Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Bonjour, tout le monde.
As Hélène mentioned, we prepared something prior to being told what you actually wanted. That's fine. It gives me the opportunity to explain a little bit about what we said on February 14. I think it will help you understand as we work through the case study.
During the February 14 evidence we gave, I explained how we developed our training based on the culture of the organization—its openness and willingness, its prior knowledge, its level of senior bureaucratic support, its resources, etc. We created something especially for you, which you won't be receiving today. Instead, you're getting this one.
With the finance training, you need to know the context. In 2005, we did what we called the mother of all trainings. It's a full day—they break into small groups and go through each step to a case study. This is what we're going to do with you today. The important thing, which I also mentioned on February 14, is that it's not a mechanical exercise. You're not dealing with widgets and gidgets and gadgets. It's teaching people to think differently. Part of the value of the training, particularly for a department like Finance, is the opportunity to think outside the box, think differently, and even more important, discuss things. Equality is something that has many layers. It has history; it has socio-economic impacts. People in the training need the time to discuss things, look at the underpinnings of the causes, of the impacts of policies and programs, look at how they can change them. We did this in 2005.
We know from some of the testimony that Finance did not get the universally approved, if you will, GBA training. That refers to gender budget training based on tools developed by Diane Elson. Now, this is a particular form of training. When you go into a training like gender budget training, you need to know that you have the administrative and political support, together with the will to make such a budget happen. This was not the case. According to the agreement, Finance was going to learn gender-based analysis because they needed to be able to understand the underpinnings of gender in the context of the budget, which means understanding how to apply the analysis. If we don't use terminology like Diane Elson's “gender-disaggregated beneficiary assessment tool”, for example, it doesn't mean that the training itself is not doing exactly that. It's just not using the terminology.
The Finance people had a backgrounder we prepared on gender and budgets, which enabled them to understand the context, the terminology, the tools, the different models around the world. We agreed to this because they needed to understand how to apply the methodology within the constructs of the federal government model. They also needed to be able to examine whether departments had done a GBA of the proposal for which they were submitting the item to the budget, which means they had to know how departments were doing GBA.
That, however, is not the training you're getting today. Over the year, we condensed our training into half a day. It went beyond the taxation and the budget people. It became more important to focus on how to do GBA, how to use it as a tool. For context, of course, they could refer to gender budgets, if that's the area they work in.
So what we're going to do today is walk you through what they would have done. I want us to have a bit of fun with it. I'm not a trainer, so bear with my attempts to be Carmen Paquette. She would have had a lot more fun with you.
What we're going to do is simply walk through a bit of the bigger picture of GBA. We're going to talk a bit about the different underpinnings of it. Then you do have, as Hélène said, two case studies that we pulled out of the 2007-08 budget. It is part of the analysis that all of you already received in previous testimonies, and we're going to go through the steps of the GBA and you are going to do the analysis.
One of the things we always hear in case studies is that there are not enough data, there's not enough information, we're guessing, we're not sure. That's fine, because the purpose is not to have a perfect thing while you're working. The purpose is to generate the discussion, the thinking, and to start looking at how you would do things differently. So we will be working through these two case studies in approximately 15 minutes or so.
Generally, again, in the context of the training we have little working groups. We split you up into two or three groups. If the committee would like that, we can split you up into two groups--you're a sizable number--and you would each be working through the steps and sharing back and forth. But I'll explain that as we get to it.
So this is the context. At the end of the session, by the time you leave, we are hoping you will have an increased understanding of what GBA really is. There is still a lot of mythology--and not necessarily for you, but certainly for Finance--around how GBA applies to your daily work.
So there are principles that not only underline the training session but also underline the practice of implementing GBA, and they're consistent, no matter who is doing it. GBA is an integral part of your work. In other words, don't wait until you've developed a policy program or legislation to look at it then and say, “Did we incorporate gender?” Start thinking of incorporating gender right from the concept of your policy or program, which we'll be doing with the case study.
You need to recognize the importance of understanding the social and economic context, and that is pretty self-evident. People don't operate in a vacuum. You have an income, you live in a certain area, you have certain jobs, you have certain characteristics based on who you are--ethnicity, etc.
The thing about GBA also is that it underlies the diversity, because women and men are not homogenous, and oftentimes what you'll find is that there can be greater inequalities between different population groups of women than there are differences between women and men. So again, GBA is not just men-women; it's also diversity.
We constantly talk about GBA being based on sound data, research, and information. This is because if you are going to look at policies, programs, and legislation, and let's say you're creating or adapting, you need to know the basis of reality upon which you are creating your initiative. It's not enough to go on assumptions; you need to know, if the government is spending X amount of dollars on this policy and it is not working, what the evaluation tells you about why it's not working. You might discover it's a gender issue. You have to go back and you'll discover there wasn't enough data at the development from a gender perspective to really ensure you were creating something that did meet the needs of the population.
It also recognizes the effects of personal values, experiences, and education, and this is on the part of the people developing the policies or programs. People need to understand that just because they belong to a certain population group, it doesn't mean the reality they identify with will produce a policy or program that matches the reality of the rest of the population of the country. So it really forces people to question their assumptions, and you'll be doing a bit of that as you walk through the case study in a few minutes.
