:
Good morning, honourable members. Thank you for inviting us to present to you.
I am here in the capacity of having been chair of an expert panel on accountability mechanisms for gender equality. We want to thank you. Ms. Dorienne Rowan-Campbell and Louise Langevin, who is on the screen, were members of the expert panel with me in the fall of 2005.
We've been reading with interest the proceedings on gender budgeting. I thought that before we answered your questions and had a discussion with you, it would be worthwhile to explain the work we did and put our work into the context of what you've been doing recently.
First of all, I'd like to make clear to the committee that I am not an expert on gender budgets. My colleague Dorienne has had more experience with them and can perhaps answer specific questions about gender budgets.
I was asked in 2005 by the minister then responsible for the status of women to chair an expert panel on accountability mechanisms for gender equality. Our mandate was to study accountability and provide advice on strengthening gender equality in Canada, taking into account the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, relevant jurisprudence in other countries, as well as the April 2005 report of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, titled “Gender-based Analysis: Building Blocks for Success”.
Here is our report, which I believe has been made available to this committee. There are a few points I'd like to make about the report that are relevant to your current discussions.
First, the subject of gender budgeting was not a focus of our study; rather, we saw gender budgeting as one form of accountability mechanism that was part of a broader system whereby a government in power could achieve its policy goals. We felt that the broader system was also extremely important and needed to put things like gender budgeting into context.
Gender budgeting, like other gender-based analyses, is only a tool and not the final outcome. The key assumption in our report was that any form of accountability mechanism can only be effective within an environment that starts with a political will to achieve certain substantive outcomes. And it's the party in power that decides what those substantive outcomes should be.
Second, we recommended that the overall desired high-level outcome should be substantive equality, which we defined on page 13 of our report as women having “the conditions for realizing their full human rights and potential to contribute to national political, economic, social and cultural development, and to benefit from the results”.
Third, we took a two-pronged approach to our recommendations. Looking at accountability mechanisms inside government in 2005, we felt that a good starting point would be to address existing government policy and administrative tools. We also saw legislation regarding gender-based analysis as a potential second step, but we recognized, as you well know, that legislation was a longer process and we felt that things needed to be done right away. However, we explored the nature of a legislative solution at a very high level and made some suggestions in our report.
In looking at policy and administrative measures, on which we urged immediate action, we gave examples of key instruments that could be used to signal the government's priorities and outcomes it wished to achieve. For example, we recognize that there are key instruments of government, such as the Speech from the Throne--part of an overall policy-setting system--that articulate how a government in power will specifically choose to tackle issues related to substantive equality.
Another significant instrument in any government policy-making process is the federal budget. It was for this reason that we recommended that the Department of Finance set an example by undertaking gender-based analysis on a least one part of the 2006 budget. Based on our conversations with Department of Finance officials at the time, we felt that introducing such analysis would require changes in attitudes inside the department, the learning of new competencies--analysts inside the department would have to be trained--and alterations to work methods. For those reasons we suggested a relatively go-slow approach, and that they start with only one part of the budget at the time.
We've since been told by the staff at the Status of Women office that in fact there has been an attempt to introduce gender-based analysis more broadly, and I'm sure you've heard from the Department of Finance.
Finally—and I'll ask my colleague Dorienne to comment more on this—we also emphasize not only the importance of work going on inside government, but the importance of reaching out to stakeholders so that citizens are engaged and participating in the solutions.
I'll invite Dorienne and Louise to make any opening comments they wish to make, and then we look forward to answering your questions.
Dorienne.
:
Honourable members, thank you for your invitation. It's a real privilege to be here, as it was to be a member of the expert group.
With that privilege goes a lot of responsibility, so I felt very responsible to try to keep in touch with what has been going on. It has been very heartening to see that some of our recommendations are indeed being acted on. We can't say that we did it, but we hope we were contributors to the process, part of the partnership of change.
I thought that this morning I would concentrate a little more on gender budgets and reiterate some of what we said in our annex H of this report, and perhaps expand a little on it. When I expand a little on it, I'm expanding from my personal experience, not from the work that we did in the expert group.
I had been, many years ago, Canada's director for setting up the women in development program, now the gender program, at the Commonwealth Secretariat, and I took a lot of the initial steps that have led us to gender budgeting, particularly in Commonwealth countries, so I'll try to share a little bit of that. When I answer questions, it will be from that perspective. As well, as a consultant, I have worked in countries where we've been trying to do gender budgeting.
