Status of Women Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2007

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I want to pick up on your expertise as a developer of the alternate budget. One of the questions I want to ask is about the current policy in terms of social spending. I'm wondering in terms of the $100-a-day child care, the lack of a national housing policy, EI, the impact of changes to employment insurance on groups within society. Had we done gender budgeting, would there be differences, and what kind of differences would you see?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

Absolutely, if that was a filter through which we had analyzed those policies before embarking on them and we had placed a high value on gender equity, we would have designed things differently.

An example is any policy that is affected by the difference between men's and women's patterns as far as labour force participation is concerned. Women are out of the labour force more frequently because of childbirth, caring for young children or the disabled, or something like that. So their work lives will look different from those who have been in the workforce from the beginning until their retirement.

That may affect all kinds of policies that are enacted based on how much time you spend in the labour force, like EI. It will affect how much you can contribute to your RRSPs if you have these constantly interrupted work lives. So looking at it through a gender perspective would make a huge difference.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Have you any perspectives on child care and housing?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

My same point still applies, but a second point is that there is often a linkage. Policy-makers have to decide which instrument to use. We often agree on the basic goals, but the question is how do we get there. The question often comes up about whether we could maybe embrace a tax cut to achieve this goal, or whether we need a spending measure to achieve this goal.

Of course, a tax cut is money you're choosing not to spend. When you've had a tax cut and you reduce government revenues, that precludes the possibility of using those revenues to do other things. The burden of proof then is that your tax cut has to achieve the goal better than a spending measure.

That's a really tough argument to make in many situations. There is a solid case that in many cases public spending achieves these goals better than tax cuts. Of course, if we had a fully developed arsenal of gender budgeting tools at our disposal we would be making this discussion on the basis of much more thorough information than we have today. But I would still be betting that we would be better off spending than having tax cuts for those things.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Professor Russell.

Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen.

We will now go to the second round with Mr. Pearson for five minutes.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Professor Russell, thanks for coming.

We've been wrestling in this committee with the whole idea of the costs of implementing gender budget analysis, and we realize it's expensive. At the same time, my staff and I have been looking at groups like the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank. They all talk about gender budgeting as a way to have far more productive economies. The GDP would be greater and would grow faster if both men and women were able to live up to their potential economically and productively within society.

I realize you're talking about having information. I agree that the more information we have the better. We're at the start of that process here. If we did undertake such a process and got it into the budget and did it, can you comment on whether you think it would outweigh the cost? It's hard to see that from this distance, but what kind of indicators would you use along the way?

In order for us to be able to sell it, if we as a committee chose to go that way, we would have to be able to tell people that it could do that. We realize it's important in and of itself, but this is politics, and we have to show that we can make a difference with it.

Do you have any thoughts you could give us on that?

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

I understand that people do make these cases. I'm sure you can find witnesses who can lead you through cases they may have constructed, as far as the costs and benefits of these things.

Often one of the problems is that the cost of performing this exercise is out of today's budget, whereas the benefits are seen somewhere down the road. So perhaps the government in power today does not see the benefits if they are more concerned about their bottom line at the moment rather than the bottom line in the future. That's a difficulty. I hope we aren't that short-sighted about it. It's a high price to pay if you say you're willing to tolerate gender inequity because of your bottom line today.

Second, we never say that accountability in government is just too expensive and we're not going to pay attention to it any more. It would be shocking for parliamentarians to say, “We're just not going to pay attention how we're spending money, because it's pretty time-consuming to keep track of things.” That's not politically acceptable, and it shouldn't be politically acceptable to say we're willing to tolerate the perpetuation of gender inequity because we just don't want to pay attention to doing the analysis.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Good. I was hoping you'd say that. I agree.

Mr. Bartle, I'm very fascinated, because we are talking about politics here. You talked about one of the real problems we would have if we implemented such a thing--namely, how to sustain it past successive administrations. You talked about places like Australia, South Africa, the Philippines, and how it started and kind of phased out.

Can you point us to some ways in which we, if we were beginning to work on this, could put in pieces of that puzzle to help it be sustainable? It's not just an idea we'd be throwing out there; we'd actually be able to do it so that it would survive successive administrations.

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

I think this is the greatest challenge of any kind of budget reform, not just gender budget reform. In the U.S., there have been a number of American presidents who came in saying, “I have a new budget system. We're going to use it. It's going to make things better.” Jimmy Carter did that with zero-based budgeting. Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy did it with PPBS--program planning budgetary systems--and so on. Performance budgeting was associated mostly with Clinton.

I think there's an inherent political tendency to want to throw out the approach of your predecessor and to bring in something new that you like and that is going to work, especially, quite frankly, when it finesses the politically difficult problem of how we get more programs without raising taxes.

At the same time, when you stop to think about it, with any sort of fiscal routine, we don't stop auditing; we don't stop making appropriations; we don't stop analyzing them. So in a certain sense, looking at the successful innovations, which are just those things like line-item budgets and auditing and all the elements of the normal system, those become part of professional norms.

