Status of Women Committee on May 10th, 2016

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

As it's 3:30, I will call the meeting to order.

We have a lot of exciting guests here today, so it's going to be lively. I want to welcome, from the Treasury Board Secretariat, Renée LaFontaine, the assistant secretary, corporate services, and chief financial officer. We also have, from the Privy Council Office, François Daigle, the assistant secretary to the cabinet, social development policy. From the Department of Justice, we have Stan Lipinski, the director general of the policy integration and coordination section.

I want to welcome our guests. We appreciate your testimony to us today. I understand that each of you has a 10-minute speech.

We'll begin with Ms. LaFontaine.

[Renée LaFontaine, Assistant Secretary, Corporate Services and Chief Financial Officer, Treasury Board Secretariat]

Madam Chair, if it would be all right with you, could we start with PCO? You'll see the link in the progression of our discussion. Would that be all right?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We are flexible here.

Mr. Daigle, you may begin.

[François Daigle, Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Social Development Policy, Privy Council Office]

My presentation is the shortest, so I get to go first.

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

I am pleased to be here today to speak with you about gender-based analysis, GBA, and how it can help the government to make decisions on policies, programs, and legislation that benefit all Canadians, in order to support diversity in Canada. I know that you met last week with our colleagues at Status of Women Canada, who have begun to outline the overarching framework under which we will work together, and with all federal departments and agencies, to improve the implementation of gender-based analysis across government.

As my colleagues noted, we are seeing a renewed commitment by the federal government to gender-based analysis. This is in large part due to the Prime Minister's direction in his mandate letter to Ms. Hajdu, Minister of Status of Women, concerning gender-based analysis. Her department and the Privy Council Office will work together to ensure that gender-based analysis is applied to proposals for cabinet decision-making. That will help to ensure that this is really made a priority in our discussions and everyday interactions with our colleagues in the departments, so their ministers are able to make proposals to cabinet.

In the face of this renewed commitment, the recommendations of the Auditor General's report have come at an opportune time to encourage all departments and agencies to work on the progress we have made, where efforts have fallen short—as we see in his report—and how we can take concrete actions to address the barriers to fully implementing our GBA commitments in government. The Privy Council Office, as you know, supports cabinet decision-making through providing coordination of proposals by the various departments, leadership, advice, and analysis on policy, program, and legislative proposals. We are therefore in an excellent position to support the use of GBA within the government.

To put it simply, PCO supports the stage in the policy and program cycle that responds to the question of what to do on a given issue.

In answering that question, it's vital that decision-makers, the members of cabinet around the table, have all of the necessary information to fully understand the impacts and the consequences of their decisions on Canadians and their interests. That's why PCO plays a critical challenge function in ensuring that departments and agencies, when they bring proposals forward, take into account all relevant factors, including sex and gender, in the development of proposals to cabinet. This is done to ensure that the impacts on diverse groups of women and men across the country are given due consideration in decision-making.

It's the ministers who bring these proposals forward. At PCO, our analysts in our department work with the departments closely to make sure their proposals identify all of the relevant factors, whether they're economic factors, social factors, environmental factors, legal factors, or jurisdictional factors. Within that, GBA has a significant role to play. Official languages consideration is another example of what is taken into account.

The recent audit found that PCO and other central agencies have made efforts recently to promote and support GBA and to clarify our guidance to departments and agencies in this respect. It also found that the implementation of gender-based analysis has been uneven and insufficient across the government.

This provides us with an opportunity to reflect on how we at PCO and others can better support departments and agencies. We've shared already the joint action plan that we've provided to the committee, and that's jointly with Treasury Board and Status of Women. I won't go through all of that, because I know you have it already. What I thought I would do is to focus on the PCO-specific proposals and actions that we're moving on.

Areas for new action respond to three things: enhanced training, guidance, and tools. We think this responds to the OAG report. It's going to help us identify and address barriers that have been identified and other barriers that we're trying to identify as we work with our colleagues at Status of Women. It will better support monitoring and reporting.