First of all, this is just a reminder that even though you've been talking to many groups that talk about women's budgets, what we recommended was not a women's budget that was separate from a men's budget, but a budget that was analyzed in a way that allowed people to identify the potential impact of any measure on both men and women and the equality of men and women. If we remember that gender is not really a shielded way of saying women and men, it's a comparative analytic tool. It's relational. What we want to look at is what happens to men, what happens to women, and within that, what happens to old men and young men and old women and young women and little girls and little boys. It's a tool for identifying what happens to people and where you might be able to introduce change. So when you speak to the groups that talk about women's budgeting, I think in Canada we're doing something a little different.
Also, as Georgina has said, we felt that the Speech from the Throne and the budget exercise annually were two of the most important central policy planks in the way we govern ourselves, in the way we allocate resources, so we wanted to make certain the tracking of those resources was adequate. What we're seeing now is that gender-based budgeting is really being used as a tool to lift the blinkers from people's eyes so they can understand that tracking, so that the gender-based analysis is a tool for gender budgeting. We don't have to introduce a whole new system. The system's already there; it's just a case of anchoring it very specifically.
So I think we've actually made quite a few very good steps, and I congratulate you on the work you've been doing to keep the flame alive, and also on the very hard work that Status of Women is doing with gender-based budgeting and serving the departments in that way.
The second point I wanted to make relates to gender-based analysis. We have made a comment saying that technical knowledge is so important. I was very interested to see Treasury Board come to you and say, “Well, we now have a Treasury Board boot camp where we put people through this”, and this is exactly what we were talking about.
Gender analysis, gender-based analysis, is not something that comes from the moon. It's not rocket science, but it does need to be grounded in some technical competence. It looks as though there is, anchored within our government systems, at least an attempt to try to gain that technical competence.
One of the things we talked about, which you will have seen emerging from your discussions with a variety of players on gender budgeting around the world, is that, for instance, the Scottish women's group and the groups in San Francisco and in a number of other areas are non-governmental organizations. We had made a very strong recommendation about supporting the voluntary sector and about the need for creating a partnership with civil society, because it's vital for monitoring and it's vital for accountability. In the end, the accountability of any government is to the people, and civil society is the people.
It's very important that this partnership be enhanced and that organizations be enabled to make the kind of insightful--critical sometimes, but usually helpful--comments about the direction. The end-user of services and goods and anything else you want to deliver in the budget should be able to feed back whether or not it's actually reaching.... Have we done a good job? Have we not done a good job? I think that would be very important.
If you're going to do that, research is very important. I noticed when I looked at the Status of Women budget that a lot of their research capacity has been cut. There seems to have been a decrease in the amount of research funds that are available--and I think probably not just from Status of Women--to bring civil society evidence-based data back to the table, back to you so that you can reflect on it. That gap may give problems in terms of ultimate accountability. I think it's something that needs to be looked at.
I know that Status of Women had been doing some research on gender equality indicators, and I would urge that this is very important. You need those indicators to set up a ranking system so that you know what you're doing. You may know where you want to go, but it gives you an idea of where the potential impact needs to be. Those indicators will also help you identify whether you're there. I would urge a lot of support for the creation, with various departments, of the relevant gender equality indicators, depending on what end policy requires those to be.
Although we can see that the central agencies--Treasury Board, Finance, and the Privy Council--have begun to take on board some of the concerns and recommendations we made, there is one area that's still very important, and globally it's still the central issue, and that is political will. In terms of accountability, somewhere in the PMO there needs to be a responsive mechanism, something that we feel comes out saying, “This is what's important, and we want to make sure all of you recognize that this is important.” We notice that we haven't seen anything in the Speech from the Throne that says gender equality is important.
Political support, although it's there within the bureaucracy and it's there systemically, I think also needs to be signalled from the highest levels, and I really haven't seen that yet. It's one of the issues that are being discussed globally. The world is asking how we entrap political will. It's all very well for us to effect the systems to bring about change, but that has to be partnered at the top.
:
I'll make my presentation in French. I think it will be easier for me and faster.
[Translation]
I wish to thank members of your committee for this opportunity to testify before you today. I wish to say that your work is very important for the status of women in Canada. Canada is a role model on the subject of the status of women in the world.
