Status of Women Committee on Dec. 10th, 2007

[Hélène Dwyer-Renaud]

I thought you were going to ask me how many years I have been doing this work. I would have found that depressing.

[Some members]

Ha ha!

[Hélène Dwyer-Renaud]

There was light at the end of the tunnel only about two years ago, and not just in Canada. It is a global movement. When we send our reports to the United Nations, we realize that people are actually going to make a difference in accountability.

For several years, we have been transferring data concepts throughout the world, but we have yet to begin retracing the results. We need a mechanism to do that. The departments have only been required to prove that their programs produce real results for about two or perhaps five years. Two years ago, we began asking how a program takes into consideration gender differences.

This is something new for the central agencies. They should be congratulated: they are interested and curious, and they want to know how it works. Every department must prepare reports about planned activities and then discuss the results obtained. We are currently working with the departments to establish a cycle that will integrate gender-based considerations throughout this cycle. The central agencies will then begin a sort of challenge at the departments because, in effect, the Department of Finance will tell you that the departments are responsible for taking gender into account in their processes and their programs.

These people are in agreement. They have started asking questions, pushing the envelope with these departments and even telling them that if they do not prove that they accept this type of responsibility, they could find it difficult to obtain the money from them.

Since September, the Treasury Board has required all departments making submissions—that is, asking for money from Treasury Board—to prove that they have used gender-based analysis in preparing their submission. That is quite new. The departments are just becoming aware of this fact. It is a lot of work for us but that may be the way to go about it rather than pushing the concept on the public service as a whole, which could give results in the very long term.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

It is about making connections, as Mr. Stanton said earlier. That is what you are doing.

I would also like to know, Ms. Peckford...

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Madame Demers, your five minutes are up.

Ms. Mathyssen is next, for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Madame Demers. I understand your frustration.

I wanted to ask a question and certainly seek an answer wherever.

Ms. Peckford, you talked about our 23 obligations under CEDAW. Quite frankly, it feels like forever since those recommendations came forward and pointed towards a need to change the way we looked at money allocation and how it's spent, and in fact since they seemed to be leading towards gender budgeting. I guess it feels like we're going on this very slow track.

We heard that the Department of Finance is being fully trained in GBA and that at some point down the road we'll get to gender budgeting. What on earth is taking us so long? Why is there this glacial pace?

[Nancy Peckford]

I would have to agree, but I actually do think there's progress.

I need to clarify. We began work on this in 2005. There were other efforts made prior to 2005 to get gender budgeting, or forms of gender budgeting, on the table. I think there is progress. What I began to say before is that Canada has always claimed a really high level of gender budgeting without doing it. They relied on the strength of their gender-based analysis. I think they've often claimed that within the Department of Finance GBA was being done to a greater extent than it was being done. In fact, I don't have evidence that it was being done at all on budgetary measures pre-2005. I think there is progress, but I think it's modest.

If you don't want the progress to be glacial in future years, I think you need civil servants and leadership at the cabinet level to set priorities in terms of women's equality and to recognize the ways in which women are again located differently in the economy, in their communities, and in their families. That's what I would strongly recommend.

In terms of these recommendations from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, they were issued in 2003. I remain convinced that they provide a very good template in terms of starting points to address particular equality gaps. Many of them have financial or budgetary implications. I think Parliament and the Minister of Finance would do very well to incorporate them into the gender budgeting exercises currently under way.

[Clare Beckton]

I would have to share what Nancy said about the need to have leadership. You need to have the training, you need to have the understanding within the bureaucracy, but you also need to have leadership at all levels to ensure that this happens.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have one and a half minutes.

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

It's been brought up in the committee that the family unit may be another useful lens to look through in terms of gender budgeting. I'm concerned that could hide some of the inequalities that women face in the family unit. I wonder if you could comment on that.

[Nancy Peckford]

I'd say that one of the fundamental principles in CEDAW, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, to which we are a party, states that women should be recognized independently within the family. It's not to say that you don't recognize or understand their contribution to the family, but you should recognize them as an independent entity within the family.

Again, I think measures like income splitting are worrisome because they begin to blur those lines. I believe it's important to recognize the ways in which women work and contribute to their families, but I would strongly advise against our consolidating gendered interests into a generalized family unit as if women don't have a distinct experience within that, or as if they all live in a particular family unit, which is obviously not the case. There are many single-parent families in Canada, and most of them are led by women. Often women are the most acutely vulnerable when they are living in alternative family structures for a variety of reasons, and that needs to be recognized.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We now go for five minutes to Ms. Grewal.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all for your presentations.

On gender analysis and gender budgeting, most Canadians would be hard pressed to find the difference between the two. If certain government departments, including Finance, were to fully buy in to gender analysis, would that alleviate the need for gender budgeting?

My second question is--and you can answer them all together--over the last two decades, have we witnessed any marked improvement in how federal government policies impact on the lives of women?

I think everyone will agree with me that the lot of Canadian women has been improving. While more maybe needs to be done, progress has occurred, and I think all of you agree with me. Women are better educated, wages are higher, and poverty is down.

My third question is, how much of this can be attributed to government policies and how much to women themselves?

