Status of Women committee  Let me just refer you back to the fact that Canada has a platform for action that it wrote in 1995 and has not yet acted on. If you take a look at that platform for action, there are indicators there. You don't have to start from scratch. You can determine which of those indica

Status of Women committee  What she's doing and what I'm doing is on a voluntary basis. There's no money for doing what we do. So if you want us to participate in pre-budgetary policies and whatnot, there are just no avenues. I pulled this thing together in the last 24 hours. This should not be the way civ

Status of Women committee  Of course, if you want to organize a meeting.

Status of Women committee  We're going to be a lot slower in moving on the agenda that we've talked about, because that's partly the process of hearing that the cupboard is bare. It looks like the United States will be entering a recession in 2008. Given the degree of integration with our economy, we can

Status of Women committee  We know there are some tax expenditures that are on the personal side, but much of the tax expenditure package is on the corporate side. When you talk about reviewing tax expenditures, I presume you are referring to the personal income tax side of the equation, in which case we k

Status of Women committee  I'll start, Madame Boucher. If you're going to do more tax cuts or if you're going to do debt reduction, show us who benefits from those things. In anything you do with the surplus, anything you do with spending, show us who the beneficiaries are. That's the very least you ca

Status of Women committee  I'd like to remind you that I have submitted a five-page document, which I hope will be translated for the members of this committee. The four things I have mentioned--affordable housing, affordable post-secondary education, affordable child care, and raising the minimum wage--ar

Status of Women committee  If I had a wish list I would ask for you to argue vigorously for a process wherein you do some of the things you've heard today: that every new initiative taken out of the surplus budget, every new initiative that comes from program allocation and reallocation, be assessed as to

Status of Women committee  I'd just like to say thank you very much for your question. Yes, it is disheartening for those of us who have been in the women's movement for decades to have lost the ground we've lost in the last couple of years. That having been said, as our colleague from Australia has sai

Status of Women committee  Can I just say how easy it is to do a gender budget analysis on tax incidence? You can follow the money. You can do “what's the impact of a tax cut like this”, given the staff to do it. Finance probably does it, but doesn't make it public—there's a good chance of that. I don't

Status of Women committee  Madame Grewal, I don't know what conversations you have with your constituents. I know that by and large, in the work we do through the Social Planning Council, which is my constituency, nobody is asking for tax cuts. People are asking for more service. I don't know if you reca

Status of Women committee  I wish I could report on something different--that is, a partisan difference--but I'm afraid that both governments we have had since 1995 have been unable to meet the Beijing commitments. That does tar both the Liberals and the Conservatives with the same brush. However, I'm hope

Status of Women committee  I'm not sure I should go first, because I think you've heard what I said. I think the primary things the Conservative government has done in the last two budgets are to allocate $191 billion of surplus in the coming years to tax cuts and $37 billion worth of surplus to debt reduc

Status of Women committee  Of course. My apologies.

Status of Women committee  Child care and minimum wage. In fact, the fourth thing is minimum wage, and it wouldn't cost governments anything. It would be just setting the rules of the road.