Status of Women Committee on May 12th, 2016

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

It's seven. You can split it.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Perfect. I'll be splitting it with my colleague.

I was going to talk about the compliance mechanisms in the accountability frameworks, because they were talked about a few times. Are there non-legislative mechanisms that work, in any of your opinions, or are they just not worth pursuing at all anymore? Should it be the legislative route?

We can maybe start with the people over video-conferencing first, please.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Ms. Rowan-Campbell?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

The question is whether or not legislation is the answer, or whether there are other cultures—

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Or are there non-legislative mechanisms for compliance that work?

[Dorienne Rowan-Campbell]

I think you have to have several layers for compliance. Its never enough simply to have a legislative mechanism; that's ultimate, but you have to create incentives so that people want to comply.

What I found to be quite useful when you're working on gender is to align it within a change management perspective and to see either the champion or a person who is one of the leaders as one of the people promoting various types of change management, and that gender takes a lead in it. Then I find that, quite often, it works very well and is more accepted.

I also think we need to have it in job descriptions, because if it's in your job description, you're going to need to do it. That's one of the gaps that have been there. A few people have it in their job description. If you're a policy analyst, this is one of the things you do. If you're something else, this is one of the things you do. Your contribution to the task is important simply because it's part of your job. You need to build those in.

[Dr. Rosalind Cavaghan]

I'll jump in, because you said that the people on the video conference should.

I concur with the idea about different levels of implementation. I think external evaluation and impact assessment are very important, because then you can get experts who would be able to draw back and think perhaps more ambitiously about what the possibilities are within a policy.

But I'm certain that she's speaking from the room and also has a specific recommendation as well, so I'll try to leave some time for that.

[Dr. Olena Hankivsky]

I don't think that legislation is the only way. It can't be a stand-alone solution, but it's almost the minimum that you need for success to be realized.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Okay.

[Dr. Cindy Hanson]

I would concur with that and add that a piece that hasn't been talked about a lot is the need not only for gender champions but for management that has value for that process. It has to be more than compliance; I think what you need is political will, quite frankly.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I have one follow-up question and then will hand it over to Ms. Vecchio.

There's been talk of an ombudsman. I've dealt a lot with the Canada Revenue Agency—a lot: more than I should ever want to. They have an ombudsman, one whom taxpayers can have access to. But an ombudsman without the power to force and compel compliance is just a champion without teeth.

I'd like to get your thoughts on this—those of the professors, maybe, and then we can go the folks on video conferencing—on setting up, as part of a legislative mechanism, an ombudsman's actual power of compliance to compel departmental personnel to do it properly, to do it correctly either after the fact or during the process. There are many different ways you can organize it, but it's to have the power to compel and to resolve problems.

[Dr. Olena Hankivsky]

I think that kind of oversight is very powerful. It is the naming and shaming, at the very least, but if you actually give that person some teeth, then it can be part of that more oversight, coordinated effort that is sometimes required to bring all the information together.

[Dr. Cindy Hanson]

In addition to the oversight, we also need examples of how it's making a difference. We also need, then, the stories and the narratives and the research, etc., that are showing how it makes a difference, so that we can move beyond compliance to results.

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

Thank you very much.

I'm going to move on to the thought. Dr. Cavaghan, you mentioned that you feel there is an undermining flow against this becoming successful.

Professor Hankivsky, I'm looking at this whole thing and I understand why we're having this issue, but I think the biggest issue we have here is about the communication. I believe most Canadians would want to see there be gender equality based on either your sexual orientation or anything like that, as well as your race—a variety of different things. Instead of sitting there and thinking that it's potentially the political will or things like that, we could be doing things better by just communicating, because I think when we talk about GBA, we hear gender. Even on the gender analysis that I had to do on the computer, the first question I was asked was your gender, male or female. Right there it's showing the ignorance and the “Wow, we just took a whole thing on gender, and I just said that I was a female.”

That was not the question. The question should have been what my sex was. I think we have a huge communication problem here and that we as parliamentarians, as well as the people doing the GBA+, have to make it sound that it's not gender, because the problem is that we've put out there the idea of gender being male versus female, and it truly is not so when we're trying to do this GBA+.

What would you say we need to do? How can we go forward with making sure that our departments and Canadians know this is not what it's about, because we have marketed it the wrong way for probably the last 20 years?

[Dr. Olena Hankivsky]

I completely agree. Of course, I'm probably the most provocative of the bunch, and I would say that we need different language. It's not about a GBA, it's not about GBA+. It's about mainstreaming equality, leaving no one behind, and looking at gender in relation to other kinds of factors.

There is resistance to GBA, because it's still thought to be about women. When I've done training in departments and talked about intersectionality, you get a lot more traction for gender when you place it in an intersectional framework. You get a much more nuanced, complex, and realistic understanding of the relational aspects of gender in context with other factors. Look at the social determinants of health, for example. Gender is among many different factors.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Wonderful.

We're off to Ms. Malcolmson for seven minutes.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Any of the witnesses can answer this, but I'm especially interested in the witnesses in the room who have been involved recently with Canadian policy.

Can you give us some examples of what has been lost? Can you extrapolate backwards to 2005, when we might have brought in legislation around gender-based analysis? How might that have affected investment and policy decisions that the federal government has made? What might have been lost by our being so behind the times?

[Dr. Cindy Hanson]

I can think that maybe we would have done gender assessments of some environmental projects that are now under way in Canada, and looked at how those projects have affected the lives of women. We can look at migration, such as when a lot of people in the Maritimes moved to Alberta to work in oil fields, etc. All of those things impacted families and impacted women very differently than men.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

I can do a quick follow-up to that. I've heard from a number of people concerned about the size of infrastructure investment that is coming up, and a propensity for us to fund, as a country, megaprojects, big construction. There's the possibility that those investments may buy us traditionally male-dominated workplaces around big buildings, and pouring concrete, etc. Also, without appropriate GBA, these investments may not look at the negative impacts that can sometimes disproportionately affect women, for example, with the macho influence around construction-type towns, where you create work camps that may be 95% men, and the sort of sexual violence that might result from that sexualized atmosphere.

Are there any thoughts or concerns in that direction?

[Dr. Cindy Hanson]

There are lots of concerns and thoughts. In terms of how GBA would have impacted those decisions, I'm not sure exactly of the question.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

If a budget is aimed, in particular, towards infrastructure investment that leads to those megaprojects and those male-dominated work camps, might a GBA test have highlighted the need for policies to either protect women affected or, alternatively, to make decisions that might more equally benefit men and women by investing on a more gender-equal basis?

[Dr. Cindy Hanson]

Sure, and I think that had there been a gender-based analysis done in some of those decisions, some of the services available would be different, and some of the makeup of who's there and who's not there might have been different. I think, generally, it's also about the movement of people and who moves and how that impacts lives. There are lots of global examples of how that has impacted women in very different ways from men.

We're also talking about quality of life and we're talking about violence. There is a whole bunch of issues that fall within those kinds of changes and when they're made, and who's involved and who benefits from them.

[Dr. Olena Hankivsky]

I think the most telling story is that inequities are persistent and growing, so the tools and approaches that we've had have failed us very significantly across all policy sectors.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Would the failure to implement pay equity legislation have intersected with that and the fact that we've seen the pay gap grow during this period of economic recession?

[Dr. Olena Hankivsky]

Yes, I would say so, but the question should be, for which women and for which men—not just men versus women?