Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, thank you for the opportunity to present today. I am pleased to share Health Canada's experience, and I hope the committee finds it useful. Health Canada has a long history of considering sex and gender as a way of advancing both gender equality and sound science.

Status of Women committee  First of all, thank you. I think success is all relative, but I'm glad to take that one home. To start with the latter, in terms of the consideration of sex being easier, it's because we can get sex-disaggregated data on almost anything. It's not always reported that way, and if

Status of Women committee  It could be. I think in the literature, even internally, we notice that the terminology around sex and gender can be used interchangeably. It's something we tend to be a bit fussy about, so I think for sure in other science research departments.... I can't really comment in dep

Status of Women committee  We should. We don't always do that consistently, but absolutely. At Health Canada and at a lot of departments, when we come out with statements they tend to be about all Canadians or all people living in Canada. For me, looking at this is getting at the question: which Canadians

Status of Women committee  We would do the sex- and gender-based analysis in terms of identifying what the population at risk is and what the differences are. With suicide, to pick up on that one as an example, we know that boys are committing suicide more, but in fact, girls express suicidal ideation and

Status of Women committee  Could I comment on...?

Status of Women committee  I was referring to it in terms of the recent media attention, in terms of the crisis of suicide. This is not only with boys.

Status of Women committee  No, what I was referring to is a study we have that's fairly specific—and there's a risk in extrapolating—and was looking at the concurrence of substance use and abuse with suicide attempts and suicidal ideation. In that study there was information that came forward in terms of t

Status of Women committee  We have some tools and checklists that give some fairly high level questions, and we encourage researchers and policy-makers to look at the data, and have you looked at the data from a sex-disaggregated point of view, and have you considered this kind of research? It's at a high

Status of Women committee  Everywhere. Seriously, the mandate of the health department is to look at health outcomes for all Canadians. There isn't a file that doesn't have potential for some personal impact, and that makes it a huge challenge for our departments that are trying to figure out where to focu

Status of Women committee  I can't speak specifically on this one. That would be a Public Health Agency matter, not a Health Canada one specifically, so I wouldn't have enough knowledge. Using that as an example to extrapolate though, for sure if we looked at those kinds of issues and did a better job, w

Status of Women committee  Doing better sex- and gender-based analysis is certainly never going to hurt, but I think you're sort of touching on a bigger question in terms of the decision-making. Because we are public servants, our job is to give that good advice based on evidence, to do our best research,

Status of Women committee  That's a good question, actually. We haven't been tracking that. We've been trying to track how many people take the training, and we have information in terms of how we're seeing an increase in SGBA applied to memoranda to cabinet and Treasury Board submissions, for example, but

Status of Women committee  I think what I said is that in the gender and health unit we're not subject matter experts. We can't possibly be experts in everything that goes on in the department, so it's really much more about the process and supporting people. I really like the phrase from the New Zealand

Status of Women committee  Yes.