Status of Women Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2007

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

It's a very critical consideration of course. There are all kinds of implications, both on the spending and the revenue side. In terms of who does unpaid work in the economy, for example, families have a lot to say on how that unpaid work gets organized. The ways in which taxation affects households, and government spending affects households.... There are all kinds of family dynamics there. There are many ways in which the way families are constituted and how they function will affect the gender implications of budgets.

Those can be very sophisticated topics, if you really want to get in to the more subtle issues. I'm only saying that today we could do a lot, even before we've worked out all the subtleties about how exactly families work.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Professor Russell.

Thank you, Mr. Stanton. I gave you two more minutes.

The chair would like to take a privilege before I go to the next questioner.

I'm not closing this; I asked the witnesses if they have a time constraint, and they said no.

The questions I've heard have been very good, but I want to ask you this.

Professor Russell's area of research has been the federal budget, forecasting, analysis, etc., and Dr. Bartle is the director of a school of public administration. Both of you have given us an analysis of what is required--the government, the civil society. I'm sure in the western world, government and civil society and the political environment are ripe for this, but what do we have to do next?

Professor Russell, you stated that a paper should be prepared. But when we are doing a budget consultation--every government does a budget consultation--which groups should we invite?

If both of you could answer that question, the chair's privilege will be gone, and then I'll go to Ms. Minna.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

Professor Bartle, do you want to take this first?

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

Sure.

One thing I would suggest is that you do some pilot projects. In many ways what you're considering is an innovation, and as with any innovation the question is how you innovate. How do you do it?

We know from other policy examples of innovation what tends to work. I would suggest a pilot project with a specific agency or department perhaps, to see how it goes, what you learn, and the concerns and how to address them.

Second, I would think about some incentives for doing so. I think most line administrators in government get frustrated when they're asked to do something additionally and there's no incentive to do so. I think if they see it as part of their development and as some innovative thing they can be involved in, that makes it attractive for them professionally.

As I mentioned at the very outset, you need the buy-in of civil society but also government. I think the groups that would be using this analysis are the ones that need to be consulted. Again, for it to be part of the fabric of the budget, it needs to be used, and for it to be used, the potential future users need to have their concerns addressed. What is the information they would want, and how do they want it presented? I would work with them on that.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

You're question was which groups you would invite....

Could you repeat your question?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Every finance minister does budget consultation, and yet we have policies come through that make no sense sometimes in terms of gender.

I will give this classic example. A person who earns $21,000 is too poor for a child tax credit and too rich for the working income tax benefit. Who did that gender analysis?

So who should they consult, which groups should they consult, from a taxpayers perspective, from an accounting perspective, from the poverty perspective? What spectrum should they look at?

That's where I think it boggles people's minds: how do I get the yin and yang balanced properly?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

You've got a real problem, because.... I mean, your question seems to assume that there is this rich array of groups out there that have this highly developed analysis of gender budgeting, and if we could just find them and bring them here, they would tell us. But in many cases, a lot of groups with a very strong interest in many of these issues don't have the capacity to perform the analysis that would be helpful to your committee and to the government.

It would be great if we could be building the capacity of those groups so that they could feed into these processes and help us fine-tune our gender budgeting analysis from the get-go, but unfortunately those groups are often underfunded and at this point can't participate fully. However, I bet that when you do the next pre-budget consultation, typically there will be questions asked of the presenters, and one of the questions could ask them to link their analyses with our overriding goal of gender equity. Listen to the groups as they make the case that their particular proposals relate to gender equity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Ms. Minna is next.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I have a couple of questions, but first I have a comment for both Dr. Russell and Mr. Bartle.

From the last two witnesses at the last meeting and from some of the specifics we got from both our witnesses today, I think it is actually quite possible for this committee to come to some conclusion in drawing or making specific recommendations on how we might move ahead. That might be not only the committee in terms of actually starting to do something, but also the government.

I think some of the parameters that were given earlier by Mr. Bartle and then by Dr. Russell are there, for instance, and the kind of training and so on that's needed.

