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.