I think you've actually put your finger on what makes it difficult to mainstream this, which has been the language used for why you do GBA.
But I want you to think about gender budget analysis not as a special interest group but as a way that you examine the distribution of incomes, purchasing power, and the ability to participate.
You've mentioned world economic pressures. You alluded to the decline in manufacturing. And there's the credit crunch that we're all dealing with too. These are large-scale hydraulics that will affect the macroeconomy. In every instance, the role of women is at the bottom of the income spectrum. In every instance, a good GBA analysis will illuminate our understanding of how the distribution of incomes is changing and how government policy impacts that distribution.
What we know from external evidence is that the really big hydraulic of the story is that government policy has actually redistributed incomes increasingly in favour of those who are already affluent. The market has done a very fine job of that on its own. Governments used to counteract that, but they have not been doing so in the last 10 years, because of two forces, one being the cutting back of spending, which really does support low-income households. By this I refer to home care, to affordable housing, and to the fact that child care has not expanded. And there's public transit and infrastructure. I can go through the list, and you know the list. But spending has not kept up with the needs of communities, of individuals, of households, and of women.
On the taxation side, there's been a redistribution of the gains of tax policy towards those at the top end—seen only if you pay attention to distribution as a part of your GBA and if you don't do your GBA analysis as Finance has done theirs, asking how many women and men have gained. Instead, you would actually ask, how many women and how many men in what income brackets have gained? Do the people who are of such low incomes that they don't pay personal income tax get any benefit from it? Then you start lifting the veil here on what's going on.
Given that every economy in the advanced industrialized world needs consumer spending to motor along, the strength of consumer spending in our economy has allowed it to sail through three events that could have been recession-producing. The lower your income, the more your marginal propensity to consume. If you let affordable housing issues continue the way they are, without intervening, people's budgets will become even more chewed up by housing costs, leaving their disposable cash smaller and smaller over time. If you want people to spend in order to save the economy from sliding into a downturn, you need to pay attention to what's happening in the bottom half of the income distribution—and more women are there than men.
So don't think of GBA as something that you're doing for women because you're nice, because you want women to be equal to men. It's a huge macroeconomic and distributional question. That's why I have said over and over again here that gender budget analysis without distributional analysis of the impact on income is useless. Don't bother going there. If you're not going to do that, don't do it at all, because the analysis is telling you something about the distribution of opportunity economically and in terms of income, and it's going to tell you something about how sustainable economic growth will be in the next five to ten years. So it's a big macro picture.