Recognizing the need to build our internal capacity at Privy Council Office, we have made GBA training mandatory for all Privy Council Office employees who are tasked with playing a challenge function on policy and program proposals, as well as for executives.

All PCO employees who are tasked with playing that challenge function on proposals, and all of our executives are now required to take the GBA+ training. I know that you've taken that, and it's on the Status of Women website. We've set as a target for ourselves, as of April 1, a 90% achievement of that by September. That represents just over one third of all the employees at the Privy Council Office.

This will ensure that PCO employees are able to meaningfully engage with departments and agencies on GBA. We hope that this will make sure that the gender and diversity impacts of proposals are clear, that these inform policy options, and that any appropriate mitigation strategies are identified.

To support this work, we have also committed to further strengthening our guidance to departments and agencies. We will ensure that they are linked to existing relevant tools from Status of Women, and we will encourage even greater use of them.

At the same time, the Auditor General's audit made clear to us that we could strengthen our engagement with departments. That is what we will endeavour to do even earlier in the process—before the review of final proposals. Privy Council Office receives draft proposals from departments. We are trying, using our new tools, to make sure that analysts in the departments and agencies do the work even before we receive the proposals and begin doing their gender-based analysis from the outset.

We're developing a policy considerations' checklist at the Privy Council Office, which will include GBA as a mandatory section. Rather than simply having a checking-of-box exercise, we hope that this tool will help departments walk through the key considerations and gather the information and evidence required before they start drafting policy or program proposals. We hope that by asking departments to show their work, so to speak, this tool will help us provide a stronger basis for discussions between our analysts at PCO and departments and agencies, when they exchange on proposals.

Finally, we're also committed to continuing to work very closely with Status of Women Canada to identify good practices in GBA, so that when we see a cabinet proposal that comes in and has a good analysis, a good report, we can showcase that and use it to identify best practices and lessons learned. We'll continue to engage with them at all levels and to link them with the support required—for example, through reaching out to Status of Women on key initiatives—as well as to advocate for high level attention and accountability for the full implementation of GBA commitments.

Those are my comments and I now turn it over to my colleague, Ms. LaFontaine.

[Renée LaFontaine]

Thank you very much for the invitation. Before I start, I will say that I think you'll find there are a lot of similarities.

First, I just want to set levels. What departments do when they go to PCO is to get their cabinet approvals, but they often come to Treasury Board if they need authorities, money, or special exemptions to policies, to implement their programs.

I'm going to come at it from the perspective of implementing government programs. As I mentioned, I'm delighted to speak with you today about the role Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat plays in supporting the use of GBA. I'm also pleased to be here with my colleague from the Privy Council Office, and my colleague from the Department of Justice.

Gender-based analysis is not the same as employment equity, where employers are required to ensure that working conditions are free of barriers that may disadvantage certain groups, including women, from obtaining employment opportunities.

Rather, GBA+ is the analytical tool that helps us understand why certain groups of Canadians are not able to access or benefit from government programs or services in the same way other groups are.

GBA starts with gender, but it also considers other layers of the diverse Canadian populations we serve, such as their education level, their income level, and their age. It's only by knowing why certain groups of men and women are being left out of the benefits of our programs that we begin to understand the gender issues and learn how to fix them.

What has been the progress to date at TBS?

The Auditor General appeared before the committee on February 25 to discuss his findings on implementing gender-based analysis across federal departments and agencies. He observed that Treasury Board Secretariat has been supporting federal organizations to implement GBA+. We have achieved this through our efforts, in collaboration with our colleagues at Status of Women Canada and Privy Council Office, to promote the use of GBA+ across government.

Training is provided to TBS analysts, similar to what François was discussing. We provide our training to analysts because it's their job to actually guide departments through the development of the Treasury Board submission as it goes for approval of the Treasury Board. Throughout this process, program analysts challenge departments to determine if there could be a different impact on women and men, considering the target group of recipients who are supposed to benefit from the proposed new program or service.

Should a potential gender issue be identified, analysts advocate for the completion of a GBA+ at the departmental level. They advise the departments to consider the findings and to adjust the programs as necessary to make sure there is no gender inequality.

