do with internal allocations within Status of Women Canada.

[Nancy Peckford]

I think it's a good question to ask regardless of the finance department, because they should be using some of this material as a framework for their own analysis. I think you want to ask them about how current their indicators are and to what degree they are putting in the effort or ensuring that Status of Women Canada, if it's their responsibility, is making them as reflective as possible of the contemporary Canadian woman's experience.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have one more minute.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

Can I answer that?

Of course it wasn't all bad. There were things like the doubling of parental leave, which is extremely important, under unemployment insurance. However, 22% of women in Toronto access unemployment insurance. The eligibility is a huge problem.