I have read part of the testimony you heard recently on gender-based budgets. It appears to me that little has changed since November 2005, when I, along with two of my colleagues, spoke to you about GBAs, gender-based analyses. Status of Women Canada, since last July, has expressed openness to the issue of GBAs. I am delighted about this. I am not an expert on gender-based budgets, although I understand what purpose they serve and how we establish them.
I wish to remind members of the committee of what everyone already knows. Since 1982, Canada has been a signatory of the CEDAW, convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. This country has signed other documents to protect fundamental rights. Canada entrenched the Charter of Rights in its Constitution. Among protected fundamental rights are equality rights, and equality between men and women. It is certainly a fundamental value within Canadian society. The Canadian government, therefore, has made legal commitments with respect to equality for all Canadians.
By systematically refusing to undertake gender-based analysis and adopting gender-based budgets, the Canadian government is breaking its own commitments. Since 1978, Canada has been trying to incorporate GBAs, which is a form of management. Since the 1995 World Conference on Women held in Beijing, Canada has made firm commitments. However, after 13 years, results are late in coming. This is why in our 2005 report, we recommended legislation obliging departments and agencies to adopt GBAs, and set specific targets.
In closing, I wish to mention that Laval University will host the international women of the Francophonie conference next September. The theme is funding women's equality within francophone countries. It is rather paradoxical that women from the countries of the Francophonie will be meeting in Quebec City in September to talk about GBAs, gender-based budgets, and funding mechanisms involving the status of women in Canada; our country is seen as a model, and yet we are moving backwards. It is troubling to see that Canada is regressing in this area. That is exactly why your work is so important at this point in time.
Thank you.
:
I think the voluntary sector, the civil society sector, has a great deal to offer and perhaps is not being used as it might be. We have a number of civil society institutions that do research but are underfunded. We have a number of women's organizations that used to do certain amounts of research but now, under the funding requirements, find it difficult to access funds to do that type of research.
When I was at the Commonwealth Secretariat, I could not undertake policy initiatives until I commissioned research that would give me some evidence-based data to say that was what we needed to do, and therefore to say to all the Commonwealth governments that those were some of the critical issues and these were the ways of approaching them.
I think there's a gap right now in Canada where we don't have enough of that partnership. It's not that their research is necessarily going to agree. It may be diametrically opposed to what we think is happening, but it's still valuable.
Statistics Canada does very good research. But we also need, outside of government, numbers of organizations doing research in areas they are particularly concerned about. When you start to do GBA, you realize some grey areas are thrown up that may lead the government to say they need a policy in this area.
I'll give you one example in an area where I do some voluntary work, the area of housing--affordable, adequate housing. Women are the ones who suffer the most. Women are the ones who are most negatively hit by homelessness. Those figures emerge mostly from the organizations that collect the data about who's sleeping rough on the streets and how many times they've been in a shelter.
That type of information collected and research done well is useful in order for a government to ask if this something we need to look at. Do we need a national policy on housing and to begin a debate? They may say no, we don't need a national policy on housing, but we may need to do this, this, and this. So that partnership is very important. It keeps the tension between government and the governed alive, and that's what makes our system wonderful.
:
I think that Ms. Langevin might have comments, but I would like to add something first.
[English]
I think, Madame Boucher, if you look at page 55 of our report, you'll see we have given some suggestions on what that legislation might look like. It's in the English, but I think it's the same thing in the French. Really, what we patterned the idea on is that there are a number of laws in place now that are trying to address very specific issues: the Employment Equity Act, the Environmental Assessment Act, the Human Rights Act, the Official Languages Act, the Multiculturalism Act. Our sense was that it would be similar in terms of trying to promote substantive gender equality. As I mentioned earlier, what a law would do is shift the oversight to Parliament versus the executive branch, where it is today. Today, as was being discussed, a lot of the oversight is really being exercised through the Treasury Board Secretariat, to some extent assisted by Status of Women Canada.
In my opinion--and this is my personal opinion--if this were to happen, it would probably have to be the Minister of Canadian Heritage, in her responsibilities for Status of Women Canada, who would have to introduce that legislation. Obviously this committee has a role, and if it felt it was important to have that, it could recommend it happen. It would then be up to the heritage minister, because she has the legislative responsibility for Status of Women Canada.
[Translation]
I know that Ms. Langevin has a strong interest in the legislative aspect.
