Good morning, honourable members. Thank you for inviting us to present to you.
I am here in the capacity of having been chair of an expert panel on accountability mechanisms for gender equality. We want to thank you. Ms. Dorienne Rowan-Campbell and Louise Langevin, who is on the screen, were members of the expert panel with me in the fall of 2005.
We've been reading with interest the proceedings on gender budgeting. I thought that before we answered your questions and had a discussion with you, it would be worthwhile to explain the work we did and put our work into the context of what you've been doing recently.
First of all, I'd like to make clear to the committee that I am not an expert on gender budgets. My colleague Dorienne has had more experience with them and can perhaps answer specific questions about gender budgets.
I was asked in 2005 by the minister then responsible for the status of women to chair an expert panel on accountability mechanisms for gender equality. Our mandate was to study accountability and provide advice on strengthening gender equality in Canada, taking into account the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, relevant jurisprudence in other countries, as well as the April 2005 report of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, titled “Gender-based Analysis: Building Blocks for Success”.
Here is our report, which I believe has been made available to this committee. There are a few points I'd like to make about the report that are relevant to your current discussions.
First, the subject of gender budgeting was not a focus of our study; rather, we saw gender budgeting as one form of accountability mechanism that was part of a broader system whereby a government in power could achieve its policy goals. We felt that the broader system was also extremely important and needed to put things like gender budgeting into context.
Gender budgeting, like other gender-based analyses, is only a tool and not the final outcome. The key assumption in our report was that any form of accountability mechanism can only be effective within an environment that starts with a political will to achieve certain substantive outcomes. And it's the party in power that decides what those substantive outcomes should be.
Second, we recommended that the overall desired high-level outcome should be substantive equality, which we defined on page 13 of our report as women having “the conditions for realizing their full human rights and potential to contribute to national political, economic, social and cultural development, and to benefit from the results”.
Third, we took a two-pronged approach to our recommendations. Looking at accountability mechanisms inside government in 2005, we felt that a good starting point would be to address existing government policy and administrative tools. We also saw legislation regarding gender-based analysis as a potential second step, but we recognized, as you well know, that legislation was a longer process and we felt that things needed to be done right away. However, we explored the nature of a legislative solution at a very high level and made some suggestions in our report.
In looking at policy and administrative measures, on which we urged immediate action, we gave examples of key instruments that could be used to signal the government's priorities and outcomes it wished to achieve. For example, we recognize that there are key instruments of government, such as the Speech from the Throne--part of an overall policy-setting system--that articulate how a government in power will specifically choose to tackle issues related to substantive equality.
Another significant instrument in any government policy-making process is the federal budget. It was for this reason that we recommended that the Department of Finance set an example by undertaking gender-based analysis on a least one part of the 2006 budget. Based on our conversations with Department of Finance officials at the time, we felt that introducing such analysis would require changes in attitudes inside the department, the learning of new competencies--analysts inside the department would have to be trained--and alterations to work methods. For those reasons we suggested a relatively go-slow approach, and that they start with only one part of the budget at the time.
We've since been told by the staff at the Status of Women office that in fact there has been an attempt to introduce gender-based analysis more broadly, and I'm sure you've heard from the Department of Finance.
Finally—and I'll ask my colleague Dorienne to comment more on this—we also emphasize not only the importance of work going on inside government, but the importance of reaching out to stakeholders so that citizens are engaged and participating in the solutions.
I'll invite Dorienne and Louise to make any opening comments they wish to make, and then we look forward to answering your questions.
Dorienne.