Status of Women Committee on April 15th, 2008

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

I know that all of you want to answer, so I'm going to be cognizant of the time. Could you keep it brief?

Go ahead.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Okay. I will really try to keep this brief.

My answer to your question is that some important tools have to be developed and be put into place and be used assiduously in order to be able to produce the outcome that you believe can be generated through this process.

In the April 1 submissions—which I believe were translated and distributed to you some time last week, or yesterday—there was a long table slightly refocused to 2006 and 2007 only. That is the first cut a gender analysis would do of a budget to try to get a picture of what items in the budget were going to further undermine women's positions, what items were going to have no impact, and what items were possibly going to be beneficial. In that table I ended up identifying only two items that could genuinely benefit women. It's a huge amount of gender analysis right there, which, if done every year, could feed into a lot of detailed discussions that could take place.

The next cut is table 2 in that material, which I've redone in light of what the Department of Finance has specifically said the gender impact of the working income tax credit is. This table—marked as table 1 and dated with today's date—shows that as you get more detailed information, you get a much better idea as to how much a particular initiative can help or hurt women. We see that as the Department of Finance produced more data, it was actually forced to reveal that the working income tax credit is helping women less than the department was initially claiming it was.

It's a difficult process that requires having informed people driving it. But Armine is correct that it's designed to become mainstream, so that you can increasingly have summary types of sheets, as you do with accounting records. I think if the mechanism is put into place, it will have long-term effects.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

I have committee business to attend to as well, so....

Ms. Mathyssen.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, and thank you so much for being here.

I want to pick up on a couple of things.

I asked the deputy minister about his GBA training; he didn't have any. It seems to me that this is at the centre of things. We've talked about the fact that the civil service advises, but the policy direction comes from ministers and from the government.

Should ministers have GBA training? Do we need to have the minister here and to ask the questions we've been asking? We haven't had a whole lot of answers that help.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

Surely you don't want the GBA training we have seen evidence of here, so I wouldn't get your knickers in a knot about the fact that the deputy minister hasn't had GBA training.

I think what this committee is in the process of doing is talking about what good and effective gender budget analysis would look like; once you have that, then insist on everybody having it. But I wouldn't want my deputy minister spending a minute being trained on how to do this sort of stuff. I don't find it useful.

It is comprehensive—somebody spent a lot of time on it—but it's not answering the larger questions: are we making progress on gender equality; are we actually reducing the vulnerability of women; are we enhancing women's economic independence? This doesn't speak to any of that, not one line of it. So whereas people are doing what they were told to do—whereas they're doing more than what they were told to do, according to the deputy minister—I wouldn't want that kind of training as part of what we say we're doing.

[Nancy Peckford]

I think we have to separate the jobs of public servants and the jobs of ministers. Clearly, they are distinct. The reality is, the minister is not getting the benefit of the best analysis possible, because at this stage of the game, given our vantage point, they're not doing what we would expect them to do or what it would be reasonable for them to do. The framework within which they're doing it is woefully inadequate, in our view, given the overall goals of gender-based analysis.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

I am very cognizant of the time.

Armine, you asked us a very specific question: how can we use you? If you look at all the things we were being inundated with, the fact is that they couldn't do a macro analysis. But if we as a country are giving the third world aid to eliminate poverty, AIDS, etc., why can't we do the same here? It's incongruous that if we're going to ask for gender-based analysis of that money, we can't do it here. Why?

I think what we need from you is to help us through this bafflegab. There is too much bafflegab being thrown at us. Even when we're trying to get it, we're mindful that the bureaucrats have to do their job. They have to meet the needs of—and he kept on saying it—“the government's priorities”. But if we're going to focus on gender-based budgeting or gender budgeting or gender analysis, you need to help us from a technical perspective.

All of us are committed. I think we all understand that we want to eliminate poverty; we want a return on investment from our taxes, and the return on investment of $200 billion is not there. But we don't know how to look at it as a holistic picture.

He gave the answer; I think the answer you got was “$270 million to mental health”. Yes, we know it goes to HRSDC, but who does any gender analysis? How is it helping the most vulnerable? We need your technical help.

