I think the first one you mentioned is income splitting.
Income splitting as it has been introduced with respect to retirement income is an attempt to imitate the United States' method of income splitting, which is a system of reporting income that was deliberately enacted after World War II in order to stop the states from enacting community property laws. This was done because a number of people in the Treasury department in the United States government became very upset at the sight of all of the state community property laws that were giving women 50% ownership in all family property and all family income. This was unheard of.
Income splitting was deliberately adopted in order to remove the tax incentive for politically seeking community of property, and a number of states immediately repealed their community property laws. So the laws that applied to Irene Murdoch prevail in most of the United States, supported by income splitting.
I would say that income splitting is something that all women in Canada should come to understand in a lot more detail.
The universal child care allowance is a good example of a direct expenditure to individuals that has no gender analysis associated with it. The problem is that it's not enough money—and the gender analysis on a statistical level would show this, and people have done this—to enable a low-income person to overcome the fiscal barriers to taking on enough paid work to be able to exist. But for people who can afford to live on one high income, it is essentially a gift for which no accounting need be made. It's a very expensive kind of gift to make to high-income individuals in a country where poverty is still so rampant.
The various clawbacks that pertain to the national child benefit are the result of allowing this particular provision to be administered through income tax legislation. This is the way tax policy people think, to try to make sure that no one gets anything more than what they are entitled to. But it has the effect of putting additional barriers to entering into paid work in the road of those who have responsibility for the care of children and also live on very low incomes.