TBS has published our expectations as detailed guidance on our website, and through a series of questions similar to the checklist that François talked about, we help departments and agencies determine where there's a potential gender issue. If a gender issue exists, as I said, we expect departments to undertake a thorough GBA and tailor their program proposal before it gets to Treasury Board to sufficiently address the gender issues that come up.

We refresh our training with Treasury Board program analysts every year, and every year we add new case studies, good practices, better ideals, and better ideas of assessing gender issues, as we learn more through the departments that we work with every day. We're also working closely with Status of Women Canada and the Privy Council Office to promote the value of GBA+ where applicable, during meetings with senior executive committees, in conferences and workshops with departments, and the GBA champions that are embedded in each department across this government.

In 2011, Treasury Board Secretariat conducted a baseline survey of the extent to which gender-related issues were identified and actually addressed in all of the proposals that went to Treasury Board. As with the Auditor General in his last examination, we found evidence that the level of adoption was uneven across departments.

First, and to understand that a bit better, we're encouraged to see that in a lot of cases the departments that focus on providing services in the social sector of our economy and the cultural-type programs that are provided across Canada, more GBAs were evident, and the results of the GBA actually tailored the program design to meet Canadians' needs.

We also found that GBA was being conducted more often in departments whose which programs and services have a direct impact on a Canadian, especially when they had the gender-disaggregated data to measure the performance of their programs. I'm mentioning this to point out that it's not as easy as it might look at first sight.

The need for and the benefit of GBA, though, was less obvious in departments where programs are indirectly supporting Canadians. For example, take a fisheries program, a mining program, or something to do with national security of this government, or science-based, or infrastructure programs. Oftentimes those programs are complex. The federal role might be to set regulations, or it might be to fund other intermediaries or levels of government to actually achieve something for Canadian or the parts of Canada that are supposed to benefit from these programs.

Getting at the root causes of gender issues in those circumstances is particularly difficult. The sponsoring department, in those cases, has to think through the program design and work through intermediaries to collect the gender-disaggregated data and do the analysis required to get at the issues they're trying to address.

Finally, I'm not sure if this happens at PCO, but it does happen at Treasury Board quite often. Many new policies, programs, and initiatives considered by the Treasury Board are very time sensitive, and we often need to address them immediately to meet specific government commitments and timelines. If the sponsoring department in that case discovers a gender issue, there may not be time to do a full analysis, especially if they don't maintain that ongoing gender-disaggregated data about the performance of their programs.

As a result of that, we at TBS feel we have to help departments more in the specific areas where it is a little more complex and tougher.

Based on our experience to date, we know we need a better way to support departments to follow up after they have their Treasury Board approval, and throughout implementation as programs mature.

We need to help departments to continue to identify and address gender issues as they arise, to ensure that the different needs, priorities, interests, roles, and responsibilities of diverse groups of women and men are being addressed and integrated appropriately.

What are our plans going forward?

As I have just explained, barriers remain in the consistent application of GBA across federal departments and agencies. Gong forward, TBS is committed to working with Status of Women Canada, the Privy Council Office, and federal departments and agencies to better identify, understand, and eliminate barriers and build capacity across the public service. Doing this will ensure that GBA is solidly embedded as a sustainable practice across government. We will engage deputy heads to discuss progress towards public service-wide implementation, including any barriers they may encounter.

We will also review our guidance and, if necessary, adapt it to the needs of federal departments and agencies so that it is more helpful in achieving better gender outcomes. We will continue to train our program analysts and their executive directors to challenge departments and agencies to conduct GBA where applicable in the TB submission process.

If departments are not able to effectively assess and address the gender implications of new proposals at the policy research stage, at the PCO memorandum to cabinet stage, or at the Treasury Board submission stage in the program/policy life cycle, we are going to challenge departments to follow up through program implementation, up to and including doing an evaluation of the program before it actually gets renewed.

