Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this training session.
I wanted to give you a bit of housekeeping and historical detail before we start, and then I'm going to leave it in the capable hands of Michèle, but I'll stay for the whole session.
The training you're about to engage in is, as you know, one component of our GBA implementation strategy. It was developed between the years 2000 and 2003. At the time, the content was pilot-tested with a variety of people, including federal department officials, representatives from non-governmental organizations, provincial counterparts, and people like that.
We knew we needed to provide training, and we knew we needed a train-the-trainer program as well, so that was also developed between the years 2000 and 2003. What's interesting is that in the first session that was given to a variety of participants, feedback from those participants, from the Canada School of Public Service, and from other people was basically that we should use professional trainers.
The people who were giving the session at the time were not professional trainers; they were the people you are looking at right now. As a result, at that time Status of Women Canada decided to create an outreach program to recruit professional trainers, who basically became trainers licensed by Status of Women Canada.
The program itself and the trainers' manual was also tested by professional trainers who were experts in gender equality. At the time, the administrative burden of having one's own trainers was pointed out to us, especially at a time when many of the institutions in government, including the Canada School of Public Service, were divesting themselves of teachers, educators, and that kind of thing.
This was such a specialized training that not too many people knew how to take it on, including the school at the time, and we wanted to make sure the trainers were meeting very specific criteria. Also, to have this network of trainers—we now have six bilingual francophone trainers and six anglophone trainers—permits us to be able to carry the word of GBA much wider across Canada and across the world, because they also do the training in several other countries.
Unfortunately, the trainer we were to have today is ill; she has this flu that I guess a lot of people are getting today. So you're stuck with me and Michèle. We will do the best we can with the materials. It's not as if we haven't seen this material before, and that's important for you to know. This material was conceived, designed, and conceptualized by Michèle and me, with the help of all these other stakeholders, so we know it pretty well.
I suppose when our trainer was preparing, she was preparing to work on the Anti-terrorism Act or something like that, and it was changed. I believe the request was to receive the same training as the finance department is receiving, and we had to ask the permission of the finance department. They were very gracious in permitting us to use the same training; however, we will not be able to use the same case studies.
Case studies, when they are what we would call home grown, or created by the department themselves, are not shared. They remain confidential to the department. However, often that doesn't happen in Status of Women Canada, and we have already created comprehensive case studies for those departments that don't bring case studies to the table.
We have case studies that range from emergency preparedness, to transportation, to HIV/AIDS. There's a variety of them. I think we're up to nine now. However, for this purpose this morning, the case studies will be two budgetary initiatives, one that came out in 2007 and one that came out in 2008, which I believe you have in front of you, and Michèle will help you work through it.
What's important to remember is that—