Evidence of meeting #8 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 things.
A recording is available from Parliament.
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a quorum as far as hearing witnesses goes. We will call this meeting to order. This is the eighth meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.
We have a couple of presenters here with us this afternoon: we have Ms. Lissa Donner and Ms. Armine Yalnizyan. Also, on video conference from the University of South Australia, we have Professor Sharp.
Can you hear us, Professor?
3:40 p.m.
Dr. Rhonda Sharp Professor of Economics, Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, University of South Australia
I can, and I can see you well too. Can you hear and see me?
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Okay.
Each presenter will have 10 minutes, and then we will go into questioning.
3:40 p.m.
Armine Yalnizyan Director of Research, Community Social Planning Council of Toronto
First of all, I want to thank you very much for being invited to address this committee.
I want to indicate that I am the director of research at the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto and an economist. We do research and community development. We work with the community services sector in Toronto. We are funded by the United Way and the City of Toronto.
The community services sector of Toronto has about 1,500 organizations that provide services directly to hundreds of thousands of residents and touch the lives of virtually everybody.
Yesterday Statistics Canada announced that Toronto is the UN in action: it is the city on the surface of the planet that has the most concentration of foreign-born. I can tell you that in our years of working with community sector groups in very diverse communities, the single and most resounding reality is that women make the difference in the societies as you're trying to improve the lives of residents of all kinds, in all income classes, and in all neighbourhoods where people lives.
I greatly thank you for taking seriously the issue of gender budgeting.
I want to indicate that my remarks are written down. I have submitted them today, hopefully for translation for everybody on the committee—about five pages' worth of notes—and I will not be reading directly from my document.
I want to say first of all that we genuinely applaud the serious discussion of gender budgeting.
It's of course important to discuss not just the tool but what you're using the tool for, taking a look at the analysis in which budgetary policies and government policies have differential impacts on women and men in this country. It is widely acknowledged that the full participation of women in gender equality is a vital precursor to achieve economic growth, social development, and political sustainability.
In part, those three things—women's full participation in life—provide the reason that Canadians are given as to why our soldiers, both men and women, are fighting in Afghanistan. I remember being very struck about a year and a half ago by the military official in charge of Kandahar province saying, “You can't come to Kandahar and go away not being a feminist.” We heartily applaud the work that is being done there to bring women and children into the fold of political discourse. We would encourage you to do the same thing here in Canada among our marginalized women and children.
The federal commitment to improving the quality of life of Canadians cannot be done without a corresponding commitment to women's equality, we believe. To date there has been no publicly available government analysis of how the policies adopted, such as tax cuts, cuts to unemployment insurance, housing, and supports for legal assistance, play out for women as compared with men.
Not only has there been no assessment of those changes, but we have had no assessment of what the impact would be not only on women but on the economy of public investments that expand the stock and affordability of housing and child care or offset the costs of skills training and post-secondary education for those who cannot save enough through RRSPs and RESPs.
My first question to you is, why do you even want to look at gender budgeting? What is it, and why do it?
The short answer is, what you can do through gender budgeting is one of two things. You can either look at what women need and figure out how to pay for the things that we say women need, or you can look at how you already allocate public resources and who benefits from fiscal policies, both taxation policies and spending policies.
Frankly, a gender budget tool is useless in and of itself. It is there to put into place a plan. You may ask what that gender plan would be, and I would answer, we have that plan and have had it at least since 1995.
But in fact it starts with what we signed on to in 1948.
Just as a point of curiosity, in 1946 a Montreal lawyer, John Humphrey, was the man who penned the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Canada signed, and in various iterations since 1948 Canada has signed on internationally to the agreement that women should expect of course to have their voices heard in the public arena; they should expect safety and security where they live; they should expect a share, and a decent share, of prosperity; and they should be able to be a viable part of public life, including political life.
Those things were all signed on to in 1948 by undertaking gender budget analysis or gender audits. The federal government would finally be living up to the key commitments made in 1995 at Beijing, when we signed on to the Beijing platform along with 188 other nations; that is, if we implemented policies to reduce systemic barriers faced by women in their pursuit of freedom from violence, access to the basics in life, and the opportunity to develop their potential, as well as an equal voice in public life. This is a very short list of things that need to be done and that we have already agreed we wish to pursue.
