Thank you.
First, I'd like to thank the committee very much for the opportunity to answer some of the questions I believe you have related to statistics and data for gender budgeting, especially with regard to three publications, a couple of which Heather has already mentioned: Women in Canada, the Economic Gender Equality Indicators, and a smaller version we call the mini women and men report, which is an at-a-glance publication based on a Swedish model.
I also understand that the committee is interested in both the content of these initiatives and the processes and mechanisms by which they came to be. And I was involved in all three of these, going back to the early eighties, as well as the sort of international version of Women in Canada, the United Nations' The World's Women. So I'm kind of the dinosaur in some of this, I think.
I want to use my presentation time, however, not to talk too much about those specific publications but to put them in a larger context. My current position is as director of the National Council of Welfare, where my focus is on poverty. There are clear links, however, between this work and gender equality, and I'm sure the committee is well aware of this. I don't need to tell you that.
But I also deal with questions of process and mechanisms, as well as content, in this job. In fact, the council concluded that the persistence of gender inequalities and poverty in Canada is very much about governance and values. I'm not going to talk to you a lot about data. These people can do that.
This conclusion was reached after an evaluation of 25 years of poverty statistics and countless recommendations that have gone on a shelf. The council advised the government very recently, based on this work that we did, and I'll quote a phrase that's often quoted in the newspapers and elsewhere.
If there is no long-term vision, no plan, no one identified to lead or carry out the plan, no resources assigned, and no accepted measure of results, we will be mired in the consequences of poverty for generations to come.
And I would contest that this is equally true of gender inequality.
Our recommendation for a national plan to solve poverty is in fact the subject of hearings that have just started in another committee of this House. And I want to draw on a couple of parallels. They've only had two meetings, but already gender is very high on the list there.
So there are three points I'd like to highlight that I think are important to this committee. First, all the traditional poverty indicators—and we've had big arguments about these for the last 15 years—do not do a very good job of capturing the situation of women. This is very important to you, I think, because the economic gender equality indicators project that Heather mentioned does fill in some of those gaps.
Second, aggregate indicators are important, but finding the perfect ones should never serve as a diversion from actually doing something. What matters is the impact that programs and policies are having on people and how we can make them better.
Third, indicators are based on values. And numbers will not speak for themselves; human beings need to do that.
And I want to offer here a very short but powerful story that was told to me in a very different context and it makes so many points that I have to tell somebody, and you're my victims.
This is about a project on an aboriginal reserve. The federal government, concerned about accountability as it is, noticed that this project listed ten employees but only one was getting paid and that person was getting a huge pay cheque. So to Ottawa this is an indicator of a problem, maybe even corruption. It could be huge. It's an indicator; that's all the information Ottawa had. They needed to actually go out and find out what was going on, so they talked to people.
It turned out that the nearest bank for this community was three hours away and this group of people decided it was not the best use of time to have all 10 people take a whole day off to go and cash their pay cheques. So one person received the cheque and distributed it to the others and, by the way, this included court-ordered support to ex-wives, who got paid first.
They had it all figured out, but it wasn't a traditional way of doing things. There was a fix found, and it was quite a simple one. But that's not the point. The point is that there are so many lessons--for example, that time is as much a resource as money, and that you need to talk to people.
The next little section I'd like to talk about deals specifically with gender budgets and program data. To me, this is the biggest gap that exists now.
If you start with an objective like advancing gender equality or solving poverty, then you need to know whether programs are bringing you closer to that objective and how they could improve. Employment insurance is one example. I won't go into detail, but I think many people think that clearly this program has been going in the wrong direction recently. The women with low income who need it are now paying in, but their odds of getting anything out are slim. Nobody would buy a car insurance plan like that.
Similarly, mothers of newborns, who need income the most, have the greatest difficulty accessing maternity benefits and get the least out of them. The program works best for the elites like me who designed it.
EI, however, does do a relatively good job of reporting information, and this is in stark contrast to the personal income tax system, which is increasingly being used as a vehicle for social policy. There are some really good reasons for that, but we don't know a lot about the impacts of that, and they're not regularly published.
I think the taxfiler database is probably something that contains a wealth of information that Canadians should know about, which is quite underutilized. I think the Department of Finance, in particular, is unique in having the capacity to do extremely sophisticated, thorough gender analysis of exactly how some of these impacts work.
I would just very quickly draw the committee's attention to a National Council of Welfare publication, which is a report on the income tax system. It's from back in 1976, so it's really old. Nobody else has really done anything like this since.
I will skip the next little bit and leave it to questions. I was going to talk a bit about the background of women in Canada, and I will certainly entertain questions on that.
The point I would like to make about that publication is I think the greatest value of this compendium is that it helps fill in the detail behind key indicators in order to analyze what's happening. So you can have big indicators, but you need more detail. For many years, the only consistently reported gender equality indicator was the full-time, full-year wage gap. That's really inadequate to understanding the situation. You need to bring things together to look at women's fertility, labour force patterns, education, violence, unpaid work--all of those things.
On the little mini “women and men at a glance”, I don't know if you are aware or have seen this one, but the point of doing that when it was initiated at Status of Women Canada was to make sure that in between this major publication that comes out every five years a key set of indicators could be updated much more frequently for people to use readily.
On the economic gender equality indicators, again, I will talk at only a very surface level about this, but I think the point that's most important for this committee here is that in this FPT ministers' project, the conceptual framework of this document took far more time to develop than the technical data work. This is the way it should be, because the selection of any set of indicators is about values, and in this case the different jurisdictions did not come to a common framework easily. I have some examples here that I can give later if people have questions.
The final thing I would like to say is particularly about the unpaid work--though I don't like using that word and prefer the term non-market work--indicators that are there. They're a critical part of the value system that's really going to work for gender equality, recognizing that women do work of economic value that benefits others, but for which they currently receive little or no monetary compensation.
If Canadians and Canadian politicians decide not to continue to use an indicator like that or don't formalize it and regularize it more, then that's basically like saying that we, as Canadians, know that everybody needs money to live, but some women simply will not get enough money, and that's fine with us. I don't think many people in this room or anywhere else in Canada, when it is put that way, would say that's fine, but tragically our policies make it so.
Thank you.