I wasn't in the department when that happened. It happened in 2002 when the legislation was passed. Maia may have been in the department...no, she wasn't in the department then. From talking with my colleagues, I know that there was clearly an immediate impact, and we've had a bit of a lasting impact.
A legislative change is blunt because it's legislation, so the immediate impact was that it required the Minister of Immigration to report annually to Parliament on the application of GBA and the outcomes that were achieved through it.
The way the department has approached that since that time is to focus on our admissions on an annual basis. The minister reports on an annual basis on the number of permanent residents coming to Canada, so there is a separate chapter in that report on GBA. It provides a very detailed outline of sex-disaggregated data in all of the different immigration categories.
What I found, though, over the medium term, and in particular working with colleagues from Status of Women Canada, is that the legislative requirement has also influenced the culture of the department because of the annual requirement. We did have to immediately build capacity in the department to ensure we could meet that legislative requirement, which has had a cascading impact throughout the department as a result.
Legislation in itself is probably not the panacea or sufficient. It's one important tool. The other, though, as my colleague from Status of Women said, is leadership. We've had sustained and committed leadership at senior management levels to the application of GBA, which has ensured that we continue to learn how to apply it and also adapt how we continue to measure and report through it.