Program evaluations are an effective means of assessing the performance and results achieved of government policies, programs, and services. This is something new for us. Program evaluations are required before programs get renewed by either cabinet or Treasury Board. This is another opportunity to assess and correct any gender implications of our programs. The secretariat will assist Status of Women Canada to develop guidance and tools to help the program evaluators working in all departments across this government to identify gender impacts when evaluating the performance of federal programs, policies, and services.

Since January, we have new ministers at the Treasury Board, and we will orient them. Because we know that federal regulations impact both genders of Canadian society, we will train our regulatory analysts at TBS to also challenge departments and agencies to conduct GBA where applicable in the federal regulation development process.

To measure our progress, Treasury Board Secretariat will conduct another review, by the fall of 2017, of the extent to which GBA+ findings influenced decision-making by the Treasury Board between September 2016 and June 2017, and will communicate them to departments and Status of Women Canada.

Madam Chair, Treasury Board Secretariat is committed to working with our partners to strengthen the development of informed, evidence-based, and gender-equitable policy and program options for decision-makers, in order to provide better results for Canadians.

We welcome your input.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

It is over to you, Mr. Lipinski.

[Stan Lipinski, Director General, Policy Integration and Coordination Section, Policy Sector, Department of Justice]

Good afternoon, and thank you all for the opportunity to appear before you and to discuss Justice Canada's work regarding the implementation of gender-based analysis. My two colleagues here have sort of put the mannequins in the window, and I'm hopefully going to share with you how we dress these mannequins, with all its failings and successes.

Justice Canada has a history of promoting the integration of GBA in its policy and work dating back to 1990, but like many histories, it can be spotty at times; it has hill and dale, and it's not necessarily always consistently positive or negative. But by 1995, Justice had developed a gender-equity analysis policy in a guidance document to help officials with their analysis. What we did at that time was to look to integrate GBA activities into all of the department sectors, and employees were then expected to be responsible for ensuring that the gender impacts were taken into account as part of the work they were doing, whether it was policy, programs, litigation, or legal advice.

That was the situation at Justice for some time until about 2010, when Justice Canada created a GBA unit, which now plays a role in providing tools and resources to help our officials better understand and effectively integrate GBA into Justice's policy and program work and to try to fulfill the obligations created for us and to follow the road map of TBS and PCO.

For us at Justice, our GBA unit in the policy sector is really the first point of contact for GBA. It plays a key role in providing advice and guidance to officials on incorporating GBA+ into specific initiatives, and it works to increase the department's capacity for GBA by offering these tools, information sessions, and resources.

Also, we have a fairly active research and statistics division, which plays a key role in supporting the department's GBA information and analysis needs through the development of various reports that contain gender-based analysis and as a centre of expertise in providing and designing gender-disaggregated data to help inform the development and design of Justice's programs and policies.

Over the past several years, Justice has continued to try to enhance the integration of GBA in policy and program work through different tools, promotional exercises, and activities. We're fairly consistent and fairly active at promoting GBA+ awareness week, led by our colleagues at Status of Women, promoting, of course, the Status of Women's on-line GBA training course. We promote the uptake of that. That's the introduction to GBA course that my colleagues also referred to. Also, we participate actively in Justice's annual submission of the GBA progress report to Status of Women Canada to showcase the department's work in this area in the application of GBA.

As well as this, the GBA unit in our department also provides advice and guidance on the application of GBA on a number of memos to cabinet and initiatives. For example, in the past year, it's been on sustainable development goal indicators, genetic discrimination, medical assistance in dying, the framework on marijuana, and the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. There's where we are called upon to offer some insight and some input on the GBA front.

As well, a key piece of work for us has been our senior-level policy committee, an assistant deputy minister committee, that developed and adopted a checklist of common policy considerations. My colleague from PCO mentioned a checklist, and that's one that we've shared with other departments. It's a key tool used across Justice to help officials consider and integrate a range of considerations important to policy and program work. For us, it's really a key instrument that we think is a good tool. It's designed to help Justice officials fulfill the requirements of a range of acts, directives, and other high-level instructions stemming from government and central agencies. It is intended to facilitate the consideration of those common factors including, but not limited to, gender, legal risks, diversity, privacy impacts, official languages, provincial-territorial relations, and a few other things, all of which are broadly applicable to programs and policy development in the federal government.

