Thank you very much
I apologize also because, clearly, we didn't do a very good job, because look at where we are today.
I was very delighted to be asked to be here because, of course, it's a subject dear to my heart, and I have to reiterate some of what we discussed in that accountability report that we did.
Like Rosalind, I think that leadership is critical, and the leadership has to be backed up. It needs to be leadership at the highest level. I would suggest that in the leadership at the moment, we have a cabinet that is equally made up of men and women, and that gives a very good message to the rest of the public service. However, I was horrified to see a photograph in The Star just after the budget came out, of our Prime Minister with five men. They were all smiling happily and about to go out and talk about the budget and what it was going to do for Canada. On the one hand, we have, for the first time, enough women who could have been in that photograph. I don't know when it was taken, but it seemed to me that someone in the public service didn't realize the message that they were sending out about the importance of equality and partnership, and of women's role in the economic realm in looking at things like the budget.
The reports that you've had from the Auditor General and Status of Women have shown us that we have a lot of weaknesses in our system and that we need to focus far more on trying to look at not just the awareness-building that comes with gender-based analysis, but actually looking at what instruments we're looking to use and what means of implementation we are going to use. That is something that the MDGs learned, and now they're trying to put it in the STGs. It is something that we also need to do. I'm not an academic in that sense.
There has to be an accountability framework, and we have slipped. In 1995, we thought we were going to really move on GBA. This report was done in 2005. We're now at 2015, and we're losing our profile as a leader on gender mainstreaming and the priority we give to gender equality.
I think we have to look at compliance. There is accountability and there is compliance. You can have accountability mechanisms and yet have nothing that forces people to comply. I'm not calling necessarily for mandatory or legal compliance. We might want to discuss that, but compelling compliance is absolutely critical. We've wasted enough time, I think, making people aware of this and saying it is important. They know it's important, and we all know it's important. Now it has to be done.
There's a very interesting report that comes out of the Pacific, from the Marshall Islands, which are tiny. They decided that it wasn't enough to report on the analysis of the budget, and that what we really should be doing, and all want to be doing, is to change the budget itself, not just how the budget is thought about. We want to change what goes into the budget, and we want to look at the impacts of what comes out of that. If I may, I will send an excerpt of that report, because I think you might find it very useful.
As Rosalind said, there were three dimensions: the dimension of GBA in raising awareness and understanding the issues and the impacts of budgets and policies; making government accountable for the gender budgetary and policy commitments they undertake; and then changing and refining government budgets and policies to promote gender equality.
Over the years, that third part is the part that we haven't looked at enough. If you look at the reports, they're about what was done and who did it and who didn't do it. But some of what we need to do is to assess the impact, and for you, as the committee on the status of women, to ask, who are the leaders who say this wasn't done and who recognize that, as a result, poverty was not addressed.
In our report—and I don't know if it exists anymore—we talked about using the internal tools that the Government of Canada has. One of them was the management accountability framework. We need to find the hooks, the anchor, and what we want to do in the regular way that the government and the public service proceed. We have to find those points of entry, and we have to hold people accountable to use them.
One of the other things in the report that we had felt was necessary was that every time we have a Speech from the Throne, it should address the importance of gender and gender-based analysis and the outcomes that we want to reach.
I notice that Status of Women is now talking about GBA+. I'm a little confused by that because perhaps it explains why we are where we are. When we first talked about gender-based analysis, to me it always had to include things like age, class, experience, and culture, because gender is not simply looking at males and females. It's the mapping, it's the layering of each different set of information that gives you a picture about gender. If we weren't doing GBA+ when it started, maybe that's the reason we haven't moved as far along the track as we might and should have.
Two other elements relate to accountability and leadership. The Auditor General reports on everything. I think we're at a point where if we want to compel compliance, and if we want to move quickly, we need a voice that looks specifically at this issue and reports to you in Parliament and to other women in Canada.
The third thing we need is civil society. We've had a breakdown in how civil society organizations relate to each other, to Status of Women, and to information that you might want in the commission. We lost the commissioner on status of women when we had that NGO civil society aspect. We don't have the national action committee working. So we need something that pools women's voices.
I've been really pleased, because all around the world, the people who are pushing most on moving forward on GBA, on gender budgeting, on gender outcomes for equality, are groups of researchers. Rosalind knows that you definitely get a lot of support in the EC from groups who are saying that you must move forward. I'm delighted to see that CRIAW is going to be speaking.
I was quite distressed when we closed down, because I was one of the founders in 1975 when we thought we needed to make a statement about how we understood and reported on and found information on women in Canada and our lives and our meaning to the Canadian people.