Status of Women Committee on April 1st, 2008

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

We're aware of that.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

So within that context of a constrained scenario where you can't even access the program you pay into, yes, there was an important improvement. But the bigger hydraulic is much more devastating to women.

The biggest thing you didn't mention that has occurred in the last ten years that has made the greatest difference, particularly to single parents, is the massive expansion of the Canada child tax benefit, which has made a huge difference to people at the very bottom end of the spectrum, reaching right up to about 50% to 60% of the population. That said, income supports help, and you could keep pumping as much money as you want into the income side of the equation, but women are no closer today to being able to assure themselves of affordable housing, which is the biggest bite out of any family's income, whether it's two-parent headed or single-parent headed, or if you're a single elderly person.

So the list of things we're talking about-- housing, post-secondary education, child care--is very short. Just make sure the tax cut agenda, which under the Liberal regime was $134 billion worth in the timeframe, does not redistribute incomes away from the people who most need the help. If you're going to do these things, make sure you're helping the people who need it most.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Mr. Stanton, for five minutes.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I must say the longer our study of this topic goes on, the more questions I have. I have to say this is an incredible study of an extremely important issue. We've done other important topics, obviously, but this one really taps the root of exactly what the Status of Women Canada exists for.

One of the things that occur to me here, and you've identified it in your presentations, is the gap that we're in fact trying to chase. I know it's too simplistic to say that there's just one gender gap and it surfaces in income, in access to education, in employment, and in so many other facets. I have so many questions that I think I'll have to go back and have a closer look at some of these.

It occurs to me that the assumption the Department of Finance has taken in its fiscal measures is that the application of these measures is gender neutral. In other words, it applies systematically to Ms. Lahey's example of the man with $1,000 and the woman with $100. It occurred to me that the $100,000 female income earner would still receive the same benefit. It's essentially a neutral approach.

So what creates the inequality here is the fact that the gender-neutral application of this policy is not being applied to an equitable circumstance. So it is the circumstance that really is at the root of the inequality that gets created. That really brings us back to what other policy instruments we can use to begin to change those circumstances. It moves us away in some cases from those income circumstances.

I wonder if you could comment on the key policy instruments that any government should be looking at.

Armine, you identified, for example, affordable housing as being critical. What's the policy instrument that has the greatest impact in bringing Canada back to that gender equality index? I think we've now fallen to 18th.

I guess the second part to that question is, are we falling behind or are other countries just doing it better? There are a bunch of questions in there, but if you could each have a spin at that, I'd appreciate it, in the little time that's left.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have two minutes to answer that question.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

So much for my preamble.

Thank you.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

Can I just point to the front page of the thing that I submitted to you last year, Bruce--March 28, 2008, correctly? The list is very short: affordable housing, post-secondary education, child care, health-related services, public transit, social services, training and employment services, legal aid, and support for caregivers. It's the known list. Do anything on those areas and you'll improve lives for women. It is not gender specific, it is gender friendly to actually make progress on these things.

On the income side, the very point that you raise about a woman earning $1,000 being treated the same as a man earning $100,000 is right on. The distributional issue is huge. So my third point in my presentation to you is this. Ask Finance always to break it down by income class. Who are the beneficiaries, male and female, by income class? That information is easily accessible. They have it all and they can estimate it. Then you can see if we are actually spending most of our tax cuts on the people who need the help least. If we still want to spend that much money on relieving the tax burden, can we reallocate it so that it's going more to the people who need more help?

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Before we run out of time, could we get a comment on the second part, that is, what are other countries doing to push us behind as they speed ahead?

Kathleen or Nancy.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

I can briefly respond to that.

Other countries that started out when Canada was number one in the mid-1990s and the second half of the 1990s are still there, because they are still doing what they were doing then, and they are working very diligently to try to close the gap even further.

