Status of Women Committee on May 3rd, 2016

[Justine Akman]

Do you mean to ensure that the GBA happens or that...?

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

I mean to ensure that the requirement is met.

[Justine Akman]

If I understand your question correctly, do you mean are there barriers to Status of Women being the enforcer for gender-based analysis?

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Is there a budget issue or a...?

[Justine Akman]

The model we've always used is that we are there as facilitators. We're there to provide the training, but our goal has been to enable other departments, because whether we dedicated all resources within Status of Women to gender-based analysis or just the existing ones, we couldn't possibly do gender-based analysis for all of government.

As to whether we could play that monitoring role that you're discussing for all of government, we really need to empower the experts within the departments to do their gender-based analysis.

We can give a helping hand and, as I discussed, we're planning on doing that going forward with our strategic initiatives, but we haven't traditionally played that really strong enforcement role in the way you're speaking about it.

Of course, we're not alone in this either. It's also the role of the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board Secretariat to play that kind of coordinating role for gender-based analysis and to ensure that it is followed in memorandums to cabinet and also in Treasury Board submissions and regulations and evaluations and other things that they look at.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Moving to the list of which departments and agencies have committed to the departmental action plan, do we have on record already who has committed and who hasn't?

[Vaughn Charlton]

We certainly know who they are and we could provide that list to the committee.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

That would be helpful, because I think there's quite a sizeable separation, isn't there? I can't remember what the number is, but it's something like out of 110—I won't try to make up the figure.

[Justine Akman]

Thirty departments have formally signed on, and part of that had to do with our own capacity to reach out to all of them. That's not to say that no gender-based analysis is happening in other departments. It is a government policy and has been for some time. I wouldn't want people to think that one is completely exclusive of the other—that if you're not part of our 30 action plan departments, you're not doing any gender-based analysis. All departments and agencies are supposed to be doing it.

[Vaughn Charlton]

When we selected the 25 initial departments, we did it keeping in mind where most of the program spending was, trying to reach out to those departments that have the biggest direct impact. Accounting for our small size and our limited capacity to be working one-on-one with departments, which is extremely limited, we tried to get the most value for our efforts, so they were selected. A lot of the 110 would probably be small agencies, some of them subsumed under larger agencies that probably do have a GBA policy, so it's a bit of a misleading figure.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

I appreciate that you would identify the ones that you intuitively felt would have the biggest impact. That's a smart way to operate.

Have you identified any other barriers that would—

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry. That's your time.

We'll go over to our Liberal friends. Ms. Sahota, you have seven minutes.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you again for being with us here today.

I wanted to turn this into a positive perspective on what we have achieved so far. I'd like to get a few solid examples from you, other than immigration; I know that's been coming up.

How have other departments or agencies applied GBA to any particular policy, and what was the outcome? Did it change that policy for the better? Could you elaborate on that to give me a better idea?

[Vaughn Charlton]

Sure. Thanks for the question.

We have a lot of examples. Certainly the departments themselves are the best ones to speak to their own policies. We won't know them in as much depth, but we certainly get feedback from departments quite a bit. The health portfolio has a lot of excellent examples. It was certainly surprising to me to learn how little medical research still is based on a male model and uses male lab animals and things like that.

The health portfolio has done quite a bit of work in developing sex- and gender-based analysis tools. The example that comes to mind, and it's in our course, is research on heart disease. By using SGBA, it was determined that the symptoms of heart disease were very different for men and women. Something that we might assume is the same for everyone turned out not to be at all. I can also think of programs at employment and skills development dealing with engaging indigenous communities in economic programming and things like that.

A really interesting one that we've been working on recently comes from dealing more and more with operational agencies. As Justine was just mentioning, we've been working with the Canadian Armed Forces, and if the committee hasn't seen this document, we'd encourage you to look at it. The Chief of the Defence Staff has issued a directive on the implementation of the women, peace, and security resolutions, which are UN Security Council resolutions. This document, which was released in January, commits the Canadian Armed Forces to conducting GBA in all their operational military planning. I certainly don't know of anything like this internationally, so it'll be very interesting to see its progress.

