Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the parliamentary secretary for taking the time to further answer questions on the Auditor General's scathing report on gender-based analysis in federal departments.
As I am sure the parliamentary secretary is well aware, the Auditor General and the Treasury Board secretariat testified yesterday at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. I had the opportunity to attend that meeting and hoped to get some answers. During question period on May 12, 2009, the President of the Treasury Board claimed that his government is committed to gender-based analysis and denied that the Auditor General was critical of the government's actions.
The President of the Treasury Board was incorrect. The Auditor General was and still is very critical about how gender-based analysis is or, more accurately, is not performed in government departments and at the Treasury Board. I will briefly summarize her findings.
Gender-based analysis has had a weak take-up in federal departments. Of the 68 cases assessed by the Auditor General, only four had GBA incorporated in policy development. Only 30 of the cases had some analysis done. Twenty-seven cases had not considered GBA at all. There is no policy requiring departments to do GBA, and departments do not know when GBA should be performed.
Furthermore, the Auditor General was astonished that the challenge function at the Treasury Board was based solely on verbal exchanges and no documentation was undertaken. How can anyone be assured if GBA has even been considered, never mind performed, if there is no written record?
Continuing in her criticism, the Auditor General stated that the government does not care about GBA. She found that the lack of documentation made it clear that GBA was and is not a priority. She felt that the government should further help Status of Women Canada fulfill its mandate and support gender-based analysis in all departments.
It was reported yesterday that individual departments are left to their own devices as to how or whether they do GBA. Some training has been done in various departments and at the Treasury Board. Time and money have been invested in GBA, but the results found by the Auditor General show that despite this investment, GBA is rarely performed, often dismissed and very rarely applied.
Transport Canada, for instance, felt that it was gender-neutral and did not need to do GBA at all. It seems very unlikely that absolutely nothing Transport Canada does would affect men and women differently. Sadly, the best the Treasury Board could say for their best practices was that they distribute a pamphlet on GBA and that they include GBA in their boot camp.
They repeated over and over that they did not think that they should have to document whether a GBA was done on a project and that departments should take care of that themselves. If departments are not regulated, encouraged or forced to do GBA and the Treasury Board is uninterested in enforcing GBA, who is left?
Many of the witnesses yesterday insisted that the buck stops at the minister's desk. Ministers alone have the ability to ignore the results of a GBA, if it has even been performed. Only four projects actually took GBA into account. This is a dismal record and it is not acceptable. The system is clearly failing at the department level, at the Treasury Board level and when it arrives at the desk of each and every minister.
I have a very simple question for the parliamentary secretary. After the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women recommended that GBA be mandatory for all government departments, why does the government refuse to make gender-based analysis mandatory?