Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I think you're right: mandatory requirement would not solve the GBA issue by itself. Training is key here. I've mentioned the word “reflex” a few times. When departmental officials design policies, what's important for them is not so much that there's a requirement, th

Public Accounts committee  The Office of the Auditor General cannot and does not make recommendations regarding specific policies like these. We have noted that the lack of mandatory requirements could be a barrier. In her opening statement Ms. Ballantyne explained that the agency was going to survey the

Public Accounts committee  At this time, indeed, there are no penalties if the gender-based analysis is poor. There may be penalties later, if we see that GBA was not considered in developing policies. At that point, there could be poorly designed policies. That said, it comes after the fact. It is only ov

Public Accounts committee  We've introduced a new reporting format, I believe, the cycle before this one. The May 2015 report would have adopted that new reporting format.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, in regard to the barriers that explain the reason why GBA was not always performed.... Actually, I think I will answer your two questions in one answer. I think it is easier for some departments to do GBA than it is for others. It is easier if it has a social component

Public Accounts committee  There is no policy that requires GBA to be performed. That being said, it is true that when the departments prepare an MC or a TB submission, there is in the template a section that they have to fill out showing that they did perform a GBA. What we saw in the report, however, is

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I'll go back to some of the issues we saw in the report. The first thing we saw was that the framework to introduce GBA was not applied uniformly across the sample departments. At the end of the report, in paragraph 1.58, we suggest a number of barriers that could expl

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our 2015 Fall Report on gender-based analysis. Gender-based analysis (GBA) is an analytical tool for assessing the gender-specific impacts of policies, legislation, and programs on women and men. This tool is intended to help

Status of Women committee  No.

Status of Women committee  I was going to say that Status of Women Canada put in place a website on which there's an e-learning module. I think it takes two or three hours to go through the GBA+ training. I understand that some departments are actively promoting the training right now. It might be a resou

Status of Women committee  The process, put simply, is that whenever there is a policy proposal being analyzed, they have to put the environmental lens on it and try to assess what the environmental impact of this policy initiative will be. This information is then relayed to the policy-makers through the

Status of Women committee  If I may add, it doesn't mean that because there's a requirement to perform an environmental assessment, they're well done. They might be taking shortcuts and writing that there's no environmental impact, whereas in reality there is an environmental impact.

Status of Women committee  We've seen TB submissions with GBA that said that there was no gender impact, but there was no evidence that we could see from which they concluded that there was no gender impact.

Status of Women committee  There is a cabinet directive for departments to perform strategic environmental assessments, so whenever there is a proposal they have to do an environmental assessment. This is done through a cabinet directive. This is one avenue that could be taken to force GBA to be performed,

Status of Women committee  We did not look at private members' bills specifically. In the sample of 16 initiatives that we selected, there was at least one revision to an act. As well, one regulation was introduced. This was in terms of looking for GBA evidence. But in our sample, no, there were no priva