To take an example of some of the strategies that Scandinavian countries are using to try to close their gender gaps even more fully, they're now looking at ways to give men incentives to take parental leave, because they perceive that the quality of all people's lives will improve if more parental time—by both mother and father, or whatever the household configuration is—is given to people to be with their children. They're now getting to the point where they're aiming incentives not just at women, but also at men.

There are some countries that have outstripped Canada now on all of the indicators, because even though they're at a lower level of development, they have higher on-the-ground gender equality, beginning with the numbers of women sitting in their parliaments; the numbers of women involved in running corporations and important government departments; and income distribution; and ownership of productive assets. So it's a combination of Canada quitting doing a lot of the things that got it where it was, and.... There's no question about that.

How Canada got where it was has become really common knowledge; these are not secrets anymore. Other countries that put a really minimal amount of effort into systematically pursuing a gender-aware analysis and in doing gender budgeting are outstripping Canada. Either way, this will beat Canada.

I predict that with these current budgetary allocations, Canada is going to slip even further in the indicators.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We now go to Madame Demers. Cinq minutes, s'il vous plaît.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

For starters, I need Ms. Lahey to clarify something for me. In the table that you presented to us, there are two columns the significance of which escapes me. Could you tell me what “by FIN“ and “by KL” mean exactly?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

That's table 1, the gender impact score by Finance. The positive signs there, the crosses, mean that the Department of Finance—

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

The crosses I understand, but what about the the other one, “KL”?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

“By KL” is me, Kathleen Lahey.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you very much.

I have another question for you, Ms. Lahey. The last time you testified before the committee, you spoke of a tax-free savings account. I was taken aback by your comments. Later I mentioned what you had said to some colleagues. I'm worried that I may have misunderstood you, because everyone told me that it was impossible for a person to set this much money aside tax free, that this money would still belong to that person, even if it was in the name of his spouse or children. Could you provide us with a written explanation of this provision, so that I can explain it properly to people and ensure that I have the right information. If this is truly possible, then we as a society have a serious problem on our hands.

Furthermore, we know that until such time as more women are elected to Parliament, we may not succeed in getting what we want. Until women hold at least 30% of the seats in Parliament, it will be difficult. It is still a system designed by men, for men. That's just the way it is. I would assume then that the persons responsible for drawing up budgets also think along these same lines. It has been this way since time immemorial. It takes more than several hours of training every year to change people's mindset and to make them want to change.

I want to know what we can do about gender budgeting. What can we do to increase representation by women? Are there measures in the budget that might help women get elected to Parliament and get appointed to positions of power? Is there anything in the budget that could help make this goal a reality?

Ms. Peckford.

[Nancy Peckford]

Certainly about a decade and some ago the Lortie Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing suggested that financial incentives could be directed to parties that ran minimum numbers of women, so if you ran 40% or 30% women, you would actually receive a financial incentive to do that. There has obviously been electoral financing reform in Canada already, but very few, if any, of the measures actually address increasing numbers of women in the House.

I think you could structure your electoral financing regime in such a way that you would reward parties. For example, you could give them a larger percentage. Let's say you normally get $1.50 or $1.75 per vote; if you run a certain number of women, maybe you'd up that by 25¢ or something. Those incentives are part of the scenarios in many other countries, and they work. That's what we know: they work. Financial incentives tend to work well. The other thing you could do is quote us, but that's a whole other conversation--but financial incentives certainly.

The other thing I would say is that in all the materials I referred to this morning from the World Economic Forum and the gender equity index, when they are measuring women's economic empowerment, they always include political participation. They always couple political participation with women's economic advancement, I think for obvious reasons. It's an important consideration in all the analyses that are being done internationally and domestically.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Ms. Mathyssen, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have some quick questions.

There's been some debate about whether a family or an individual should be the basic tax unit. Is it important that the taxation remain applied to individual rather than family? If so, why?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

I'll take the first run at that.