Back in 1995 the federal government, having signed the Beijing platform, said in order to meet its commitments made in Beijing, “The cornerstone of the Federal Plan is a policy requiring federal departments and agencies to conduct gender-based analysis of future policies and legislation.” We are still waiting for this to happen. It is greatly acknowledged and encouraged that you continue these very serious discussions on how to make gender budgeting a reality, because that's what's going to facilitate it to move on to the other commitments made to women in 1995.
Given the actions taken last year by the federal government to silence women's NGOs that explicitly advocate for greater and substantive gender equity, not just equal treatment, it is heartening to see the federal government is now examining ways to take these objectives back in-house to ensure that policies are not gender biased toward men, so they don't favour men, and do not have the perverse impact of further advantaging those who are already advantaged in our society.
NGOs have always said the task is greater than the resources available to our sector and that indeed it is the proper and appropriate responsibility of government to undertake this sort of analysis when deciding how to spend our money.
I want to go very briefly to what we've signed. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948, according to the Beijing Platform for Action, according to the millennium development goals we signed onto 2000, and, more recently, with four provinces and two federal parties indicating we must make a move on a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy, I would say we have more than enough adequate plans on how to move to assure better equality for women in this country.
These initiatives all have had many elements in common, and the top four things they all endorse--which by the way are endorsed by a vast majority of Canadians irrespective of political affiliation, as we have seen in polling by Environics--these four top measures that most Canadians would support are affordable housing, affordable post-secondary education, affordable child care, and improved minimum wages.
The federal government has a role to play in all these things, and irrespective of which party was to take that forward, if you moved on any of those things you would have the vast backing of Canadians in every region, in every income spectrum, irrespective of political support.
You will note that these things are not gender specific. However, they have a disproportionately beneficial impact on women.
I believe you heard last week about the impacts of tax cuts on women as compared to men. In the interests of time, I am not referring to how you could do better gender budget analysis, but I want to say that federal policies have long relied--there is a little gap here in my presentation that I'm going to fill in. I am worried about running out of time.
I do want to connect the dots to our federal government's reliance, and this has been a longstanding reliance, on immigration policy. We will be relying on immigrants as a pillar of economic growth and advancement, more so in the coming decade as we see a sea change in the labour market in this country as more people will be retiring than we have ever seen before.
It is absolutely incongruous that we should be inviting more people to this country. They come to the growth poles of this economy where there is precisely a lack of access to affordable housing in those places, and systems of public infrastructure, both hard and soft, are already stretched to the limit.
The fiscal tools for meeting these things are available at the senior levels of government, but cities and municipalities are increasingly tasked with the process of making things work, so I want to refer to the fiscal imbalance that exists.
I do want to indicate that the premier policy that has been adopted by parties of every political stripe at both senior levels of government between 1996 and 2004 has not been to meet any of these things that I have discussed--affordable housing, affordable child care, affordable post-secondary education, or raising the minimum wage, which wouldn't cost governments a penny--but has been in tax cuts.
Let me simply say that I believe this particular group of people here can be vocal critics of further tax cuts. We have already spent $250 billion on tax cuts between 1996 and 2004. The current federal government has spent the last 21 months in power scheduling a further $191 billion in tax cuts.
We need investments, and it's up to you to help us champion and endorse these investments in the areas we know can make a big difference in women's lives, that will in fact, by supporting a women's agenda, find a way to support an agenda that promotes economic security, human development, and political stability for all.
I thank you for your time and look forward to the next step in this process.
3:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Thank you very much.
We'll now move to Professor Sharp. We don't have notes for Professor Sharp, so we'll be taking notes as you speak.
You have 10 minutes to make your presentation, please.
3:50 p.m.
Professor of Economics, Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, University of South Australia
Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.
I'm going to speak to you today as somebody who's been involved in gender-responsive budgeting since its inception in Australia in the mid-1980s. It's been a journey of some 22 years. I just wanted to talk to you about some of the insights I've gained along the way.
First, I think it's worth noting that for the majority of countries, the government budget is the major source of finance for gender equality and women's empowerment, so we're left in a position that if we're serious about promoting women's empowerment and gender equality, we can't ignore the impact of the government budget.
That having been said, though, there is no clear pathway to how we can make sure the government budget does deliver those objectives. It's not so much a technical problem of not knowing; although there are technical problems and we need increasingly better data--particularly gender-desegregated data and analysis--the problem is a political one.
I'm probably not saying anything new to a group such as yours that at the heart of the budget process is a political process and it requires contestation. Commitment at very high levels is required as well if things are going to change in the area of gender equality.