We've also then formalized these tools to the point where Justice has, like most departments, a cabinet affairs unit that deals with memos to cabinet. All MCs going to that unit now require a common policy consideration checklist in which officials are expected to have fulfilled a whole range of considerations, of which gender and a series of others that I mentioned are included as being checked off, including any thinking that goes around it. As I mentioned, over the past couple of years, we have shared that checklist with some other departments that had an interest.

In addition to this common policy consideration checklist, we also have a range of other tools that are made available. They include things like pamphlets with general information on GBA, which inform our colleagues of the importance of the tool, a step-by-step process document for GBA that provides visual depictions and guides of various steps in the process, and a flash training module some of our younger folks have created—I don't even necessarily always understand what it means—that provides five things officials need to know about GBA.

All these tools are found on our GCPEDIA page that was created for the department's GBA unit. That's a way of trying to upload it and share it with colleagues throughout the federal government and with other people in the Department of Justice across the country.

As I mentioned, we have a fairly active research and statistics division. The department contributes, along with other departments, to the publication “Women in Canada: A Gender-Based Statistical Report”. That is led by Status of Women Canada, but it's undertaken by Statistics Canada. It's a popular report that provides high quality gender-disaggregated data that helps the Government of Canada meet its commitment to GBA and to the development of gender responsive policies, programs, and legislation. A new edition is released every five years. Our department regularly contributes to it. I think every department contributes about $50,000 each for that report and the data to be collected and disseminated. We've also provided support in the development of a chapter on women in the criminal justice system for the seventh edition of that report, because that is the department's expertise.

Justice Canada also carries out considerable social science research on a wide range of policy issues, as well as providing litigation support. We use a lot disaggregated data on gender, as well as other variables, such as race, aboriginal status, marital status, and other parts of the GBA+ framework. All of our social science research has to go through a research review committee, chaired by our director of research and statistics. This is where they talk about the methodological rigour of things like gender identification variables and frameworks. It's a fairly robust discussion at the methodology stage.

In addition, that group has many reports that contain a gender-based analysis. Some examples include “A Profile of Legal Aid Studies and Family Law Matters in Canada”, “Inuit Women and the Nunavut Justice System”, and “Drug Importation in Ontario: Profile of Accused, Cases, and Recidivism”. These are the ones that have gender breakdowns and analyses along gender lines.

In terms of our next steps, we're planning to update the department's gender equality policy to better reflect and modernize the language to make it more current. We will be applying new requirements set out by our colleagues, which they refer to in PCO and Treasury Board, in terms of changes to the practices that are carried out.

We're also going to explore the development of some new GBA tools, including tools to support Justice counsels who work in departmental legal service units across federal departments, and who provide legal advice and services to those client departments, as well as those who work in litigation and represent the Attorney General of Canada.

We're always looking to do other things like enhance GBA+ information, materials, and orientation packages for new employees. A number of these are pushing information down the pipe. As was mentioned, it has met with various levels of success and various levels of uptake, but the efforts continue to promote that.

With that, I want to say thank you very much. We appreciate the work of this committee and know that we will benefit from the work undertaken by it to inform a whole-of-government approach to GBA, as well as the work being undertaken by Status of Women Canada, the Privy Council Office, and Treasury Board Canada, given their responsibilities in this area.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thanks to each of you for your excellent input.

We're going to begin our first round of questioning with my Liberal colleagues, beginning with Ms. Damoff for seven minutes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you all for being here. It's encouraging to hear the good news about what various departments are doing with GBA.

One of the things that came up when the Department of Citizenship and Immigration was here was the need for champions within the departments. They spoke about how they appointed a champion who then recruits more. I'm just wondering if you could speak to whether or not you do that and whether you think that should be something that we should be requiring of departments as well—not just to do the analysis but to have champions within the department to speak to it.