Louise, do you have any comments?
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good morning, witnesses. I must say it's a great honour to have the three of you here today. I thought your report was extremely thorough, coming on the heels of what I would consider to be some very comprehensive work on the part of this committee and including the government response of the day.
One of the things I'd like to deal with first, Madam Langevin, is in regard to your comments suggesting that at this point there is in fact no political will on the part of this government to deal with gender-based issues. That was a rather categorical statement. I point to some of the initiatives--and I appreciate, by the way, that observers may look at that question and have varying degrees, and accept the fact that some would like to see more political will, but to suggest that there is none is, I think, a little bit harsh.
We point to, for example, budget 2008, in which we've committed to an action plan on equality. Changes in the recent mandate of the Status of Women Canada, particularly to the women's program, point to this evolution.
We've heard testimony here before the committee that though some would agree that we are not yet where we ultimately need to be on the work of ingraining gender-based analysis into the culture of planning and decision-making and budget-setting, we're making some progress on it.
Do you have any response to that?
:
Good morning, Madam Chair and honourable members. I want to thank you, on behalf of my colleagues, for the opportunity to be here today.
In 2003, responsibility for gender-based analysis was centralized in the gender-based analysis unit within the Citizenship and Immigration strategic policy branch. In 2005, the gender-based analysis function was transferred to my branch, corporate affairs, which is now situated in the corporate services sector of Citizenship and Immigration. This provided an opportunity to strengthen and integrate gender-based analysis into departmental planning and reporting processes that my branch is also responsible for coordinating.
At Citizenship and Immigration, gender-based analysis is understood to take account of diversity and how the variables of age, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, and culture, among others, intersect with gender. This approach broadens and deepens the analysis, the policy, and the program impacts.
Across Citizenship and Immigration, gender-based analysis is carried out, by and large, at the branch level, where most policy and program work occurs. To support the mainstreaming of gender-based analysis, my branch provides advisory services. We develop tools, deliver training, facilitate information sharing, develop guides, and assist branches in formulating their branch plans. We also coordinate input into the annual immigration report to Parliament.
Accordingly, Allison, Julie, and I are not the policy experts on immigration. Rather, we support the experts, experts like Jeff Daly, who represents policy on the refugee side.
We work to increase Citizenship and Immigration's capacity to integrate gender-based analysis into its work based on the following four principles of Citizenship and Immigration's five-year strategic framework. Principle one is that policy, legislation, programs, and services are consistent with gender-equality objectives. Principle two is that gender-based analysis is an integral aspect of policy and legislative analysis, program development, and service delivery. Principle three is that the quality of advice is enhanced when gender implications are considered. And the fourth principle is that progress requires innovation--innovation in training and innovation in data collection and analysis.
Today I want to give you a quick update on some of the progress we've made at Citizenship and Immigration on strengthening our capacity and performance on gender-based analysis. In so doing, I'll do my best to also address the points I understand you wish to examine: the current legislative framework and the reporting structure for gender-based analysis at Citizenship and Immigration, the process that led to the adoption of a legislative model, and how this model impacts on the implementation of gender-based analysis at Citizenship and Immigration.
Back in 2005, the gender-based analysis unit worked with partners across Citizenship and Immigration to develop our 2005-2010 strategic framework. That framework lays out a path for filling the requirement to report to Parliament. The framework is about progressively building capacity in CIC to do gender-based analysis. It's also about facilitating the integration of gender-based analysis into CIC's work so that policies, programs, and legislation better reflect commitments on progress towards equality between men and women.
Broadly, we accomplish this in two ways. One is the GBA capacity-building initiative I'd spoken to earlier, which my branch is responsible for. Second is the branches themselves developing their plans based on the analysis of the issues.
Since publishing that framework, we've done a few things. We've developed and then improved a comprehensive and interactive two-day training programming. Other departments continue to come to us and express their interest in the program we've developed. This committee hasn't seen that program. We'd be happy to share it. It's worth taking a look at.
We've delivered that training to more than 200 employees. We've developed and then improved a template to facilitate branch planning, and we've taken the first steps to integrate planning around gender-based analysis into the broader corporate planning.
We have branch plans in place for integration, immigration, Metropolis branch, refugees, risk litigation, and strategic policy. In addition, we have a plan in place for our citizenship program that falls outside the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which I think is a testament to the commitment of the department to gender-based analysis.
