Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being with us this afternoon.
I have two questions for you. The first concerns gender-responsive budgeting.
An article was published last March in the Toronto Star about the poor results obtained through gender-responsive budgeting elsewhere in the world, and they gave three examples.
The first one is from Australia; that country adopted this type of budgeting until 2014. They suddenly decided to drop that approach because of the impossibility of obtaining specific, positive results for women.
The second example is from Austria. There, they amended the Constitution to adopt gender-responsive budgeting and also take into account gender-based analysis plus, as Canada is doing now, but the office of the Austrian parliamentary budget officer unfortunately found that the results regarding women were inconclusive. There were no concrete results tending to demonstrate that the lives of women had improved much. In fact, they found that the objectives were not well defined and that the communication among departments was poor.
Finally, the Toronto Star quoted a third example from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD. Unfortunately, the same results were reported in 12 countries. Only half of those were able to provide specific examples of good results where political measures such as gender-based analysis and gender-responsive budgeting led to convincing positive results for women.
My question is simple. In light of these results obtained in Europe, do you think it is possible that Canada will obtain better results?