Status of Women committee  Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here, and I'm delighted that the members of this committee have taken on the opportunity to study gender budgeting. We have been a keen and long-term advocate of gender budgeting, for a variety of reasons. We understand gender budge

Status of Women committee  There's currently no other mechanism through which to obtain the information. There is simply no other way. It's not public information yet. I think that to improve the quality of the analysis and also to better situate why you would do gender budgeting, it's really important to

Status of Women committee  There was a GBA done on tax policy of the 2007 budget, and the access to information request that we received demonstrates that. Clare, you may have seen it. What I would suggest is that the analysis is done to some degree in a vacuum. It's not done with any meaningful goal.

Status of Women committee  Other analyses stated that the transportation, the public transit credit, for example, would be potentially useful to low-income individuals, many of whom are women, but because women have a more limited tax liability, they wouldn't benefit, in fact, to an equal degree, because t

Status of Women committee  To our knowledge, there is no other mechanism. Consequently, there is no possibility of access to the Minister of Finance during pre-budget consultations other than at the consultations held by the Finance Committee. It is truly very difficult to establish a contact, to have some

Status of Women committee  Pardon me?

Status of Women committee  They said it was not possible. Not all groups that requested to be included were chosen. Our group was not chosen.

Status of Women committee  No, we do not know what the criteria are.

Status of Women committee  I think the pre-budget consultation process is perhaps a mystery to many. That is the case for many groups.

Status of Women committee  I understand that.

Status of Women committee  I think Ms. Mathyssen is referring to the gender-based analyses that have been done on previous budgets, including 2007, which are not publicly available, or in fact even internally available, in many cases.

Status of Women committee  I'll make a distinction between the pre-budget consultations that are done through the finance committee and the ministerial round tables that are led by the Minister of Finance in the pre-budget lead-up. Our information suggests that more groups, about four to six, appeared bef

Status of Women committee  Sure. Certainly I think other witnesses have elaborated upon income splitting. In our view, income splitting has a number of problems attached to it. Filing a joint tax claim or, more to the point, transferring some of a higher-income earner's income symbolically for tax purpos

Status of Women committee  I mean there's no coherent analysis or framework that's guiding the gender-based analysis done within the finance department. The tax policy people are doing what they can, but I don't think they're necessarily doing it...and it may not be their job. It may be the job of the seni

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. I think what Debbie said is correct, and you need a performance indicator. We were sad to see that Canada's report to the Commonwealth finance ministers association emphasized analysis and not indicators. Internationally, Canada claims to do gender budgeting on the s