Good afternoon, everybody.
My understanding is that your committee is embarking on the study of gender budgeting. Thus, my comments are oriented to my understanding that you are still contemplating doing this rather than being actively in the midst of doing it.
I am here, I suppose, largely because of my experience as the senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, where I was deeply involved in preparing the alternative federal budget. Currently, though, I'm at Carleton University, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration. I've not been around CCPA lately, so if you have any current questions about what CCPA is doing, I can refer you on.
My background was largely focused on budgets per se rather than gender budgeting. I did not start my work dealing with the alternative federal budget that we prepare with any particular knowledge of or commitment to gender budgeting. My commitment was to improve on budgeting in general and to advocate for both effective and fair tax and expenditure measures.
But what I realized in the course of immersing myself in federal budget issues was that there were some serious and even debilitating omissions and flaws in the way we typically design our federal budget. And these omissions are costing us. We make inferior fiscal decisions, and we make a hash out of some potentially promising ideas because we are not using all the tools at our disposal to make sensible public policy. More troubling still, we do not have to be making these mistakes.
So I came to gender budgeting because I think it is a powerful tool to improve public policy, and it is well within our reach to make significant improvement in public policy in Canada with a fairly modest and doable gender budgeting initiative.
I'm going to cover three things for you today: number one, why you should advocate on behalf of gender budgeting; number two, why you should not be dissuaded by the naysayers; and number three, what is a modest and doable first step you can entertain right now?
First, why will gender budgeting make a difference?
Every time the government collects taxes or spends money, this has consequences for all Canadians, and different Canadians are affected differently by the various tax and spending measures.
You know this better than anyone else in Canada. You are members of Parliament. It is fine to say that a given measure is great for Canadians. But as members of Parliament, the first thing I expect you do when you hear of a new policy is think, “How does that affect my riding?” Because each particular riding has unique attributes. Is it rural? Is it urban? What sort of economic base does your riding have? Is it a very affluent riding or not so affluent? All of these things will matter when you analyze how a certain measure may affect your riding.
If you do budget analyses from the perspective of your riding, you must understand the reality on the ground to appreciate how a policy will affect your riding. So whatever the goal of public policy is, whether it will work or not depends on that reality on the ground. And gender is a huge reality on the ground. Policies may sink or swim, depending on how gender dynamics interact with the policy.
In other words, you can have the best-intentioned policy that flops because gender context is not taken into account. Or you can have a policy that seems to sound okay, or at least doesn't sound overtly gender biased, but turns out to reinforce gender inequality and maybe even thwart other policy objectives, because people haven't done the digging to understand the gender budgeting analysis of that policy.
Any policy in Canada that purports to care about families, or poverty, or inequality, or most labour force issues, or a host of other important issues is very likely to badly misfire--and expensively misfire--if gender issues aren't taken into account.
Now, I care about gender inequality, full stop. But even if your commitment to gender equality isn't such that it persuades you of the importance to do gender budgeting, I still think you should embrace gender budgeting. It's a powerful tool to make sure all policies are well designed, cost-effective, and accountable.
I will move on to my second point, on why you should not be dissuaded by any naysayers. In your investigations, you will likely hear objections--that we don't have the right data available, that it's going to cost too much money, that it's going to be too cumbersome, and so on. Do not waver in your commitment to gender budgeting for any of those reasons. I do not find them persuasive.
Do we have the right data? If you ask any of the professionals who devote their life to looking at data whether they have enough, they will always say, no, they wish they had more data about this, that, and the other thing. The fact is that we all cope with life despite the fact that the data is not always ideal. Certainly it would be better to have more data, and certainly that would cost something.
This does not mean we can't attempt gender budgeting today given what we know. There is some very low-hanging fruit within our reach, and we could make many important contributions to understanding the distributive effects of many existing policies with the data we have. Data issues are no excuse for not getting started.
It also speaks to the cost issue. We could have a lot of important impact with very little additional cost. We may not do everything we would ideally like to do and answer every question we would like to answer, but we would get further than we are today.
We could devise some fairly routine gender filters to apply to policies that are easy and pretty cheap. They have the added bonus that we could stop spending money on policies that are creating obstacles for gender equality. It has the potential to make budgeting much more precise and efficient, even if we can't achieve all the potential gains of gender budgeting right away.
I'm going to present you with a first step that could be done right away, and at bargain basement prices. It would have a very meaningful impact on gender equity, as well as on a number of other policies. Here is what I suggest you do as your very first step. The next time there is a federal budget, ask the finance minister to insert one page into that document. That one page would be a summary of any new tax measures that are contained in the budget. Never mind for a moment that there are existing problems in the tax system; I'm speaking only of any new tax policies that are enacted. On this one page in the budget, the finance department would write the following things: the cost of any new tax cut, and a projection of the distribution of the benefits of that tax cut by income and by gender.
This is not rocket science. There is software out there that will help people create the distributional analysis of a tax cut. In fact if you were to wander down the halls at Finance Canada and shout, “Hey, does anybody know the couple of software packages I'm speaking about?”, you would get more than enough people who could run this through in a very short time.
The tools we have today aren't perfect, but they should be used because they exist and because we can do better than we do currently. It's a first step that could be done today.
The finance department already prepares charts like this. You often find them in the back of budgets. All I am demanding here is that they stick in there the gender and income information that is easily available. It would be a big step forward. The only thing that is required is the political will to do it.
Sure, we could aim for more, we should aim for more--there's a lot more richness available to us if we would embrace gender budgeting fully--but for sure, this would be an easy first step, and it would be very meaningful.