[Hélène Dwyer-Renaud]

I think I'll try the one about, if you had gender-based analysis theoretically across the departments, would you need gender budgeting? I think that was the question.

Theoretically, and I think Ms. Beckton said that, if all departments did their gender-based analysis in terms of the design of their policies, their programs, and their resource allocation, and looked at it from a results-based position, theoretically that information should be fed to the finance department and theoretically it should go into the budget. There should be, then, a national budget that very much looks at the impacts from a gender perspective. Perhaps that's what I'm trying to do with colleagues from the different departments and the finance department. But I think that's what we're aiming for.

I think it's a cycle, and you've heard the international witnesses talk about that. You'd have to constantly still be evaluating the past to see the future. You'd have to check all the time to make sure that the departments have learned their lessons, if you like, in terms of applying their knowledge to the next cycle of budgeting based on the past cycle of budgeting. So I think there's always going to be the need to do that evaluation from a gender perspective, even though the capacity has been built inside.

[Debbie Budlender]

If I could just try on that question, I think what Ms. Beckton has just said is...though the important words were, if they have done “the analysis” of the situation of this and “the resource allocation”. As soon as she says “the resource allocation”, she's talking about gender-responsive budgeting. Certainly in South Africa and in some other countries, the reason we went to this is that the gender lobby, the women's activists, have been very good at drawing up long lists of what we think ought to happen. But things don't happen unless you give the money to do them. So our slogan became “the budget is the most important policy of any government”, because without money, no other policy works.

The gender-responsive budgeting is saying, you've done your analysis, you've designed a good policy, but are you going to give sufficient money to implement that properly? And we want to check, once you've allocated the money, that you spend it and it reaches the people it was meant to reach.

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

Ms. Budlender, I have a question for you.

A list of nations that have tried gender budgeting is dominated by the names of Commonwealth countries. Looking at your resumé, I can see that you have some knowledge of these initiatives. What can Canada learn from these countries? And what works and what does not work? How many of the countries that have used gender budgeting have used it to analyze every government revenue and expenditure? When it comes to gender budgeting, is there one country you could hold up as an example for all others to follow?

[Debbie Budlender]

My answer to the last one is no. I don't think there's any recipe for gender budgeting. I really do think it's got to be designed to take into account the political situation in the country, the method of budgeting, what has been done before, what are the various processes.

I do think the lessons show that it's something that happens slowly; it's not something that happens overnight. But that is true about any budget reform. I'm sure with your introduction of your resources and results, it wasn't perfect at the beginning and it's probably still not perfect now.

It's something that you grow, but the gender-responsive budgeting, the approach, has to be adapted to build into the existing budgeting system.

In terms of countries that are doing well, as I said earlier, I think Uganda is very interesting. I think Tanzania is very interesting. I think India is an interesting one to watch, because dealing with a country that has 71 ministries and a billion people and is trying to do gender budgeting with line item budgeting is very interesting. But it's certainly not a model that would be useful for Canada. I'm afraid I can't be very helpful in saying what the way for Canada is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to find out from the committee members as to how many more questions we want to ask. We are at 5:10. I know Ms. Neville and Ms. Minna want to ask questions.

Would you like to ask a question, Ms. Demers?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

As many as we can, madame la présidente.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay.

Then I need to give time. We have the last round, and that's a round of five minutes. So if, as teams, you want to share your time within your own groups, that's fine. We need to give time to the presenters to wrap up, if they don't get an opportunity to respond. So please stick to your five minutes, and I will now hit the gavel if you go over five minutes.

With that, I'd like to start off with Ms. Neville.

If you're sharing your time with Ms. Minna, that's fine.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I'll try to be brief.

I'm looking at the Status of Women printout or the deck you gave, and you make some comments here in terms of context, that one size doesn't fit all. You say in particular, “The political process is influenced by broader country and government context”. I raise that because you also say you're focusing on accountability for results.

As I understand from the summary of the discussions that have taken place so far, there's been much discussion of the fact that transparency is lacking in the budget and in the budget process. What I'd like to know is what needs to be done to ensure there is accountability in gender budgets and in policies. How do we make it happen?

[Clare Beckton]

I am not from the finance department, so I can't talk about the internal mechanisms of the finance department; you will have to ask them those kinds of questions. But I think some of the work we're doing with Treasury Board around reporting and ensuring that the mechanisms for reporting contain the accountability--and the same could be said around the budgeting process--is to ensure there are some kinds of mechanisms for accountability in those reporting mechanisms.

We also need to continue to work on indicators, and we do have a project looking at that. We'll be working with other government departments, and we're certainly interested in what's out there in terms of indicators, because we know that as part of this process you have to have indicators to know when you are successful and when you are closing the gap.

So we have to work on those kinds of elements. And our work around program activity, architecture, the management accountability framework, etc., is very important. Those are the kinds of mechanisms we can also be working on with the finance department.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

I have more questions, but I'll pass.

[Nancy Peckford]

One of the things I've identified in my presentation is how important it is to have dialogue with civil society organizations. Internationally, it is recognized that in order to have a rigorous gender budgeting process, you need dialogue, engagement, and conversation with civil society groups who are endeavouring to ensure women's full economic security.

So I think that's a piece of the pie.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

That's not happening now, Nancy.