We have an active departmental working group that shares lessons and best practices, that tackles common and horizontal issues, that tests new ideas with each other, and shares with each other some of the developments going on more broadly in government.
We've completed a survey of managers that tells us how to improve. For example, we've learned from the survey that we need a more a tailored workshop for more senior managers to better equip them to lead their teams in the implementation of gender-based analysis.
You've heard from other officials from CIC in previous appearances before the standing committee, and you've seen in our annual immigration report the kinds of tangible results we've achieved. This takes me to the questions you've posed about what impacts our legislation around GBA has had at CIC. As you know, we're the only federal department required by law to report to Parliament on the gender impacts of our policies and programs.
In my mind, there's no question that the progress CIC has made in strengthening its capacity and performance in gender-based analysis is attributable in large measure to the 2002 legislative requirement in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. It was the impetus for the creation of our original gender-based analysis unit in the development of our five-year strategic framework. It brings sustainability to our work, because there's an annual ongoing requirement to report.
The opportunity to report to Parliament that's built into legislation brings a heightened sense of relevance and commitment to the file. It helps us convey a sense of importance and priority to our colleagues and it challenges us, perhaps most importantly, to take the time to think through what it takes to report positive results. In short, the impact has been significant, and it's been positive.
But in saying that, I would point out that the legislative requirement itself is quite simple. It simply states that the annual report on immigration shall include a description of the gender-based analysis impact of the act. That's the legislative requirement. So I wouldn't characterize that requirement as a framework.
I say that because we have a framework, and none of the activities that are laid out in our framework that I'd spoken to earlier, things like training and getting branch plans in place, are part of the legislation. So I would suggest, therefore, that while the legislative requirement was certainly an important foundation, a key driver, it alone wasn't sufficient to account for the progress that we've made at CIC.
Without the thought-through strategic framework my predecessors developed, without the support of the Status of Women, without the leadership and commitment and innovation I've seen at Citizenship and Immigration Canada in my short time there, I don't think we would have seen the same kind of progress. Without doubt, I would suggest that our progress is also attributable to the fact that gender considerations are naturally an integral part of the work of CIC.
We naturally think about gender, and it's a regular consideration when examining our specific policy proposals, from family reunification to preventing vulnerable foreign workers from being exploited or abused to live-in caregivers. Gender considerations are paramount and something we take very seriously.
Under the language instruction for newcomers to Canada program, for example, we provide child-minding services to ensure that language training is accessible to all eligible clients. Child-minding is aimed at removing the barriers often experienced by immigrant women and caregivers.
Finally, I want to suggest that while legislation certainly had a catalytic effect for us, I'm not sure it's the only means to have achieved that effect for Citizenship and Immigration. Perhaps the same results could have been achieved through other means--a requirement, for example, to report in the main estimates, to report on plans and priorities in the departmental performance report. We do that anyway, but that could have been one approach.
A Treasury Board policy might have worked equally well for us. Something in the management accountability framework, where Treasury Board rates departments each year, might have worked equally well for us. We produce a corporate plan each year and we're required to do that. Perhaps a requirement to build gender-based analysis into our corporate plan would have worked equally well.
These are just some of the possibilities I believe this committee has considered. I saw many of those in the April 2005 report called “Building Blocks for Success”.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to be here.
Thank you very much for your presentations this morning.
We've heard from a lot of different experts in the field of gender analysis and gender budgeting. There was one thing that I wanted to ask you about, since your department is actively involved in doing the gender analysis.
We had one person testify who was doing an expert analysis of the budget. In that person's presentation, it said:
The goal of gender analysis is to eliminate existing differences in incomes, wealth, empowerment, and other indicators between women and men to promote the full and equal development of women; and to support the attainment of women's equality.
Then it went on to say:
A full gender analysis of budgetary measures seeks to determine whether each individual budgetary measure is likely to have a negative, neutral, or positive impact on the status of women as compared with men.
They went on, then, to analyze and to give us the results of the impact on different policies, whether or not they actually increased the gap between men and women, or ensured that women were no worse off, or actually improved the status of women.
And then we have had other expert presenters say that this should not be a “men versus women” issue. It definitely needs to be something that analyzes the impacts on all sectors of our society, whether it be men, women, children, whoever.
Could you tell me how your process works? Does it include the overall general analysis, or does it do an analysis of women only?