[Stan Lipinski]

I agree that champions are important. At the Department of Justice, for example, we did have a champion. She retired a short while back. A new champion has not yet been appointed, but our senior assistant deputy minister of the policy sector, Donald Piragoff, has responsibility for the GBA unit, so in the interim he's taking on that role. I think it's very important to have a champion. I know that in letters from Status of Women Canada, from deputy to deputy, they're often highlighting the importance of having a champion and encouraging deputies to appoint champions of gender.

[Renée LaFontaine]

If my colleague from Status of Women Canada were here, she'd tell you that we actually get together with our champions all across government. That's where we're sharing our best practices. It's really starting to help us raise awareness, share good ideas, and make it easier for departments to understand how to go about this. So that's working well.

I would say that the only caveat—and maybe François has some comments here as well—is that gender has to be mainstreamed in your program design. If you have a GBA champion over here but you have a program manager over there and they're not connecting well in a department, that's not what we're looking for. To find a way around that, we're actually going to work more with the deputy minister community. We are surveying them on what they think the barriers are, and how to mainstream better gender-based analysis as a proper analytical tool in our program design, development, and implementation. Champions are fabulous as long as they are part of the mainstream.

[François Daigle]

I agree completely that champions are important, and their network across departments is really key, because that's where they share best practices. They can also bring back the information they obtain and promote it within their departments.

At PCO we do have a champion. To address what Renée's talking about, our deputy secretary, who's the champion, is also the deputy secretary for operations, which sees maybe 80% of all the proposals that come to cabinet. He has huge oversight over this and is well situated to promote it. We also ask him to do little things like track down those executives who haven't done their training yet. So come September, if they haven't done their training they'll get a call from the champion.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

You also spoke about how some departments are doing a good job implementing it and reaching out to Canadians whereas others are not. Could you maybe give us some thoughts as to how we could encourage all the departments to do it, not just the ones that are implementing it well, to make it mainstream within all of the departments?

[François Daigle]

I have a couple of reactions to that. Part of it is accountability, making sure that deputies understand that it's important and that they make it a priority in their departments. As I said in my opening remarks, the fact that the Prime Minister has put it in the minister's mandate letter makes it a priority and makes it easier for us to say to the departments that it is important. We're working closely with Status of Women Canada, who are the experts. They're the go-to resource for all departments when they need some advice or some guidance on how to do the analysis, how to do the research, how to check their assumptions. I think those kinds of activities are what we've proposed to do more of in our joint action plan, to try to encourage departments to have a more equal starting place.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I think it was you, Mr. Lipinski, who talked about how you had a really good tool that you didn't know how to use.

Are those tools being shared with all departments? You mentioned that you have the department champion meetings. When there are effective tools, is there a way to make sure they are shared with other groups, and if so, who takes the lead on that? Is it Status of Women? Where does that fall, to have the best practices?

[Stan Lipinski]

From our experience, it is a fairly active network led by Status of Women, in terms of having colleagues working in that area of endeavour who share quite broadly, so there is a degree of sharing. I can't really speak to how consistent it is, but there is a fair bit.

For example, because of that network, I know we get called to come to different departments to present our common policy consideration tool and some of the other things that are being done, so there is sharing going on. It probably could be a little more consistent, but it is happening at certain levels, not necessarily in the DM community. I don't know what is going on at that level or at other levels, but at the working level, a lot of sharing is going on.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

When our colleagues from Immigration were here, they talked about how we need to use a lens so that everything we are doing is part of the process.

What are the barriers to getting people to think that way? It is not just gender; the example in the training was about fitness levels and applying not only gender but also age to the lens. What are the barriers to getting people to actually use that lens when they are looking at everything?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

You can answer that one in the next round.

We are going to go over to my Conservative colleagues, starting with Mrs. Vecchio.

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

Hi, and thank you very much for appearing here today.

I am going to start with the Treasury Board, if you don't mind. The expectations on the Treasury Board website say that each department or agency “should tailor TB submissions to sufficiently address all gender considerations”. As noted in the 2015 AG report, the Treasury Board also includes a requirement that evidence of GBA is presented with the submission.

