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.