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?