Status of Women Committee on Nov. 21st, 2007

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

What I am hearing, therefore, is there's a consensus to move on a very focused basis. And the focused basis, if I heard correctly—we had done our economic security of women and poverty of women, especially in the rural areas, in the aboriginal areas, and immigrant women—was a key factor for us. So we could look at gender-based analysis, based on what has been suggested, poverty and the woman.

The next one Ms. Minna suggested was on women and the legal system. I guess everybody has seen this article about a 19-year-old woman who died in prison. It's amazing. What is it? Why is there this discrepancy between the treatment of women and the treatment of men, and where is this problem coming from? So there's one aspect that would require us to look at it from an economic perspective and one aspect would be the justice perspective, the legal perspective. This one has a lot of resonance with a lot of women who are asking what's going on in this area.

And thirdly, if I heard you right, was women in the military. A lot of us have heard from women in the military, or spouses of military men, of the level of inequality they seem to face. So we could focus and say we'll take three or four subjects of that nature and perhaps move forward with them—we have to agree on that first—and then look at what resources, what sorts of experts we will want to call. They will be departmental people because we need to understand from departments. As Ms. Minna mentioned, when CIDA gives money to donor agencies, it demands gender budgeting and demands gender sensitivity, and we don't do it in our own area. So perhaps some departments in Canada, in the federal government, might be better equipped than others, and we might be on a search mission and find some very good benchmarks or stories we can relate to.

So number one is agreeing to the focus, number two is people we would like to call, and number three is the timeframe.

Madame Boucher.

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

I would also like to emphasize employment equity. In every part of town, in every city and in every rural municipality, we hear horror stories that show that women are never equal to men as far as employment is concerned. I would like us to look at...

Poverty also exists in the rural regions. I come from a poor background, and as I have lived in poverty, I feel very close to the problems of the poor.

I would also like to discuss the specific needs of men and women. We must understand our differences before we can find solutions. We must keep in mind that men and women are different. We cannot... We must understand this, and they must understand it too.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Madame Boucher, I think you are re-emphasizing the point that poverty, and poverty in different areas, is critical. Our report on economic security has targeted that women get poor because of certain gender differences. And we have listened to Dr. Clara Morgan, and I think we need to find out about our money and its impact. Is it having impact?

So I think if we can agree on certain things we want to focus on, move forward and get that out of the way, then we can go forward with the next round.

Mr. Stanton.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I don't disagree with where we are at this point, but I'm not too sure how we're making a connection between the four areas that were proposed: working women, the justice system, the military, and race. Those are the four groups that no one would disagree are segments of women in society that perhaps would deserve having us take a focused look.

How do we connect the dots between that group of women in society and gender budgeting? We're talking budgeting, so it's principally finance, that is, the allocation of dollars. We put words to the picture here. To cut to the chase, are we talking about whether government programs are properly allocating to those groups? That kind of takes us down the road of really now talking about whether government programs are sufficient in addressing issues of economic security. You can see that it's easy to take this discussion to a different place. How can we understand it?

The way I see it, when we talk about budgeting, it could potentially be three things. First is how much is allocated to specific, targeted groups, perhaps much like what we've seen here. Second could be the decision-making process. Does it take gender equality issues into consideration? Then, perhaps, third is what's happening in the aftermath. Once a program or a budget is implemented, do we see the desired outcomes? Even if you did make all the right decisions, are those things happening?

I'm still not clear. Maybe I'm just not grasping it, but if someone can help me out here, I would appreciate it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

We'll go to Ms. Minna.

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

I'll try, and my colleagues around the table will help if I don't get there.

It's not so much how much money is allocated to which envelope, although that obviously has an impact at the end of the day in terms of what government policy at that time happens to be. Quite often, it is how programs are then designed to spend that money and the criteria around those programs to spend the money.

I'll give you an example. I was working with some immigrant women who desperately needed training and upgrading back in the late 1980s. The program offered by HRSDC at the time required that you have grade 12 and be somewhat fluent in the English language to access it. Well, it meant that all those immigrant women were excluded. The criteria shut them out. That's why I put down “racialized”, as well as the other lines.

Another example is, for instance, a policy like the child tax credit. It's about $7,000. If you have money to spend, you can take advantage of it, but if you're a low income to poor person, and a woman, in particular, and are in under the labour force, you can't access it, because you have to have money before you can get it back. It's not a refundable credit.