I'd like to endorse the comments of the previous speaker. It's interesting sitting here, because in Australia we're following a similar policy path in giving enormous emphasis these days to tax cuts as a policy instrument. Tax cuts and tax expenditures, or what I call tax concessions, have enormous gender impacts and go through the budgetary process almost without question as being a good thing for everybody. They're not a good thing for everybody.
The other point I'd like to make is that it is unlikely that any developed country has not, at some time, sought to make government budgets more responsive to gender equity and equality. So what I'm saying is this process of gender-responsive budgeting is not entirely new.
I was reading the other day a very good publication from the Canadian office of the Status of Women. It was talking about the particular impact of tax expenditures in relation to women's retirement income. This is an example of a plank in gender budgeting--that is, gender analysis of the impacts of budgets.
What we're moving into increasingly I think since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action recommendation that government budgets should be scrutinized for their gender impacts is an era in which we're asking how we can explicitly and systematically scrutinize the budget and engage in actions and processes that will bring about change. There have probably been elements of gender budgeting in developed countries since we developed plans for gender equality and women's empowerment, but it's the issue of the explicit and systematic link to the budget process that's been lacking in the past.
I think another understanding I've come to is that naming something is political. If we put it up in lights that we're doing a gender budget initiative, it sometimes sets us up. I'd like to see more and more gender budgeting as just the normal everyday work of politicians, NGOs, and the bureaucracy--and also, importantly, of ministries of finance or treasury.
In Australia, we did go down the track of sort of saying we are doing “women's budgets”, as we called them, in the mid-1990s. So it ultimately gets constructed as a project rather than the normal everyday work.
When I talked to my New Zealand colleagues, they said to me, “We're not doing gender budgeting.” I said, “That's interesting, for a developed country that has a very strong women's policy.” So I started to deconstruct the process by asking the question of what they do to implement their women's policy. It very soon became apparent that they're engaged at a number of significant levels, particularly with the finance ministry, in making sure that there is a flow of resources to support the projects that are needed to implement their plan and that there's scrutiny of new projects that go up to cabinet from a gender perspective. But they would say, “We're not doing gender budgeting”, and I would say they're engaged in the politics, particularly under—not so much now but in the recent past—a very strong neo-liberal framework for operating that made it difficult to name gender and women's equality as a priority.
Some of the key lessons I've learned over my 22 years of involvement I'll just put to you as a series of points.
The first one is that specifically targeted allocations to women and girls or men and boys are important, there's no doubt about that. But we must keep remembering they're minuscule in terms of the total budget. Every assessment of this—and I've done one myself for my state here in South Australia—shows them always to be less than 1% of the total budget. So it's important that when we talk about gender budgeting, we're genuinely looking at the other 99% of government expenditures that are not gender specific but have important gender impacts, like retirement income policies; family policies; infrastructure policies, even; tax cuts; whatever. They're not designed, we're often told, for women or for men, but the issue here is to work out what their impacts are and change them if we don't like them.
Some countries are still persisting with focusing on gender-specific targeted allocations. I don't want to undermine those claims. I'm just saying we need to be clear that they're just one element of gender budgeting and not the most important in terms of the total dollars or impacts.
Another observation that certainly came home to me here in Australia, but in every country in the world I've worked in, is that the wider economic and political context in particular, the macro-economic strategy that's in place, and the discourses about the role of government do play a fundamental role in shaping what can be achieved I think in relation to gender equality, but just as importantly, they're going to shape the design of any gender-responsive budgeting exercise that you may wish to implement.
4 p.m.
Conservative
4 p.m.
Professor of Economics, Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, University of South Australia
Okay.
Under a neo-liberal framework, it's much more difficult to get increases in expenditure through the budget, but there are spaces for actions. We can more effectively use the budget reforms that have been going on that emphasize transparency, accountability, and participation, and the use of results-based indicators to make them more gender sensitive.
Lastly, crucial to it all, which I started out with, is that you do need champions for this work and you need them over a long period of time, and you need a high level of political commitment within the government to make sure that it keeps on moving, and you need the involvement of treasury. You can't afford to let them sit on the sidelines.
The final piece of that picture is that you need a very active civil society and NGOs putting pressure and contestation around the budget.
Thank you.
4 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Thank you very much, Professor.
Now we will move to Ms. Donner, please. I will let you know when you have a minute left as well.
4 p.m.
United Nations Platform for Action Committee Manitoba
Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I'm here today as a volunteer representing UNPAC Manitoba. UNPAC is the United Nations Platform for Action Committee.
In Winnipeg I am self-employed. I do research, much of it focused on gender and women's health and social and economic situation.
