Status of Women committee  Perhaps I'll make a brief response, and then I will have to leave. I think, as Professor Lahey said, it would be extremely revealing. If we had a gender breakdown of how the tax system impacts men and women, it would reveal some inequities that would immediately seem very intolerable, which are currently deeply hidden in the tax system.

Status of Women committee  I would think that is a major one. The justice department is also very important because it's responsible for developing specific legislative initiatives. So that's very important as well. I apologize that I can't be more authoritative about exactly which spending departments, but I think you have identified the key one: HRDC.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much.

Status of Women committee  I think it's critical to attend to it as part of a gender budget analysis. As I said, I would love it if the committee could look at women in both of their main roles, as paid workers and as unpaid caregivers. They're usually doing both at some point in their lives. I think if you took the approach of really looking at women as individuals, not as dependants or members of a household, you would get a lot further in terms of asking whether caregivers' interests are being advanced or are being protected.

Status of Women committee  I'm sorry. Is the question for me?

Status of Women committee  Certainly in the form it has taken with the pension splitting rules, I think it would be quite disastrous for us to extend those. They are very poorly designed, especially from a gender equality perspective. It is a real shame those came into being without undergoing a proper gender analysis, and I would be very sorry to see them be enlarged.

Status of Women committee  I'm not sure I can comment on departmental structure. However, what I do believe is that the Department of Finance needs to acquire some expertise in this field, and that probably means new personnel who are trained in gender-based analysis. There is a disconnect between the finance department and gender experts elsewhere in government.

Status of Women committee  I think it's true that many problems of equality require direct spending by government to address; not everything can be done through the tax system to address women's inequality or the problems of low-income people. This is one of the reasons we need to examine the budget from a gender lens, because there has been such a heavy shift towards tax cuts as the instrument for addressing problems, and we need to scrutinize those to see if they're working equally well for men and women, for low-income and higher-income people.

Status of Women committee  I believe it could, and I'm sorry I can't put a figure on it for you. But I strongly believe that making tax policy in a gender-blind way means it's going to be poor tax policy, in terms of achieving the government's own stated objectives, whatever those objectives are, because the government is not using complete information in formulating its policy.

Status of Women committee  We've made a start on that. The Canada Revenue Agency does publish some gender disaggregated data; however, it is limited, and we would need to enrich it significantly to do a thorough gender analysis. There may be new kinds of data that would need to be produced about, for instance, the distribution of resources within households.

Status of Women committee  I think it does. However, I guess I would say there are some organizations who are working on this, despite having limited resources. There are academics who are working on these topics. So there are people in organizations out there in civil society who government agencies could definitely work with.

Status of Women committee  In some cases, it may need to collect more information. It may need to actually gather more data about the effect on men and women. We don't always have the information we need. This is part of the reason that governments have to be involved. It can't just be done by NGOs, because governments have the ability to do the data collection, for instance, or they may have confidential data that they can access in order to do that kind of assessment.

Status of Women committee  I would be happy to respond. First, I think what you said at the end is accurate, that “gender budgeting” is a term that captures the application of gender analysis to the budget as a specific government policy instrument.

Status of Women committee  Is that a question for me?

Status of Women committee  Thank you. There are many different ways of going about measurement of outcomes. I suppose one would have to think about what one means by an outcome. One could measure who receives the benefit of a spending program, comparing men to women, who receives the benefit of a tax cut, comparing men to women.