Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee today.
As the Public Services and Procurement Canada's co-champion on gender-based analysis, and the assistant deputy minister with the responsibility for the gender-based analysis function within the department, it's an honour to be here today.
PSPC's mandate is to be a common service agency to the Government of Canada and various departments, agencies, and boards. We have a strong focus on service and identifying the various needs of our client group. Most of our clients are internal to government, but because of some of our functions, we do reach out and touch Canadians beyond our department. We try to ensure optimum value by enabling other government departments and agencies to provide their programs and services to Canadians.
Some of our main business lines would include, starting geographically, a responsibility for the parliamentary precinct; procurement, in the order of $16 billion to $18 billion a year in purchasing on behalf of the Government of Canada such things as office accommodations and linguistic services; as well as the Receiver General, the treasury of Canada, and accounts administration; industrial security and screening; and specialized programs related to back office services provided to government departments. It's a diverse set of services offered.
Further to a 2008 audit, PSPC was one of the first departments to start implementing GBA as part of a federal action plan. In our department, we've named a champion. We have a bit of a tag team effort now. This position has been bolstered by a co-champion. The GBA function has been enveloped within the larger diversity champion, but it has a specific focus as well in our department. We've implemented a GBA statement of intent. We've created a responsibility centre, which exists within the policy, planning, and communications branch. We've developed a one-day, PSPC-adapted GBA course. We've reported annually to Status of Women on the departmental GBA practices. We've created a GBA network in the spirit of trying to disperse ownership for this function and not have it invested in just one person or one group. We have a network of individuals across the branches of the department and across the regions of the country. This network focuses on increasing awareness, increasing capacity, and increasing engagement in our work on GBA.
As an operational department, what we do has practical impacts. I'd like to share with the committee four examples of recent gender-based analysis projects we've done. One had to do with the major implementation of a direct deposit initiative, transferring payments from paper to direct deposit, which had service benefits, security benefits, and some efficiency benefits for the government. Our group that was responsible for this realized that this might have differential and unintended impacts, so it undertook a formal GBA study and found, as you might imagine, that access was linked to gender, and in many cases to income. An adjustment was made in how we rolled that service out to Canadians. The responsible group offered a series of exceptions, so that individuals who were at a high risk of not having access to traditional or Internet banking services could continue to receive their payments by cheque.
A second example, and it's sort of an inside baseball term, is the workplace 2.0 initiative. That's the Government of Canada's major modernization of the space in which we work. It involves the footprint of the government, technology, collaboration, and a response to new work patterns. We undertook a major GBA on that, and the one finding we came away with was that, for women, one element of the strategy that was particularly helpful was the additional technology and capacities for telework. Given the statistics, which point out that in the area of care, either for young children or for parents, women tend to shoulder most of the burden, the flexibility of being able to work from home, or have that additional assist, was useful.
Even here, in the long-term vision and plan for the parliamentary precinct, we've done a gender-based analysis to look at this facility and how, when this facility gets renovated, the facilities that will be available for members and staff and visitors will be informed by an understanding of how different people, different genders, have different requirements to modify facilities and open up accessibility to the Hill.
Finally, the build in Canada innovation program is a program that we administer to promote innovation. It sets up the Government of Canada as the first buyer for entrepreneurs who have a product that they want to get into the market, but they face that hurdle. After the Government of Canada has sponsored this project, they're in a better place to market it into the open marketplace.
It's not a particular secret, but women have less access to grants or programs like this. The statistic is that 15.6% of small businesses are owned and operated by women. We anticipated that there might be differential access to people who have the benefit from this program, so we undertook a GBA and in fact found that there was not equity in how the funding was being distributed.
We are not permitted to direct procurement on a basis of gender, but we enhanced our outreach to women's organizations and to business organizations that had direct contact and reach to women. To give you a sense of the metrics, in 2015-16, our office of small and medium size enterprises held 38 sessions. They reached out to almost 3,000 female business owners and entrepreneurs to raise awareness of how they could buy from government and how they could gain access to the build in Canada innovation program.
Those are some of the examples. We are in the midst of finalizing the survey for Status of Women.
During the last presentation, there were some questions asked about barriers. My colleague mentioned some of the barriers, so in questioning, I'd be more than happy to share what we in our department see as some of the barriers for advancing gender-based analysis.