It's becoming increasingly well documented that using the individual as the basic measure of tax liability and the basic unit for giving tax credits or tax cuts of any kind is very important to the status of women. Detailed studies have been carried out in the OECD showing that as any form of income splitting, joint filing, or joint taxation measures has been eliminated, women's overall economic equality has increased. Women's participation rates in paid work have increased. Women's access to child care resources, etc., has increased. It's absolutely, scientifically been proven conclusively. From a substantive perspective in this day and age, to turn around and start trying to hand out benefits to the family really ends up being a shorthand way of saying that we're trying to put men back in the financial driver's seat.

As illustrated by the numbers generated by the pension income-splitting provision that was put into place a couple of years ago, the higher the income a single-income earner has, the greater the tax benefit from pension income splitting; the greater the tax benefit to income splitting, the greater the disincentive to women's economic autonomy. It then becomes a family liability for a woman to have an income. It becomes a family liability for a woman to have money to put into a tax-free savings account. This inferentially reinforces a pattern that is dysfunctional.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Professor Lahey, could you give us reference? Otherwise, for our purposes we will only have your quote. Thank you.

Please continue.

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

Was anyone else interested in the question?

Ms. Yalnizyan, you've talked about the impact in regard to money spent from our surpluses on tax cuts and given to corporations. It seems to me that we've come to a point in time when we need to re-evaluate all of that. There's been discussion about the impact of tax cuts and creating jobs and those kinds of general benefits that are touted as the reason for doing the tax cuts. Could you tell us if it's possible to calculate the economic impact of the de-investment you've been talking about?

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I've been talking about public sector de-investment. I did mention in December when I appeared before this committee, as well as briefly in this submission, that it is exceedingly difficult to talk about the incidence of benefits from spending.

It can be done. There are two analysts in the Department of Finance—gee, it was the 1970s and I think as recently as the 1980s—who worked with a fellow named Irwin Gillespie, who was not in the Department of Finance and who had done incidence studies of both tax and benefits. They would be well worth going back to.

The benefits from public spending and the incidence of this has been kind of a school of analysis within Finance that used to exist in the sixties and seventies, when we actually invested and you wanted to make the business case for why you would want to make public investments. It is very easy to do in areas like health care, and it is easy to do in other areas by gender and by income class.

However, the difficulty with the benefits from public investment is.... I'm going to use technical jargon like“returns on investment”. All of us want to see a yield curve when we invest something: I've put $100 into my RRSP and I want to know how much I am getting after five years and after 10 years. Any public investment also has a yield curve, but that's the part that's difficult to calculate. So in year one you can say, where are these expenditures going? What you can't fully capture is the multiple years of the flow of benefits that society is going to get.

That said, you can't do that on tax cuts either. If you're going to talk about who gets the incidence of benefits of tax cuts, you may as well talk about who gets the benefits of spending, too, as best you can. I agree that they're much more widely distributed, which is actually an argument to do them. More people actually benefit from spending than from tax cuts, more universally.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Before I go to the last question—we have a very short time—we need to get some business over with.

Professor Lahey, I understand from a question Ms. Minna presented that you're going to give us an analysis of your assessment of the table, i.e., textbook tax credits—why you give it a negative and they give it a positive—child fitness tax credits, and public transit pass, etc., so that we articulate in a proper manner when we are questioning the Department of Finance.

Two, we would like the Department of Finance not to be surprised. We would like to present this to the Department of Finance so that when they come, they are prepared to answer, so that it is a dialogue. Since all of us are very concerned about gender budgeting, we would like to present some of the arguments you've given. Of course, it's public knowledge. They should get it from Hansard.

Armine, you told me you don't like anybody being blindsided or surprised. I don't want the department to be surprised by anything we ask them, so we will give them some of the questions that we would like them to come prepared for. If they come prepared, we'd better be doubly prepared.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Just to clarify, the detailed analysis has already been delivered to the clerk's office. It's just pending translation.