Those are just a couple of examples. What I'm seeing is that the criteria and policy, and how policy is designed and then delivered, may miss the mark of what the intended objective is overall. Do we want to eradicate poverty? Do we want to address the issue? Does it miss because we didn't do the right analysis, and therefore, the criteria that was designed actually leaves out a big chunk of people? Quite often that is women, and usually minorities are the ones who are more disadvantaged.

The tools we would use would be to look at.... First what I would do is have us take some time to have hearings with people who have expertise in gender budgeting to understand the criteria that are required to do gender budgeting properly and to see a few examples of where it might have been done. Then I would move on to take a look at some of these areas we've identified and see how, if applied properly, it might have worked in some of the current policies that exist within our system. Out of that we might be able to make some recommendations about how things might be corrected, and then by extension, advise that the model be used government-wide in the preparation of budgets. If you do the right gender budget analysis before budgets are prepared, you're likely not to have the wrong outcome at the end.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Mr. Stanton, you have a very valid question. And there are two tools that could be used.

I come from a public finance background. I am not an accountant, but have a public finance background. And there are two ways in which budgets can take place—drill down, or go upwards. The drilling down is based on what the Department of Finance has as revenue. And moving upwards is your grassroots sectoral analysis by departments.

You can use two tools that the analyst has given us: look at the gender-disaggregated public expenditure incidence analysis, and the gender aware policy appraisal. Those are what we ask the experts to do. But basically, you can take the issue of poverty, for example, and say to yourself, here is what we, the government, spend on social programs. We need this to have impact, as we want to eliminate or alleviate poverty. You can then ask, is it having an impact?

When we did our study on the economic security of women, we found lots of incidents when this was not happening. So we need to go back to the drawing board and ask, why not? There is something wrong. We are all taxpayers. There is something wrong with a system that is not addressing this very key issue, and we're spending a lot of money on it.

Did I see your hand up, Mr. Cannan?

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'm new to the committee; I'm just subbing for someone else and listening in.

I echo my colleague Bruce's comment. I'm just sitting back and thinking about your public finance perspective of drilling down or coming from the bottom up. The fact is, it doesn't matter how much money you're spending, if the program is going in the wrong direction. So we have to take a step back.

And it's not necessarily the budget, but goes back to the core. As Bruce was saying, it's about the mandate of the committee and the policies and the criteria.

I'm having trouble getting my head around studying budgets, if you're looking at programs.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

No, and I appreciate that you're new.

This is gender-based budgeting, and we've gone through gender-based budgeting and its impact.

Departments do their budgets and they push these upwards to the Department of Finance. And Finance turns around and says, well, what's the value of this program, as it doesn't meet the philosophy of the government, etc., etc.? That's fine, as there's a political side to it. But there is also a social side to it, and the departments, when they present their budgets, are the ones who have to look through a gender lens. Is it having an impact?

Say you want to alleviate child poverty. To alleviate child poverty, you need to put things in place--child care, for example, or affordable child care. If that is the mandate, then you ask, is it having its impact?

We don't know. We're sitting as the Standing Committee on the Status of Women and our job is to ensure that we help women in poverty, or families in poverty, to be able to address their issues.

So if the Department of Finance comes with an analysis, for example, that having an income of $21,000 is too rich for a person to be able to access the child tax credit, or $21,000 is too poor for a person to access a working income tax benefit, then you sit there and ask the question if that's the poverty line. Those are the analyses we will have to do, or questions we will have to ask, because we need to be asking intelligent questions so we can make intelligent recommendations. That's what I think our discussions are going to be about.

You're more confused than you were before, right? Well, that's normal for anybody new coming to the committee. This gender-based budgeting is a.... It's not that we go after the finance department, but that we go and ask departments to come before us, and we have to choose which areas we want to focus on. That's why we're saying that if poverty is an umbrella, are we focusing on immigrant women, rural women, and aboriginal women? And then we should ask, for example, INAC, the aboriginal affairs department, what they do when they present their budget to the Minister of Finance. What sort of lens do they look through?

Those are easy things, I guess, from my perspective, but perhaps they are very difficult to comprehend.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I appreciate that. I'll sit and listen a little more.