[Nancy Peckford]

I'll just suggest that the Government of Canada recently signed on to the statement, the agreed-upon conclusions, from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. That statement includes a section on financing for gender equality, which was the theme of the UNCSW. The Government of Canada clearly signed on to this statement, which talks about how gender perspectives must be incorporated into all economic policy-making, and about increasing the participation of women in economic governance structures and processes to ensure policy coherence and adequate resources for gender equality and the empowerment of women. So there is something on the table right now that the Canadian government has signed on to, which can help inform your direction.

This is part, one could argue, of the priority action plan going forward. I would encourage you to refer to that document. It gives the current government a mandate to pursue some of these things with more rigour and more substance.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay.

Armine.

[Armine Yalnizyan]

I'd just like to say if I can be of any service--and I imagine my colleagues feel the same way--it would be an honour to work in any capacity with a committee that has been as dedicated as this committee has been.

I want to go to Madam Neville's question of the deputy minister, which was, can you substantiate these claims? The claim was that these measures had greater productivity. And then, what data was used for the assessment that the GST cut benefited lower-income women? These are important questions to ask, which you don't need us to answer. You need the Department of Finance and you need this committee to ask those questions constantly: are you sure this is helping the people you claim are being helped?

But quite apart from saying, can you substantiate your claims, because dimes to doughnuts they'll come back substantiating their claims, what you really want to know is, in the sum total of measures that have occurred, what has been targeted to the bottom half of the income distribution, the bottom 20% of the income distribution for women versus men, versus the top?

Ask the question you want to see. If you think it's not more progressive, don't ask them to substantiate what they've already said. Ask them to show by a measure that this is the distribution and this is the incidence by income tax bracket for men and women, or by income class for men and women, of how these different things stack up.

In their analysis here, in some line items they'll say what the fiscal impact is and in other line items they won't say what the fiscal impact is. Consistency would be a great step forward--consistency in having the fiscal impact and in having who benefited from this from what our data show us. And if you can't show who's benefiting, then explain to us on what basis you're moving it forward.

But again, I just think the role of this committee is to get greater clarity and to lift the veil on government initiatives. Sometimes the people who sit on the government side can do this and sometimes they can't, but that's the purpose of this committee, to lift the veil.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Professor Lahey, do you have some final remarks?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

Yes. I just want to say quickly that it does sound as if the Department of Finance is now ready to launch what it considers to be its official gender-based analysis template, using the working income tax credit as an example. And there are severe methodological problems even with their supposed detailed gender-based analysis.

So I would urge the committee to get out in front of the Department of Finance and set up your own template, your own model, your own example, and put that out there as the counter model. Otherwise, this disconnect will continue to exist.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

And if I understood you correctly as you were making your statement, the Status of Women is not doing a good job with the template. Armine, you say the training that was given to the deputy minister, based on what you have in front of you, is not good training and you wouldn't want that training. Did we understand that correctly?

[Armine Yalnizyan]

He said he didn't get any training, and I don't know that he would be trained on this. But I'm just saying there are so many inconsistencies and inadequacies in this that you wouldn't want to spend a lot of time training people on how to do this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Thank you very much for being here. We will be calling you back.

We will suspend for half a minute.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Madam Chair, you said something very important about confidentiality. In the past, we've asked different departmental representatives who have come to testify before the committee various questions. We took note of the questions asked. They can be found in the minutes of the committee meetings. I would like us to be able to identify all the times we asked questions to the departments about this specific file, and for us to send them a copy of those questions adding what you have just read to us from Marleau and Montpetit.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

We will do that.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

We must demand an answer.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

The next time they tell us, we'll give them this.

We have two motions before us. Ms. Minna, would you like to read your motion for the record?

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

It reads:

That, the government appoint an independent commissioner for gender budgeting analysis immediately to conduct a gender based analysis of the budgetary policies of the government, and that the Chair report the adoption of this motion to the House without delay.

As you recall, Madam Chair, we had some discussion of this at the last meeting, and I had agreed to put off this motion until this morning because I think Madame Demers had a question that she needed to clear with her leadership, and that has been clarified.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Yes, we clarified it.

I thought you had a discussion last week.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

It doesn't read the same.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

The motion was amended at the last meeting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You don't have the amended motion?

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Okay.