Mr. Speaker, I am honoured and pleased to rise this afternoon to support this Liberal motion.
First, I would like to discuss the economic aspect of the issue. I would then like to address the importance of applying a gender lens to these political issues.
I would like to begin by talking about women and the economy. Not because the economic aspect is more important than any other—it is not—but because I am an economist. I therefore have some ideas on the subject.
It is in society's best interest to eliminate all barriers blocking members of any group from participating fully in the economy and the labour market.
In other words, we want to break through the glass ceiling in the case of women, or we want to end racial discrimination in the case of visible minorities.
From a purely economic point of view, if we do not do that, then clearly society is the poorer for it because systemic barriers will prevent people from making their maximum contribution to the economy and to society. Not only the individuals in question will be the poorer for it but so will their family and so will society at large.
I saw recently an interesting case of this on television where the principal of a school in Afghanistan was being interviewed. This was a school in which girls were to be educated. His answer was purely in terms of economics. He said that Afghanistan needed girls, who would grow up later to be women, to become productive members of the Afghanistan economy because it is a desperately poor country today and if it does not have the full participation of half of its population in that economy, it will remain desperately poor for a long time.
I am certainly not trying to say that there is a close parallel between the state of Afghanistan and the state of Canada, but the point of principle is the same one. In the extreme case of Afghanistan, if it does not get those women educated and into the labour force, Afghanistan will remain poor.
On a much smaller scale in this country, if we do not ensure the full participation and the right to participate of all women, of all minority groups, of all members of any group in our society, then Canada will be the poorer. From an economic point of view, then, this is the case for breaking down the barriers, breaking through the glass ceiling to ensure the full participation of women and other groups in society.
Just to be clear, I am not saying this is the most important element at all. I think considerations of fairness and social justice are primary, but I think it is nevertheless an element that is worth mentioning.
Mr. Speaker, I forgot to mention that I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the member for Laval—Les Îles.
My second theme is the importance of this gender lens. My comments are based partly on my experience in government, which I will come to in just a minute.
It seems to me that one of the most important reasons to preserve and promote Status of Women Canada is the advocacy and educational role that is played by the minister responsible for the status of women.
If only because a large majority of cabinet and caucus members is male, we need an advocate with some clout to educate all of us and to ensure that all policies are seen through a gender lens as well, of course, as two other lenses.
To illustrate this, I would like to take the example of a different kind of lens, a rural lens. I have a keen memory of endless lectures by a former colleague, Andy Mitchell, now the chief of staff of the Leader of the Opposition, who had responsibility for rural Canada. I remember his lectures on the importance of rural Canada and the importance of seeing everything we did through a rural lens. While the lectures may have been a bit repetitive, they certainly affected my thinking and helped me to understand the importance of rural issues.
It is not that I or any of my urban colleagues were anti-rural, not in the slightest, but all of us parliamentarians are busy people. We do not always study every issue from every angle at every moment. It helps to have that voice reminding us of our rural responsibilities.
I would argue that exactly the same principle applies in the case of women, just as most of our caucus is urban, so, too, the majority is male. I have equally vivid memories of Lisa Frulla as the former minister responsible for the status of women, along with many of her colleagues, reminding us incessantly that everything we do had to be seen through a gender lens as well as through other kinds of lenses.
I would submit that if we in the Liberal Party had need of someone to focus on the gender lens, the need of the Conservative Party for such a person is far more pressing. Only 13% of the government's caucus is female. We would have to go back to the last Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, more than 10 years ago, to find a government caucus where the percentage of females was as low as the government's percentage is today.
If any government in Canada, for at least a dozen years, if not for a century, had the need for a gender lens and the need for a number of people to remind the cabinet and the caucus of the importance of that lens, it is the government sitting over there.
That is why, as chair of the expenditure review committee when we were in government, I said no right away when the bureaucracy proposed that we abolish Status of Women Canada. My committee colleagues immediately concurred with my feeling on this subject. When we were presented with this idea, just as the government has been, we immediately said no but the present government leapt at the opportunity and said yes.
This need for a gender lens is also why we in government, when we were doing our expenditure review, applied gender based analysis to all the issues that came before the expenditure review committee.
Sadly, the minority Conservative government has decided to go the other way. It has cut $5 million from the budget of Status of Women Canada. To the extent it applied any gender based analysis at all, it seems that the lens was focused in the wrong direction, that is to say that it was directed against women rather than in their favour. Why else would the government have cut this flagship program dedicated to improving the status of women?
I might say that this is not the only cut that the Conservatives announced yesterday, which had a distinctly anti-women bias. In general, I do not think Canadians have ever witnessed such meanspirited, ideological cuts, juxtaposed on the same day that the government announced it was swimming in a $13 billion surplus.
Among those other cuts that were specifically hurting women more than men, I would mention a number of others other than Status of Women: women's access to legal rights, the protection of minority rights, the protection of the social economy and cuts in funding to community organizations dealing with poverty and abuse. These organizations affect not only women. They affect women and men but in many cases, disproportionately, these cuts will have a negative impact on women.
These cuts, partly biased against women, were clearly ideological cuts playing to the narrowest of bases, rather than government actions designed to promote the well-being of all Canadians.
I will end with a question. Is it not high time that the government focused on doing what is right for all Canadians, and particularly for Canadian women, rather than focusing exclusively on doing what is right for the Conservative Party?