Thank you, Madam Chair, for inviting me to address you today.
I am the assistant deputy minister of the economic development and corporate finance branch at the Department of Finance Canada. I am also the gender-based analysis champion for the department.
The Department of Finance is the government's primary source of analysis and advice on Canada's economic and financial affairs.
In certain policy areas, the department is the lead within the Government of Canada. The department has lead responsibility for policy development on tax and tariff legislation, major federal transfers to provinces and territories, the legislative and regulatory framework for the financial sector, and representing Canada within international financial institutions.
The department also provides analysis and advice on the economic merit and fiscal implications of policy and program proposals developed by other government departments. Departmental officials serve as members of a broader team of federal officials from the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board Secretariat that reviews options for, and the implications, including gender implications, of proposals that are presented to cabinet.
These two roles, as the lead on certain policy areas and as a central agency, have shaped the department's activities with respect to gender-based analysis.
Gender-based analysis is a key policy tool for evaluating the potential gender impacts of proposed policies, plans, and programs, and to support informed decision-making. The Department of Finance has committed to performing gender-based analysis on all new policy proposals, including tax and spending measures where appropriate, and where data exists.
Gender considerations are integrated into all aspects of the federal budget process. Our pre-budget consultations are undertaken on an annual basis and solicit the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, including gender perspectives.
In our challenge function role, the Department of Finance reviews budget proposals put forth by other federal departments and agencies, and provides advice to the Minister of Finance on funding decisions. We require departments and agencies to consider all relevant factors, including gender, when developing a policy or program for budget consideration. When departments and agencies submit their budget proposals, we require their gender-based analysis as part of the proposal package. A summary of the results of the gender-based analysis are included in the budget advice to the Minister of Finance.
For new policies, plans, or programs that originate from the Department of Finance, analysts in the department perform a gender-based analysis to determine whether the proposal will result in important gender impacts. This analysis can be brief if an initial assessment finds that there are likely to be few or no important gender impacts, or the analysis can be extensive if an initial assessment indicates there may be significant gender impacts. The gender-based analysis can involve a statistical analysis or fiscal simulation of the gender impacts.
Outside of the budget process, Finance works with the departments and agencies to ensure that gender-based analysis has been fully considered during the development of memoranda to cabinet.
It is difficult to talk about specific examples where a gender-based analysis has had an impact, given that our advice on budget and policy proposals are cabinet confidences. I have chosen a couple of examples to give you a flavour of the information that a gender-based analysis at Finance could examine. These examples were selected because they have obvious important gender impacts.
The first example is the teacher and early childhood educator school supply tax credit that was introduced in budget 2016, which allows Canadian educators to claim a 15% refundable tax credit on up to $1,000 in expenditures on eligible supplies. According to Statistics Canada's labour force survey, almost 80% of people employed as educators in primary and secondary schools or child care centres in fall 2015 were women. Given their higher level of employment in this sector, a gender-based analysis would likely find that working-age women would be expected to benefit more from this measure than men. The impact of the measure on other diverse groups of women and men could also be assessed through other data sources, looking at intersecting identity factors for this occupational group.
A second example is the budget measure of improving heart health for women. Heart disease and stroke are the leading causes of death for Canadian women, yet many women are not aware of heart attack or stroke and do not know how to recognize the symptoms until it is too late. From the “Women in Canada” report that was available last fall from Statistics Canada, we know that in 2009 in Canada, 3.9% of females over 12 years old had been diagnosed with heart disease. In a gender-based analysis we could expect that research results of a program that targets women's heart health would likely have greater benefit for women and that there would be benefits for both men and women with respect to those employed in heart research.
A different example that demonstrates our recent activities related to gender-based analysis is the latest budget decision for Status of Women Canada. Budget 2016 announced $23.3 million over five years starting in 2016-17, and $7 million per year ongoing to strengthen capacity at Status of Women Canada, including to ensure that gender-based analysis is performed more consistently across the federal government and to support the creation of a dedicated research and evaluation unit to provide evidence-based, innovative research with respect to women's issues.
We do several things at the Department of Finance to support our analysis in conducting GBAs and to ensure that our gender-based analyses are relevant and appropriately prioritized. We offer department-specific training for GBA so our analysts and economists are trained to conduct GBAs in the development of Finance-led proposals or when reviewing GBAs performed by other departments and agencies.
We have designed finance-specific tools to use to perform a GBA on all budget proposals. We revised these tools prior to the development of budget 2016 to also incorporate the identification of demographic characteristics of diverse groups of women and men, such as race, age, aboriginal identity, income level, ability, and sexual orientation, given departments and agencies are increasingly conducting broader GBAs to also include diversity implications.
We participate in interdepartmental GBA working groups, both at the ADM level and the working level, to ensure we are learning best practices from other departments and agencies. We also observe the government's annual gender-based analysis awareness week, which is coming up next week, with special communications and activities.
GBA commitments are integrated into the performance management agreements for all executives. Specifically, executives are required to meet the department's GBA commitments to allow for ministerial consideration of the potential gender-specific impacts of proposed policy initiatives.
My branch coordinates our departmental activities and annual reporting on our contributions to Status of Women Canada. In the past 12 months, the department completed more than 250 gender-based analyses. A total of 24 finance employees, largely new employees to the department, attended two GBA training sessions that were held in the fall of 2015.
The Department of Finance was not a part of the most recent audit on the implementation of gender-based analysis, but we were implicated in the previous audit in 2009. Since that time, we have been working to improve our GBA tools and processes to ensure we are fulfilling the GBA commitments we have made.
Our biggest barrier for performing gender-based analysis is gender-disaggregated data. Our colleagues at Statistics Canada produce the “Women in Canada” report that provides some of the best gender-disaggregated data on a number of topics like women's health, women in the labour market, and family and living arrangements that can provide evidence to use in our analyses. Many departments and agencies also share our concern regarding data, and we understand that we are going to be exploring collectively how data collection can be improved and better accessed.
For tax-related proposals developed within the Department of Finance, our tax policy branch analysts use a variety of data sources, including data that are linked to information allowing detailed gender analysis.
Another barrier we have faced is that departments and agencies are responsible for implementing their own GBAs. As we know from the Auditor General's reports, it has been implemented unevenly and without consistency. From a challenge function perspective, this means that we receive input in different formats, styles, and depths from each federal organization, which can make it challenging to incorporate that information into our advice in a meaningful way.
We have taken note of the new tools being developed by the Privy Council Office, such as the policy considerations checklist. As central agencies, we will be working together to try to align how we will ask departments and agencies to report on the GBAs, given that we all use this information in a similar fashion to provide advice to ministers.