Evidence of meeting #6 for Status of Women in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was budgeting.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Have you conducted a summary or in-depth analysis of measures, either tax cuts or budgetary expenditures, to see what was the best thing to do? Can you send us any? I'm not asking you to do that today, but would it be possible to do so in the coming weeks?
Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University
Yes, I can look to provide some information.
I also think you're about to speak with Armine Yalnizyan. She actually undertook a ten-year study of the federal budget from a gender perspective, and she may well have a number of examples up her sleeve that would speak to your issue.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Madame Demers, did you want to ask Professor Bartle if he has any suggestions?
Bloc
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Professor Bartle, did you understand the question I asked Professor Russell?
Director and Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Yes.
Bloc
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Have you conducted any analyses differentiating between a tax cut and a budget expenditure to solve a problem?
Director and Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha
No, I have not.
I think the closest thing I've done that might help is looking at existing data in the U.S. to try to determine how well we could proceed with it to analyze tax incidence by gender. The answer is that are some data, even though we've never tried to collect it from this perspective. There are some data on income taxes here in the U.S. that would be helpful in doing that. It's not complete or it's not everything you need, but it would be a start.
Again, this doesn't affect Canada necessarily, but it was interesting to me to find there was at least something available, even though nobody had ever really tried to use the data; this had never been a lens or a focus that had been used.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Ms. Demers, time's up.
Professor Bartle, Madame Demers is asking if you could send us the information.
Our clerk will communicate with Professor Bartle.
Ms. Mathyssen, do you have any questions?
NDP
Irene Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
Yes, I do have one more.
One of the challenges of carrying out gender-based analysis is that it's sometimes difficult to determine which segments of the population will actually benefit from specific changes. There is this debate going on about what kinds of benefits.... One thing I've always felt is that if women are considered, if we do make an effort to ensure the economic security of women, it will in turn benefit their children and families. Mr. Stanton mentioned that the government was family focused.
Does GBA benefit the whole family?
Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University
I think it's pretty obvious that when you get past Gender Budgeting 101, it is difficult to extricate women from the fact they exist in families. There are children, there are elderly people, who are all in women's lives. There are very material consequences if, for example, women aren't able to enter into the labour force because they are engaged in unpaid care activities vis-à-vis these family members. There are consequences if income level becomes the decisive thing in providing these women with a choice about whether they can.... You know, you get stuck in these situations where, if you don't make enough money from your wages, you can't afford to go to work because it would cost too much to have child care, elder care, or what have you.
All of these things affect every member of the family, because families are inextricable networks in which an effect on one affects all.
Director and Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Thank you for that question. I think it's a very important one.
There is an example in my research—I just can't find it in my notes right away—of a specific country where they found that cuts to a health program that looked like budgetary savings, because they reduced expenditures on health, resulted in a significant or dramatic increase in the amount of time women spent on caregiving for elderly relatives or children. I think this is an excellent example of what I would call a false budget economy, where it looks like you saved money, but what you did was simply to put the costs onto other people, particularly women.
I think this is the sort of evidence that, if I were in your shoes, I would want to have in order to help me think through what the impact is of the decision I'm making.
Conservative
Sylvie Boucher Conservative Beauport—Limoilou, QC
I'd like to go back to the constraints that certain countries have faced in taking gender specificity into account when they prepared a budget.
We're going to study gender budgeting, and there will definitely be some constraints. I'd like to know how we around the table can prevent these constraints from slowing down our work and ensure that they are more of a means to continue it in a positive manner.
I'm putting the question to Mr. Bartle.
Director and Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Can you give an example of what you mean by constraints or limits?
Conservative
Sylvie Boucher Conservative Beauport—Limoilou, QC
I don't know. You said earlier that, in other countries, efforts had not been sustained. I asked you what were the main constraints they had faced.
We're going to study a gender budget. That can be broad and involve a number of levels of society, the poor, rich and people in the community. There will be different constraints for each of those levels. Our committee wants to work on this. How can we make these constraints something positive so that we can find a happy medium for all classes?
Director and Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha
That's a good question.
I guess this is where I would point to the importance of information. You want the information that you need to make the appropriate decisions. In many ways it goes back to what Professor Russell said at the beginning, that if you don't know the impacts of what you're doing in terms of gender, then you're flying blind.
If I were in your shoes, I would be concerned about that. You want to know the impact of your policies on the people who are affected. I think that's maybe one of the most persuasive things for a member of Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Would you like to respond as well, Professor Russell, on the constraints?
Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University
Perhaps I can respond not precisely to your question but to something that I think is relevant to this.
We speak about constraints and costs as though there's a bit of a veneer on this, like it's an additional burden or something to do this gender budgeting. I don't think we've sufficiently emphasized the potential benefits of doing this.
You stand to design policies that are much better designed to meet their desired objectives because you've taken into account the gender landscape in which these policies have to exist. It's like this: you could hire an architect to design a house, and that architect might do a quite capable technical job, but unless they go there and see things--was there a hill, was there a drainage problem, was there erosion--they don't make the plans in full awareness of the actual obstacles on the ground.
If you take into account the obstacles on the ground in terms of the issues around gender in society, then you can make a much more elegant response to the problems that you say you want to address. You say you want to address poverty or something like that. Great--then you'll make a policy that takes into account the fact that women who live in poverty have specific difficulties that need to be addressed if the policy is going to work.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Thank you.
Dr. Bartle, I was asked by the analyst just to.... In your presentation, you say that the “lessons learned” suggest the obstacles that need to be removed. Would you happen to have some of the lessons learned so that we can look, as a collective, at those lessons and not repeat the same mistakes or reinvent the wheel?
Director and Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Yes, they're on the third page of my slide. I was specifically referring to the slide that is titled “Lessons learned to date”.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Yasmin Ratansi
Okay, right.
This is interesting. Under lessons learned--you do not have the slide because it was in English--you have buy-in from government and civil society; integrated into budgets at all levels; political environment; incorporated into the budget cycle; and technical expertise.
I would like to thank both Professor Bartle and Professor Russell for being here. I thank you for your insight and input. I'm sure what you have given us is food for thought in terms of how , we can now draw the parameters.
In your presentations you made it a little simple. Your one-pager is a good analysis. And when Madame Demers was asking you her question, dropping the GST came to my mind in terms of whether a gender-based analysis was done on that.
As a committee, we need to go forward with it. We're not trying to be the Department of Finance. All we're trying to do, as the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, is to try to see.... We've done the economic study, on economic security for women, and one of the main issues that has come about is inequity. In order to balance that out, we need to get this gender-based budgeting or gender budgeting into the forefront--in everybody's face, hopefully.
So I thank you for providing us with this input. Thank you for being here and sharing your knowledge with us.
I'm going to suspend the meeting for one minute. We have to discuss a budget.