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.