UNPAC Manitoba has existed since 1995, when 45 Manitoba women who attended the UN Fourth World Congress on Women in Beijing returned and were keen, as Armine has talked about, to carry on the work and to really hold the feet of government to the fire here to ensure that Canada lives up to its commitments under the Beijing Platform for Action.
UNPAC has existed since that time. From 2003 to 2007 UNPAC received funding from Status of Women Canada for its gender budgeting project. UNPAC has also received funding from the Province of Manitoba and hopes to again receive funding from Status of Women Canada to continue its work. Currently, all staff have been laid off because of these funding cuts.
I want to talk a bit about UNPAC's gender budget project, the overall goal of which is to reduce women's poverty. We're not interested in abstract studies of federal and provincial government budgets. Government policies and budgetary decisions can either alleviate or exacerbate women's disproportionate burden of poverty.
UNPAC has used education, consultation, and working with decision-makers to reach its goals, adopting a treetops and grassroots approach, working both with government decision-makers, the treetops, and with local women, the grassroots.
The grassroots part of this strategy involved 46 workshops over two years from 2005 to 2007. The workshops were held across Manitoba to introduce mostly low-income women to government budgeting processes and to learn from them about their priorities for government revenues and expenditures. They were designed to be fun and interactive.
UNPAC also developed a cartoon character, La Femme Fiscale. If you have my written presentation, she's on page 2. La Femme appeared in cartoons and in postcards, to popularize these issues. She also appeared in person at the Manitoba legislature to comment on the 2006 and 2007 provincial budgets.
Those 46 workshops held across our province over two years identified a number of issues. The themes—Armine and I did not plan this—sound remarkably similar. The first was housing, housing, and housing; the second, child care; the third, affordable public transportation; the fourth, employment, work, and income—decent-paying jobs, pay equity, and better employment options for women—health, including a greater focus on prevention; intersectionality, that is programs that recognize the ways in which all of these factors combine to hold women back; government programs with long-term stable funding, adequate resources, and staff sensitive to the needs and experiences of low-income women; and government revenue.
As the previous two speakers have mentioned, the perspectives of the women who attended these workshops are not really in sync with current federal government initiatives. They called for increased corporate taxes, higher personal income taxes for high-income earners, luxury and sin taxes, such as a tax on junk food, and green taxes.
That was the grassroots part of UNPAC's work. What about the treetops?
The treetops part of the strategy was designed to get the message about the importance of gender analysis and the priorities of women attending the workshops to key decision-makers.
At the close of each workshop, women had the opportunity to write a letter to their local MLA, asking that gender analysis be made part of the budget process and naming their own specific budget priorities. Letters were copied to the Minister of Finance and the Minister responsible for the Status of Women.
UNPAC also met with our provincial Minister of Finance, the Hon. Greg Selinger, and other key ministers, such as the Minister responsible for the Status of Women and the Minister of Family Services and Housing.
With the assistance of the Minister of Finance, these meetings were followed by ongoing meetings with senior staff to discuss options about how government could use the results of the grassroots consultations.
As a result of these initiatives, the Minister of Finance expressed an interest in improving gender and diversity analysis skills among provincial civil servants. UNPAC encouraged these efforts and supported the idea of pilot projects as a way to both test the usefulness of GBA and to build skills internally.
At the first stage, the province prioritized analyses of the situations of aboriginal women and men and boys and girls, and women and men and boys and girls with disabilities. And in my professional life, I was contracted to lead this project.
We began with training in gender and diversity analysis for program managers and policy analysts, and this was followed by four pilot projects on priority issues that were identified by departments, one with Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, one with the Public Library Services Branch, one on housing that I will describe to you in more detail, and one with Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives.
In the remainder of my presentation I would like to focus on the portion of the work done in the Manitoba Family Services and Housing pilot project. The department was interested in learning more about the demographics of those Manitobans living in what Statistics Canada calls “core housing need”.
And if you have the English version of my written brief, that definition appears in a footnote at the bottom of page 5. It deals with three elements: affordability, suitability, and adequacy of housing.
Manitoba Housing was interested in understanding more about the population living in core housing need in order to better plan for the development and redevelopment of social housing in our province, particularly in Winnipeg.
Usually, data about core housing needs are published about households. This seems to make intuitive sense--people live in households--but it masks the sex differences in the incidence of core housing need.
