Subcommittee on Oil and Gas and Other Energy Prices committee  Well, I think that when one group of institutional investors, say in the United States, is able to do something, it creates pressure for everyone to do likewise. So even where there might be some regulatory restrictions in place, they will scramble to try to find their way to do what the other folks that are in the same ball club do.

Subcommittee on Oil and Gas and Other Energy Prices committee  Thanks very much. It's good to see you all. I'm going to address the question of whether the price of oil is justified by underlying economic fundamentals. So do garden-variety demand and supply factors explain the high price of oil, or is something else going on that is distorting these fundamentals?

Status of Women committee  Perhaps I can respond not precisely to your question but to something that I think is relevant to this. We speak about constraints and costs as though there's a bit of a veneer on this, like it's an additional burden or something to do this gender budgeting. I don't think we've sufficiently emphasized the potential benefits of doing this.

Status of Women committee  I think it's pretty obvious that when you get past Gender Budgeting 101, it is difficult to extricate women from the fact they exist in families. There are children, there are elderly people, who are all in women's lives. There are very material consequences if, for example, women aren't able to enter into the labour force because they are engaged in unpaid care activities vis-à-vis these family members.

Status of Women committee  So are you looking for examples of where a tax cut is compared with a spending measure in terms of its gender impact?

Status of Women committee  I'm sure there must be, but I just can't think of an example at this moment.

Status of Women committee  Yes, I can look to provide some information. I also think you're about to speak with Armine Yalnizyan. She actually undertook a ten-year study of the federal budget from a gender perspective, and she may well have a number of examples up her sleeve that would speak to your issue.

Status of Women committee  Income splitting is clearly something that has been analyzed a lot from a gender perspective, but as for an example of a tax way to go about something being weighed against a spending way to go about it, I am blanking out. There are lots of things, such as particular tax measures, that have been critiqued on gender grounds, though.

Status of Women committee  Can you restate the question?

Status of Women committee  I don't doubt that there are ways of presenting even empirical information that tend to highlight certain things and not others, and therefore they introduce the biases of the people who apply the filter. That's true in so many areas. We have to have debates about what the numbers mean.

Status of Women committee  You're question was which groups you would invite.... Could you repeat your question?

Status of Women committee  You've got a real problem, because.... I mean, your question seems to assume that there is this rich array of groups out there that have this highly developed analysis of gender budgeting, and if we could just find them and bring them here, they would tell us. But in many cases, a lot of groups with a very strong interest in many of these issues don't have the capacity to perform the analysis that would be helpful to your committee and to the government.

Status of Women committee  I don't know exactly what the Department of Finance has at its fingertips, but I have stuff at my fingertips that would be at least useful as a first approximation. I am being a bit facetious here, but--

Status of Women committee  --this is not classified information. In many cases you can at least work your way backward to figure out a lot of the gender implications of things, even if you don 't have the ideal data set in front of you.

Status of Women committee  I think you could get started tomorrow and do some meaningful work. If you have the capacity to say to folks in the federal government, in the finance department and Stats Canada, “Do your best”, a lot could happen. Now, you may well get important information going through this--I don't know--but my guess is that you'll walk away having heard the pros and cons, that there is no conclusive information and no guarantee that it'll all work out well....