That's an awesome question. I would go back to my original point, which is that you need to know what it is you want to achieve. You need to have a process in place. Then you pick the people you think are going to help you get there. I think you're working on all three of those things at the same time. But I don't think this committee is there yet.
In my very first submission to you I said to pick three priorities. As a committee you work extremely well. As a committee, pick three priorities you want to see some progress on. Just pick three. Make them doable, and make progress on how you would advance those three things that you believe are good indicators of advancing gender equality or of reducing the vulnerability of women. Pick the way you want to look at them. These would be three elements of an action plan that you would like to see progress on.
By starting with knowing where you want to go, you can actually guess about the process to get there. In the abstract, I think a GBA, a gender budget analysis, could be anything. You could fill that envelope with anything.
So use your remarkable ability to work together to say that this would be important, that if we made a difference here, we could actually say that government made a difference for the first time in 10 years. Pick your target, name your process, and then start filling in the blanks on how you get there.
As I have said to you before, taxes are one side of it. I couldn't agree more with the analysis that has happened at this end of the table on repeated occasions. Insist on making sure that whatever tax analysis is done includes all Canadians: men and women, taxpayers and non-taxpayers. You have to see what the incidence of benefits is for every measure.
But taxes are not all of it, and the benefit side is very challenging. To assess the impact.... For example, on affordable housing, you heard about three or four programs, which were marshalled in front of you. Who benefited? Where did they benefit? Are people actually more housed today than they were 10 years ago? These are important, substantive questions. The evidence is there or it's not there, and if the evidence is not there, then you can't say you've made progress. You can't just say....
You know, there was a statement made by the deputy minister that the changes that have taken place in the tax system--I presume he meant in the last two years, because he was referring to this government's period--have made the tax system more progressive.
We know the OECD believes that the progressivity of the tax system on the personal income tax side has declined. So there's a disconnect there, and not just between you and Finance.
Their job, he said over and over again, is to support the finance minister. I respect that, and I understand that, but your job, as parliamentarians, is to make sure that the evidence is marshalled to substantiate those fairly strong statements, which I don't think can be supported.