If you look at figure 1, which is on page 5 of the English version of my brief, you'll see a standard presentation of that. In Winnipeg, as in Manitoba and Canada as a whole, the percentage of households living in core housing need increased from 1991 to 1996 and then decreased from 1996 to 2001. Since 1996, Winnipeg's core housing need rate has been lower than that for both Manitoba and Canada. So where is the problem? Why are all you women complaining?
In 2001 there were just over 60,000 Winnipegers living in core housing need. By including gender in our analysis, we discovered that women had a higher incidence of core housing need. In Winnipeg and in Manitoba as a whole, for every 100 males living in core housing need, there were about 125 females. So at the very outset you can see just simple sex disaggregation of the data makes a big difference to our understanding. That's shown in figure 2, which is on page 6 of the English version of my brief.
We also wanted to examine core housing need among males and females through the life course. We found that the largest group of Winnipeg residents living in core housing need were children, almost 21,000 of them, and young adults aged 18 to 44, particularly young women. About 13,600 young women lived in core housing need in my city in 2001. This is shown in figure 3.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
4:05 p.m.
United Nations Platform for Action Committee Manitoba
Okay.
Note that while the incidence of core housing need is lower among senior men than among working-age men, it's higher among senior women than among their younger counterparts.
I understand I'm out of time. I'd like to draw your attention to figure 4, which shows that when we consider disability status, again it is women with disabilities who are at higher risk of core housing need than men. It's the same for aboriginal women compared to both aboriginal men and their non-aboriginal counterparts, and again, if we look at males and females, by immigration status.
The participants in UNPAC's grassroots workshops identified housing as a major budget concern for women wherever they lived in the province.
Research done as part of a gender and diversity analysis project for the Province of Manitoba helped to document the greater burden of core housing need borne by women, as well as familiarize provincial employees with the value of considering gender and diversity analysis in planning government programs.
I want to conclude by saying that, importantly, Manitoba Family Services and Housing has indicated these data will help shape their future decisions about the development and redevelopment of social housing in our province.
We remind the committee of Canada's obligations under the Beijing Platform for Action to work toward gender equality and to undertake gender analysis. The question here should be how to proceed, not whether or not to do so.
We would recommend this committee encourage the federal government to support governmental and non-governmental collaborations to understand and act upon the differential impacts of its budgetary initiatives on women and men. As demonstrated in this case study, policy and program areas such as housing, which appear to be gender neutral on the surface, are often not so in practice.
Thank you very much.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
Thank you.
Thank you to each of our presenters.
We'll now go to the question round, the first round being seven minutes.
We will start with Mr. Pearson, please.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much, all of you, for coming. This has been a bit of a journey for us as we're trying to get our heads around the whole idea of gender budgeting.
Just briefly, Ms. Sharp, we had a professor from the United States here a couple of meetings ago, and he was talking to us about gender budgeting analysis. He was talking about Australia as an example. He said that things have started well but have tailed off since that time. Is that correct? If it has fallen off the rails, could you tell us why?
4:10 p.m.
Professor of Economics, Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, University of South Australia
The first thing I'd say is it did last at the federal level in a very explicit and visible way for 12 years, and that's not bad for any exercise. All the state and territorial governments introduced these, what I thought and what I now call the “femocrat”-based, gender-responsive budget, meaning it was driven by the women's policy units within government. Those exercises continued in similar forms right up to about 2001.
What happened after that is that at the federal level we got a change of government, which has changed again very recently. In 1996 it abolished the femicrat-type exercise and replaced it each year with a ministerial budget statement. So it was still visible, but it was more politicized and less reliant on analysis. It was a recognition that government was saying they still needed to be accountable to the public in some way.
In South Australia the exercise morphed into various forms. Even in 2003 the treasury was still publishing an appendix to the budget papers, saying this was the impact on women and girls.
What I would say is it never stays the same. A mistake we made in Australia was thinking we could have the same model forever. Things change, particularly the economic and political climate. By the early to mid-1990s, we shifted into a discourse that the role of government had to be reduced all the time. The basis on which we had introduced gender-responsive budgeting was in more of a Keynesian economic environment where it was possible to get substantial increases in funding for women's issues. When that environment changed, we didn't really have a strategy, other than stopping the worst from happening.
We know a lot more now, but I think each country has to design the exercise according to its conditions. I would say now there's more of a consultative process within government on these issues and much more emphasis on whole of government approaches, but we don't call it a gender budget exercise or a women's budget exercise; we try to always bring the budget element into the process. What we're still lacking I think is a strong movement outside government to put pressure on the budget.
4:15 p.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
Thank you, Ms. Sharp. I appreciate that.