I guess from my perspective as the father of three daughters, all I know is that I give my wife and daughters the money, and they give me a little bit of whatever is left over.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

That's not what the Minister of Finance does, no.

So are we confused or agreeing?

Mr. Stanton.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I think we may be at a point where we can get some scope to this. I wonder if we could go back to Dr. Clara Morgan. If you were to frame the mandate of this study, what would it be? That would be my first point.

And then the second part would be, how would this study...? We're going to take some time on the part of this committee; we're going to have testimony. What will we be doing to help women in Canada through the course of this work? Because that's ultimately what we're trying to do. What will this either help us to do, or more principally...? We're here to bring recommendations to the government on how it should conduct its business and policy-making and decisions. So how would we come at that question? How could we scope this study?

[Clara Morgan]

According to the literature, when you are putting an agenda or budget into practice, one of the things is to scope it. I think it's up to the committee members to determine the mandate for the gender budget. It can simply be making the budget responsive to gender or it can be submitting a parallel gender budget at the same time as the budget is submitted. It's up to the committee members to decide how far you want to take a gender budget initiative. It could be incorporating more from the civil society groups into the gender budget-making consultation process. It's really up to you how far you want to take this.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

I haven't heard from Madam Mathyssen. Irene had done some work on this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Did you want to speak, Ms. Mathyssen?

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

I have been listening carefully, and my initial desire was to find out how this works. We've heard a great deal about it. How do you actually take this idea and make it work and make it an action that creates the greatest possible good? That was the reason I thought to start with the group close to home, with the Manitoba government, because they're just beginning. They've done some background work, preparatory work, analysis, and they've had the help of a community group. I want to know what they did and how they have begun this process of putting it in place. Because they are quite determined it's going to be something that bears fruit, has a result, and achieves the goals they've set out, and because I know so very little about that, I wanted to know what we need to do in a very practical way.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Yes. If you look at page 60 of what you got from the IPU, it gives you a framework to measure.

I do not know where the French version is.

It says it's box 35, and then if you go to the U.K. one, which is box 41, you can get your head around the framework to measure gender equality. I think, Madame Boucher, it comes to your point of employment and poverty.

For the benefit of the clerk, can we have a specific request so she can limit it, and then we are all on the same page?

Ms. Mathyssen, could you repeat what you said? I hope you haven't forgotten.

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

Let me see. I wanted to know exactly how gender budgeting worked. My thought was to go to a resource that was close by--in this case, the Manitoba government--to find out what preparatory work they did, what analysis they did, and work within the community in order to begin this process, because they've only just begun. I wanted to know how you start something like this. How is it that you grab hold of gender budgeting and make it happen?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

All in agreement with that thought process?

Yes, Ms. Minna.

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

I agree, but just to add that for part of that discussion of how gender budgeting is done, it wouldn't hurt to look at some other jurisdictions--like Australia, as was suggested--that may be further down the road than some of the local ones, and bring in some other experts, so we can get a handle on exactly how it's to be done and what impact it has when it's properly done. Also, when is it done wrong or superficially or as lip service, and when is it real? It's one thing to say you're doing it, but it's another to actually be doing it right. I think that would be the first thing.

Then I think the areas we suggested earlier would be areas that we would look at as examples of, when applied, what impact they might have on those areas, and that would give us some templates.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Ms. Minna.

Mr. Pearson.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I agree with what Ms. Mathyssen and Ms. Minna said. I might want to include Great Britain, because they've just done their poverty-reduction strategy. They missed some of their targets--not by a lot--and as a result they're reassessing. It might be good to see where they're at in their reassessment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Fair enough.

So those are the marching orders we're giving the analysts?

Mr. Stanton.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

I have one other suggestion, Madam Chair. We talked about understanding how gender-based budgeting works--Ms. Mathyssen's point--and more importantly, learning about other jurisdictions, particularly those that have successfully implemented gender-based budgeting.

I think a third point would be to know to what degree gender-based budgeting is currently being used or applied here within the government.

That's probably enough to get started with.

But I come back to my first point. This really is a learning exercise for committee members. Ultimately, you want to be able to use this knowledge to better assess when you're doing estimates or supplements or when financial considerations are being considered by committee, so that you are then better equipped to use that information. I think a potential recommendation that might come is that we can share that knowledge and make recommendations around how the government might be able to use the information to better shape its policy and decision-making processes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Yes, Ms. Minna.