Does the TBS have any powers to fully reject the submissions that do not have GBA applied to them? If something comes in, you can return it to them, but at the end of the day, if they return it to you and say, “This is what we have; this is what we are moving forward”, do you have the right to say, “No way”?

[Renée LaFontaine]

To answer that question, I have to explain our challenge function to you a little bit. When you develop a new program, there are a lot of things the department has to consider. First is the objective of the program and the timelines.

Maybe I will go back to answer your question with a few things I mentioned. Sometimes, our design around what we are looking for in gender-based analysis.... We set it up as an all-or-nothing kind of thing, where you have to do it before the Treasury Board approves your proposal, and we are finding that this is not working. That is where we think we need to change. It is not working if the government doesn't have time to do it, or we don't have the gender-disaggregated information because the program designs are so complex that you need to deal with two or three intermediaries before you actually get performance information about your program.

That is why, over the years of working on this, we have learned that we, at the Treasury Board, need to be a little more understanding of what it takes for departments to meet those requirements. We are looking at the program cycle, and if it is not done at the policy research stage, we have to get there earlier to make it better and to get our PCO colleagues involved so that it can be consistently talked about through cabinet and Treasury Board. Then if we still can't get it there, we have the end of the cycle, which is the evaluation. We are changing our Treasury Board policy to make that possible. We will be advising our department in that way.

I hope that answers your question.

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

This is great. Thank you.

To Justice, the committee has heard that the justice department is a front-runner when it comes to implementing gender-based analysis. Since the victims of crime are predominantly women, how has the justice department taken this into account when it develops policy? Is there an example that is exemplary of the department's GBA system?

[Stan Lipinski]

Yes, there's quite a bit. In any of the legislative drafting and reform to the Criminal Code and programs, there's a fair bit of consideration that goes into discussing the gender-based aspects of it. A lot of it is by virtue of the work done by policy analysts, who are usually content-specific people. Many of them have a really deep experience of the work and understand the gender aspects of any sort of issue, whether it's prostitution or some of the other projects I had mentioned with regard to women in the north. These are the sorts of projects that often have a fairly strong gender element to them and a lot of discussion. I think it's just one of the aspects of going through the common policy considerations that I mentioned in terms of that lens.

Gender is one lens among about 12 lenses. That's the only thing I would state. It is one aspect. Then there's the north, and then there's the matter of ethics, and then there are a few other lenses. There are multiple lenses that have to be considered, and they often are. I would say that a lot of the folks who are doing that kind of work are really steeped in it. It gets done, but the problem is that how they are doing it has to be conveyed or expressed so that everyone understands how they're doing it. That's perhaps where the challenge comes in.

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

Excellent.

I have a question for the Privy Council Office. How does it expect that it will aid other departments to build internal capacity for GBA, and in what specific ways will it provide guidance on the inclusion of GBA in proposals to cabinet? The Privy Council Office is committed to updating its guidance for development of memoranda to cabinet to include more specific direction on GBA. What will this practice look like?

[François Daigle]

What we'll do at PCO is to require that GBA be done before proposals come in, and we'll work with Status of Women and the departments to make sure that the analysis is done before we get to see a first proposal.

If it comes in early enough and there are some obvious gender issues that have not been analyzed, we'll work with the department to give them some direction and guidance and make sure that the research and analysis can be done. Then it's reflected in the proposals that come forward.

As I said, we're also revising our checklist so that we have a more systematic way of keeping track of where there's good GBA being done and where it's not as good, so that we can follow up on those things.

Right now, we're also looking at our memorandum to cabinet template, which is still in the works. Right now it requires a number of things, like an environmental sustainability lens, an official languages lens, a charter lens, and a GBA lens. We will look at how we can improve that and make some parts of that mandatory.

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

Finally, throughout the action plan, the term “challenge function” is employed quite a bit in reference to the TBS and PCO. To what degree can this challenge function actually block policy that has not undergone, or has undergone inadequate, gender-based analysis?

It's similar to my question to you at the beginning.