So it isn't about women in the military, and yes, it is about women in the military. What they're looking at is that their operational effectiveness is increased when they're looking at gender and diversity going into an operation. That came from General Vance's experiences in Afghanistan, where they realized we could have been much more effective if they had been engaging other parts of the population. That's an ongoing example of looking at GBA not simply about the people in your workforce but as something that can enhance your work internationally.

Those are just a few. We encourage you to be asking the departments you're going to see about their examples of GBA.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

We definitely will be. Thank you for sharing that, because it gives me some insight as to which departments to ask what questions.

We've been hearing around the table that there hasn't been implementation everywhere, but it seems to me that a lot of departments have started implementing it. If we can get these positive stories out about how it's actually made their policies or programs more effective.... What is your department doing in terms of publicizing the work that other departments and agencies have been doing in regard to GBA?

[Justine Akman]

This is a part of the action plan that I personally am very excited about, because I think we really need to do a better job of explaining to ourselves as federal officials, but more importantly to Canadians, why gender-based analysis is so important. I don't believe that we need to have some formal exercise called “gender-based analysis”, but we do need to ensure that gender considerations are taken into account in all of our programming and policies.

An example is work done last year with ISED, the industry department, in ensuring that women owners of small and medium-sized enterprises and women entrepreneurs were being fully considered in the programs to support SMEs, small and medium-sized enterprises, and in the programming and policies of ISED. It wasn't actually called a formal GBA, but by focusing in on the gender aspect, the department was able to identify gaps and realized they needed more research. They worked with StatsCan to start developing that research and then on going forward with changes to policies and programs.

Going forward, we will be focusing on that part of GBA: how do we tell the story better? As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we'll be developing indicators. We'll be thinking about an evaluation strategy of some sort, whether it's formal or informal. We're not quite sure yet, because it's quite daunting. We'll also be thinking about what kinds of reports we can issue to show people that, yes, it has made a difference to Canadians.

[Vaughn Charlton]

I wonder if I could add a bit.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

You have one minute and 30 seconds. Go ahead.

[Vaughn Charlton]

I think your question was about what we do to promote the best practices of others. I have a few probably very concrete examples of the ways we do that.

The first is that we have a very robust interdepartmental committee on GBA. As I said, there are 35 members, and it's a very active forum. Departments talk to one another about the work they're doing, and they learn from each other.

As Justine mentioned earlier, we've sent out a GBA survey to all deputies. We're going to ask them for examples of where GBA was used so that we can use those as best practices going forward. Our training is always augmented and enhanced when we have those real examples of where it was applied. We've gone out to ask deputies in order to have best practices.

As part of our upcoming GBA awareness week, which is happening from May 16 to 20—just a plug there—we have been collecting from departments some of their success stories. We'll be putting those on our website. They're just small things, but it's just to be inspiring in terms of where there have been successes. We do collect anecdotal evidence, and we hope to get more through our survey.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

You have 20 seconds.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

All right. I'll go over to my Conservative colleague, Ms. Vecchio.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thanks for being here today.

You've talked about a couple of things. As we've all said, we've done the GBA+ online. What other tools and training are available for departments so that we can move forward on this?

[Vaughn Charlton]

In terms of the training we provide at Status of Women, we're a small agency, and what we've tried to do over the past couple of years is partner with other parts of government that have adult learning specialists, in particular the Centre for Intercultural Learning at Global Affairs Canada. I mentioned earlier that they would be involved in training foreign service officers on GBA, so they have some internal expertise.

We've entered into a memorandum of understanding with them for the delivery of advanced GBA training. I know that recently a number of departments took them up on that. In terms of what we're encouraging departments to do, we're working on a cluster approach. For example, we're saying to departments, “Natural Resources Canada and Environment Canada, work together, and hire the CIL to develop this training for you.” It's something that we think is working really well and that we'd like to continue.

In terms of developing advanced GBA training, going forward, we're hoping for this cluster approach, whereby departments that have similar business lines can come together and hire CIL, using our resources under the memorandum of understanding, to do more in-depth training. We've had some good uptake on that.

That would be primarily the additional training that is available.