My question is to Dr. Russell first. When we met here with the Department of Finance, we asked if they were using disaggregated data, and, if I remember correctly, they said no. Do you know if that is available in the department? You said information is available, and I am wondering if you actually know whether that kind of data is in fact available and whether it could be used for this purpose.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

I don't know exactly what the Department of Finance has at its fingertips, but I have stuff at my fingertips that would be at least useful as a first approximation.

I am being a bit facetious here, but--

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

I understand that.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

--this is not classified information. In many cases you can at least work your way backward to figure out a lot of the gender implications of things, even if you don 't have the ideal data set in front of you.

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

If you have access, I'm sure they do too.

Okay. The only other question is maybe not a fair one, but it's one nonetheless, because we have to deal with the real world sometimes.

Can the end results of a gender-based analysis turn out to be biased? If the premise of the philosophy for that policy is already going in a certain direction, can it influence that analysis?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

Can you restate the question?

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

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are doing this in the system all have personal beliefs or interests in certain directions.

We are not all perfect. We have large systems in place. Let's say the government says we're going this way, but there's a certain built-in bias or philosophical belief on the part of the individuals who are doing the gender base; can that impact on the gender-based analysis by giving the wrong information, so you think you're going in that direction while you actually might be going the other way? How do you make it transparent and how do you correct for that? I ask because we're not going to be doing it ourselves, obviously; it will be done by other people.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

I don't doubt that there are ways of presenting even empirical information that tend to highlight certain things and not others, and therefore they introduce the biases of the people who apply the filter. That's true in so many areas. We have to have debates about what the numbers mean. We can't just take on face value that the numbers mean what the person stating the numbers says they mean; we have to do our work.

It is going to require vigilance on your part to make sure the information you get back, if you instruct a certain department to do a gender budget analysis, in fact reflects the kind of commitment that you have going into it. We're going to need that vigilance forever as we use these tools.

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

Madam Chair, can Mr. Bartle answer that as well, please? Thank you.

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

Yes, I would agree. I think you make it transparent by having full disclosure. You will have the details from the analysts on how they did it in a technical appendix, or something like that, which would probably be mostly for other analysts to look at. But as with anything, if somebody wants to carefully go through the numbers and to discuss alternative methodologies or criticize them, that's appropriate, and a healthy thing.

It would be a great thing if the discussion were about how to better do a gender budget analysis rather than whether to do a gender budget analysis, which is where we are now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Ms. Minna.

Thank you, Professor Bartle.

Ms. Demers, you have five minutes.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Professor Bartle, Professor Russell, the more I listen, the more confused I am. We all come from different backgrounds. Some of us are on the left, some on the right and some in the centre. Some of us have experience in finance, others have none.

However, I understood what you said, Ms. Russell.

You said that a tax cut has to achieve the goal better than a spending measure in order to be efficient.

I found that easy to understand that. The people in my riding would find it jsut as easy to understand. Wanting to develop a program to ensure gender budgeting isn't everything; you also have to ensure that people understand what it represents. Otherwise, I'm not convinced they would vote for it, it's so complicated.

In the budget analyses that you've conducted, are there any concrete examples that you could submit to us in writing? We could study them before submitting this idea to the officials who prepare the budgets. Before asking them to insert pages, we would already have something on the basis of which we could tell them that we have before us obvious proof that, if an analysis had been properly done, such a measure would not have been introduced because of such and such an impact. That's what you did earlier in talking about a tax credit for child care services.

Have you conducted any analyses, following measures introduced in the past, that you could give us as examples?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

So are you looking for examples of where a tax cut is compared with a spending measure in terms of its gender impact?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I'm looking for analyses that you've previously done following former budgets.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

I'm sure there must be, but I just can't think of an example at this moment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Professor Russell, income splitting or pension splitting may be your answer.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

Income splitting is clearly something that has been analyzed a lot from a gender perspective, but as for an example of a tax way to go about something being weighed against a spending way to go about it, I am blanking out. There are lots of things, such as particular tax measures, that have been critiqued on gender grounds, though.