Status of Women committee  We have a unit that's working on it. We have a contact that does all of the gender retrievals for international databases. But again, this would be a cost-recovery project. We would probably be participating in it as partners, I would imagine, although I can't commit to anything, because I don't really know what the agreement is at this point.

Status of Women committee  Yes, we can measure impact and comment on it. The line is drawn at drawing conclusions or making recommendations. It's at that point. Our role is to determine what the data we have collected tell us.

Status of Women committee  It's not Statistics Canada. I will say something about that, though, because it goes back to what you heard earlier. If you have a program logic model that says you're putting in place this program and these are the outcomes you hope to get and these are some measurable outputs you could look at, and if gender is taken into account in that, then StatsCan gets together with the departments and they say “This is what we want as our output.

Status of Women committee  I agree that the value of having an indicator at a high level is that you can kind of, at a glance, get a sense of things. But you really need to dig deeper to get a real idea of what the issues are and of what's explaining the situation. That's the disadvantage of the indicator; sometimes it masks those kinds of things.

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  To the first question, I think there's always more one can do. What you heard earlier from Status of Women Canada is true. I manage the general social survey, which has 25,000 respondents. So if we want to look at women in a particular geographic area, broken down by age and minority status, and so on, you will pretty soon have such low cell counts that the results are not releasable.

Status of Women committee  Those, again, are decided in consultation. If you're talking about the Women in Canada book, definitely, Status of Women Canada brings its expertise to the table. Also, as I said, we're involved in international groups. A lot of work is being done around the world on this issue, so we try to keep up to date on that.

Status of Women committee  I missed the question, sorry.

Status of Women committee  They have some of their own projects under way. Sometimes they contract out small projects. I don't know if that's what you're referring to. Most of their data does come through Statistics Canada. They're very involved with us. They're on our steering committees, so that we understand their policy needs.

Status of Women committee  The analysis that comes out of Statistics Canada is meant to be objective information provided to policy departments. We do produce all of this information, we do analyze the results, and then it's up to the policy departments to kind of take it. I think the step you're talking about is the next step: asking what this means and what policy should be in place because of it.

Status of Women committee  That's a good question. As far as I know, the preliminary work hasn't really started yet. The analyst responsible for that publication is actually retiring, and Louise is heading up the section that will be responsible for the production of that report.

Status of Women committee  I can't answer how we compensate for it, but I can tell you how it has been measured. National accounts has a satellite account for unpaid work. They use time-use data: they calculate the amount of time spent in unpaid work and they have a method for giving it value. That's how it's calculated in Canada.

Status of Women committee  There are very many players in the consultation process.

Status of Women committee  There used to be one person dedicated to it who coordinated the agency's activities to an extent. At the moment, this is part of the new initiative Louise mentioned. We're in the process of setting that unit up again, because after that person left, there wasn't an immediate replacement.

Status of Women committee  As I mentioned in my presentation, we don't have a gender unit at Statistics Canada. First of all, all projects have some commitment to collecting information on gender, so it's rather hard to measure in terms of the amount of resources. There are person-days devoted to particular projects; we are represented on the UNECE committee and the UN committee for gender statistics; we're involved in task forces for gender databases in both of those organizations; we have a member on the committee who's developing the new indicators; and we devote certain resources to cost-recovery projects.