Accountants, for example, know what an appropriate accounting basis for analyzing a government budget is. I think that may be ultimately what you're shooting for, what the goal is.

Sustaining it is really the hardest question. Again, trying to weave it into the fabric of the organization and doing it, as I mentioned, through all the phases of the budgetary process is what I would try to do--understanding, of course, that it's a difficult task.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Dr. Bartle.

Thank you, Mr. Pearson.

We now go to Ms. Grewal for five minutes.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Dr. Bartle and Dr. Russell, for your time and your presentations.

If the federal government were to introduce gender budgeting, what would you suggest as specific goals to be addressed? Either of you can answer.

[Dr. Ellen Russell]

My suggestion has been this initial first step--which I think is a pretty modest first step--just to give us a gender breakdown on any new tax cuts. You can and should get more elaborate than that, coming up with some kind of basic scoresheet, in effect, to see what the gender consequences of different policies are. This is especially true for new policies, because when there's a new policy, you have an opportunity to do it right the first time rather than fixing something that was done wrong some time ago.

Apply that filter to upcoming policies. Ask, as a matter of course, what the gender consequences are of a new policy. If it's a tax measure, who is getting the tax cut? If it's a spending measure, who is likely to be the beneficiary of that spending? That's just a beginning step. You can get fancier than that, but it's a good start.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Dr. Bartle, do you know of any measures Canada has undertaken to advance the concept of gender budgeting?

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

I can't speak to the Canadian situation, but I do have three suggestions.

One, I think you should articulate goals for gender equity in specific programs, and then you should audit them.

Second, for grants that the federal government gives out to provincial governments, local governments, or NGOs, I would require that when they report, they report on whether or not they've achieved gender equity goals.

The third suggestion I would have is to train the analysts in how to do this. Ideally, they'd create a cadre of analysts who would then turn around and train others within the agencies so they would know how to do it. If they don't know how to do it, then it's hard for them to comply.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Madam Chair, do I have some more time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have two minutes plus.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I suppose the assumption behind gender budgeting is that policy is not gender neutral. So government programs benefit one sex more than another and the balance sheet favours men. If we accept this as a fact, should we also accept that the best way to rebalance government policy is through gender budgeting?

Any one of you can answer.

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

I think in many ways, in a certain sense, the term “gender budget” is a misnomer. It implies that the budget is now totally different, done in a different way from before it was a gender budget, and now that it is....

Some of you have used the term “lens”, and I think that's appropriate. To me, it's an approach to budget analysis and to allocating funds and it's a lens with which to examine it. But again, it can fit with existing budget formats.

If I were a budget officer for your central government, my concern would be, “Okay, now what do I do? Does this mean I have to change the format of the budget that we're doing?”

Again, I think if you don't have to change the forms too much in order to comply, then it's much easier for the analysts and the people in the agencies. I would urge you to keep it as simple as possible, to use it as a lens, an approach, a method of analysis, but it's not really a different format.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

We are nearly done.

Madame Freeman for five minutes.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Mr. Bartle and Ms. Russell, thank you for being here and for giving us your presentations.

Mr. Bartle, what were the first measures taken by the governments that undertook comparative gender budget analysis? You've given us some ideas and you've told us how we should begin.

Is that how the other countries started their search?

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

What were the first measures taken by the governments that conducted comparative gender budget analyses in gender budgets? What data did they start with?

The committee is undertaking a study of quite broad scope, and we have to try to bring that back into a concrete area and be as efficient as possible.

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

I believe the first sets of steps in Australia were simply to analyze existing programs, and then in turn to have that analysis inform what data needed to be collected, either refinements in existing data or not. Then I think in South Africa it was done somewhat more outside of the budgetary process, more as an analysis by external groups, civil society groups, as a part of their examination of the budget, but not really a part of the government's budgetary process.

In those cases, I think those are the characteristic first steps that they took.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

So Australia and South Africa have used two different ways of gathering the data. In your opinion, which was the more effective?

In the context of this committee, what kind of witnesses, what kind of experts could come and help us prepare a study that would enable us to achieve the desired objectives?

[Dr. John R. Bartle]

I don't think it's as much about collecting data as it is about making the decision to do it. So I think the data can help, but I think as Dr. Russell said earlier, you can do some kind of an analysis with existing data. It may then suggest new data that you need, but I would do the analysis first, rather than to wait for the data to come.

In terms of the most effective first steps, who you should hear from? Quite frankly, I would talk to the budget officers in the finance bureau and ask them, “What would you need to do this? Do you need more training? Do you need more information? Do you need to visit other countries' ministries of treasury to see what they've done?”

Again, from a public administration viewpoint, which is my area, if they're going to do it, they need to know how to do it. They need to be able to do it.

So I think that's where I would begin.