Ms. Yalnizyan, you made some evocative statements, I thought, at the beginning when you spoke. We are trying to get our heads around gender budgets. In many ways, I think a lot of this is that we don't know quite how to start.
I've worked a fair bit in Africa over the years. With women's groups and others, we have signed all sorts of declarations with community leaders and others, and we come back a year later and find out that none of these things have been respected. Now that's Africa. In Canada, I know, with the Beijing signing in 1995 and other things, we're a fairly advanced country, and yet we seem to have trouble moving ahead on this ourselves.
So my question is this. People like me who are trying to get their heads around it kind of need a Gender budgeting for Dummies—I'm speaking about myself—something in which somebody could help us to get started.
You have mentioned four things. I think you mentioned post-secondary education, housing, pay equity, and the fourth was...?
4:15 p.m.
Director of Research, Community Social Planning Council of Toronto
Child care and minimum wage. In fact, the fourth thing is minimum wage, and it wouldn't cost governments anything. It would be just setting the rules of the road.
4:15 p.m.
Liberal
Glen Pearson Liberal London North Centre, ON
I wonder if you could take just one example that you think would be good. How could we get started, as opposed to just eyeing it and trying to get a perspective on it? How would we make it work?
4:15 p.m.
Director of Research, Community Social Planning Council of Toronto
I have to say, Mr. Pearson—and I thank you very much for your question—it isn't a vague thing. It's actually more about poverty reduction than anything else, as Lissa has said. It's really just moving forward on those things that we have failed to invest in.
With due respect, we cut in the mid-1990s. You know, it's often said that the poor bore the brunt of the costs of getting this country's fiscal house in order, and I have to repeat again and again, it was women who did it. It was women who primarily benefited from the programs that were cut. It's not women who primarily benefit from tax cuts.
We seem to have a lot of money to throw around. I have to remind you, we are the ninth largest economy on the surface of the planet, with a fraction of the population. That is, to me, an eye-popping number as an economist, that we're the ninth biggest economy. We're the only economy of the advanced industrial nations that enjoys fiscal surpluses. We have for the last 10 years, and as far as the eye can see, now that provincial levels of government are enjoying surpluses...and we don't seem to have enough money for a national housing project, which we know would make a material difference in women's lives.
Women have no place to go. The violence-against-women shelters are full. They are going to emergency shelters with their children, which is not a place for women and children to be.
It's imponderable to me. We are inviting immigrants to come. Where do they go? They go to Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Where's the biggest housing crisis in this country? Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. We have no national policy. That's seen as something that cities should be doing. You can't do it without everybody rowing in the same direction. Cities do not have the resources to meet the needs of living conditions.
So housing, to me, would be the biggest thing you could do to make a material difference in women's lives, but it isn't a gender-specific thing. You know when you do tax incidence studies on the effect of tax cuts—you heard about this last week—that the primary beneficiaries of tax cuts are male. You can see that by just going through tax information. Where are women in the income registries? They're in the middle and at the bottom of the income spectrum. Who gets the lion's share of tax cuts? Those in the middle to the top. That's just the way it works.
So if you want to spend our surplus somehow in a way that invests in the future, housing would be number one, making sure that people have pathways to—
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
4:20 p.m.
Director of Research, Community Social Planning Council of Toronto
Of course. My apologies.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
No, that's fine.
We're going to move on, and perhaps you'll get a chance to expound some more on those things.
We move to Madame Deschamps, please, for seven minutes.
4:20 p.m.
Bloc
Johanne Deschamps Bloc Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
First of all, I would like to welcome you.
I'm going to continue in the wake of what Mr. Pearson said. This is quite complex. Sometimes we get the impression that we're experiencing a surprising paradox. We try to define a budget that promotes gender equality and to acquire the tools to do that. In the past two years, we've dealt with two Conservative government budgets that do not appear to be promoting gender equality.
One question is of great concern to me. Is it preferable to allocate a government's budget surpluses to pay down the debt or to invest part of those amounts in social programs in order precisely to promote gender equality?
In the past year, we've had witnesses tell us about women's economic security. We've virtually made the rounds of what could concern that type of economic security. We've talked about elderly women, housing, employment insurance and women heads of single-parent families. In general, the heads of single-parent families are women. So very few tools currently exist. In addition, in the government's last budget statement, there is no indication that concrete measures and means will be taken to promote equality between men and women.
Doesn't allocating all budget surpluses to pay down the debt further heighten the inequality between men and women?