And it leads me to the next point, which is that GBA also requires you to examine and question your assumptions. Sometimes the assumption can be that women are not reaching the same outcomes as men, but when you do the analysis you might discover most women are, but it's only a succinct group--perhaps aboriginal women--who are not. So what does that tell you? How does that inform what you're going to do in terms of your policies and programs?
Of course, GBA is enhanced by collaboration. This is because issues that affect women and men exist across the spectrum. They exist in all kinds of policy areas and program areas, so you need to work with the people. As we said when we were here the first time on the 14th, you need to work with the people who have the expertise in terms of the substantive knowledge of what they're working with.
So GBA is basically a systematic approach to gender inclusion. It's not hit or miss. It's not looking at a policy and saying, “Oh gee, we didn't think of women, so let's fix it”. Let's ensure that as we develop the policy we're looking at the realities of women and men.
It's a tool for gender equality. When gender-based analysis is applied appropriately, it will lead you to certain trends, data, and knowledge that will help you determine how to achieve equality. It will also help you determine, which is important for many departments, within a gender-neutral policy or program—and most federal government policies and programs are gender neutral—even if the policy or program has a gender-neutral outcome, what is actually happening for the women and men in diverse population groups when they interact with this policy or program. You may discover that you need to make adjustments. You may discover that even though the broader objective is not specifically equality, you can have an equality objective component within the bigger objective. You'll be doing that as you walk through the case study.
GBA is also part of an approach known as mainstreaming. Mainstreaming is basically ensuring that gender is an integral part of absolutely everything a government does, to put it bluntly, and gender-based analysis is a tool to help ensure you can get there.
A lot of times people confuse diversity employment equity and gender-based analysis. We like to let people know that GBA is a methodological tool. Diversity is about population groups, and employment equity is about legislation for the representation of people in the paid labour force. Those are very different things. GBA can inform the other two because it's a methodological tool. One of the things we love about GBA is that, as a tool, it can be applied and adapted to just about any situation.
Many people wonder why we should do GBA and what the value-added is. There is a bit of an assumption in Canada that we're doing very well on equality because of the charter, so the question does come up. GBA allows you to have certain things. It has gone through an evolution. We have gone from equitable access or equal opportunity--where everyone gets the same shot at a program--to equal treatment, which is formal equality, where if we treat everybody the same they will all receive the same benefits. We realized that wasn't quite it. Then we moved into the evolution of substantive equality, or equality of outcome. That means the outcomes are going to be equitable for the various population groups. So you look at the impact to see if it is serving your population fairly, adequately, and equitably.
We also do GBA for sound policy development reasons. Policy is about serving the people of Canada. If you don't know who in Canada you're serving, your policies are not going to be effective. It's quite simple, in the sense that it informs your policy so you actually meet the needs of your population. If you have the policy, then move into a program. In order to bring the theory of the policy into the reality of a program, you need to continue thinking of the gender perspective as you implement your program. Of course--sound legal reasons--we have the charter.
We're moving into how to do GBA now. You're really going to have to pay attention, because you're going to start working in a few minutes.
On fundamental questions for GBA, although we have a million questions that people use to help their thinking processes--of which you have a selection in these laminated sheets--does the policy or program support full participation and equality for women and men? That really covers a lot right there. Does it create barriers? Again, sometimes we know that it's not necessarily the policy or program per se that has been badly designed, but there might have been unintended barriers. They can be a very simple thing, like a walk-in centre for employment programs shutting the doors at six o'clock in an area where a higher percentage of women are shift workers in the hospital and they can't access services until midnight or two in the morning.
These are the realities of implementing programs to ensure you meet the needs and don't create barriers.
The second fundamental question is whether the policy or program discriminates against men or women in its outcomes. Are the outcomes equal for both sexes?
The overall checklist that we ask people to keep in mind in order to think about the framework of applying GBA is to integrate your questions concerning gender throughout the whole initiative, throughout the whole analysis--and we'll be doing that with the walk-through on the case study--clearly presenting the gender implications.
Sometimes the gender implications are hidden. You really have to, as we say, drill down or peel the onion layers to get to the gender implications, because sometimes on the surface, a policy or program can appear to be quite “neutral”--and I put that in quotation marks because a lot of people think neutral means it's going to be okay for both men and women. You need to substantiate the claims with relevant, reliable gender-disaggregated data. So you need to have reality. You can't be looking to establish policies or programs or spending public money based on assumptions.
As politicians, you're on the other end of the spectrum, but for the bureaucracy, for policy people, you need to be able to present and support policy recommendations that support gender equality to your ministers in a credible and practical way. So this is something that analysts really have to be able to discern: how do we present the equality impacts--whether positive or negative--of what we are developing, and how can we best recommend a direction that will take into account, at least, the equality consequences of doing or not doing the options that are presented? And of course, we do look at ensuring that gender equality is congruent with other government positions.
We're going to introduce you to the shower sheet. These are selected highlighted questions taken out of the training manual that people use in order to inform the thinking process. Now, generally in a full day's training you'd have the manual with many more questions. In a two-hour session, it's much more practical for people to go through these questions to generate the thinking process on the case study.