Status of Women committee  It's a very critical consideration of course. There are all kinds of implications, both on the spending and the revenue side. In terms of who does unpaid work in the economy, for example, families have a lot to say on how that unpaid work gets organized. The ways in which taxation affects households, and government spending affects households....

Status of Women committee  Professor Bartle, do you want to take this first?

Status of Women committee  I would like to emphasize something that Dr. Bartle said, which was about the importance of the initial commitment do this. I'm quite certain you'll hear a lot of very stimulating witnesses who will tell you a lot of important things, and you will walk away and won't be sure what to do, because there are a lot of uncertainties about this.

Status of Women committee  I can't speak to that.

Status of Women committee  My suggestion has been this initial first step--which I think is a pretty modest first step--just to give us a gender breakdown on any new tax cuts. You can and should get more elaborate than that, coming up with some kind of basic scoresheet, in effect, to see what the gender consequences of different policies are.

Status of Women committee  My same point still applies, but a second point is that there is often a linkage. Policy-makers have to decide which instrument to use. We often agree on the basic goals, but the question is how do we get there. The question often comes up about whether we could maybe embrace a tax cut to achieve this goal, or whether we need a spending measure to achieve this goal.

Status of Women committee  I understand that people do make these cases. I'm sure you can find witnesses who can lead you through cases they may have constructed, as far as the costs and benefits of these things. Often one of the problems is that the cost of performing this exercise is out of today's budget, whereas the benefits are seen somewhere down the road.

Status of Women committee  Sure. Various tax measures that either have recently been enacted or are being considered or debated in the public sphere don't have any obvious...or at least from the superficial level, they do not look like they speak much at all to gender. One example--and I think it was debated during the last election--is the possibility of having a change to reduce the taxation of capital gains.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely, if that was a filter through which we had analyzed those policies before embarking on them and we had placed a high value on gender equity, we would have designed things differently. An example is any policy that is affected by the difference between men's and women's patterns as far as labour force participation is concerned.

Status of Women committee  I've been involved in conversations where it's been explained to me that something is happening. I just haven't seen any report or something that would concretely lay out for me just exactly what is happening. So I hesitate to comment, because while I've been assured that something is going on, I'm not too sure what that something is.

Status of Women committee  Within the finance department?

Status of Women committee  Well, at the very minimum--it's quite simple--I'd see a table. A given tax cut would be described, and how much it would cost. Then there would be a table, with men on one side and women on the other side, and then different income groups. Women earning less than x thousand dollars a year would get so many dollars, and men in the same income category would get so many dollars.

Status of Women committee  There are many ways of answering that question. My answer would be that my first priority is to have the information so that we actually know what the consequences are of policies based on gender. We could go further than that and put some sort of goal attached to it. Once we have all the information on the table, then our goal is such-and-such.

Status of Women committee  Well, vis-à-vis the question of unpaid work that women are often performing, there are any number of ways that budgets end up impacting on that kind of unpaid work. To give you an example, with something like child care--performed on an unpaid basis in the home, say, or performed on a paid basis in a child care centre, say--the availability of government programs that make it possible to access child care centres will affect women's unpaid work in the home.

Status of Women committee  There are various ways of approaching problems. One is to make a provision in the tax system to address a problem. There may be ways of spending money to address the same problem. So the question boils down to which would be the most effective, cost-effective for the government and also effective vis-à-vis the intended beneficiaries of this.