FEWO Committee Report

This chapter is concerned with providing a roadmap on how Canada can move towards implementing a gender responsive budget. The chapter discusses the international lessons learned in the area of gender responsive budget initiatives, outlines the key steps to be taken when implementing a gender responsive budget and makes recommendations to ensure that the federal budget is gender responsive.

The Committee heard that there is “no single recipe” with the approach Canada can take in implementing a gender responsive budget. What is key is to “keep it simple and unburdening” particularly for civil servants. [199] The Committee heard that “Canada must choose what works in its specific context.”[200] At the same time, the Committee learned that a gender responsive budget exercise must consider gender “as an integral part at the very beginning when analysis is going to take place.” [201]

A. International Lessons Learned

In his testimony, Professor Bartle outlined the following elements that are needed in order to implement successful gender responsive budgeting initiatives:

1. Buy-in of government and civil society stakeholders;

2. Integration of gender into budgets at all levels of government;

3. Political environment and social values in place to affect its acceptance;

4. Incorporation of gender analysis into each phase of the budget cycle: and,

5. Technical expertise and data availability.[202]

The Committee heard testimony describing various experiences in implementing gender responsive budget initiatives at different levels of government. The most well-known example is that of Australia. The Government of Australia is considered a “pioneer” in this area since it began including a Women’s Budget Statement in 1984 as part of its budget papers.[203] As Professor Sharp explained to the Committee, this was a “femocrat-based, gender-responsive budget, meaning it was driven by the women's policy units within government.” [204] When a new government came into power in 1996, “it abolished the femocrat-type exercise and replaced it each year with a ministerial budget statement.” [205] Professor Sharp pointed out to the Committee that a “mistake was made” because the gender responsive budget initiative was not sustainable in a changing economic and political climate:

A mistake we made in Australia was thinking we could have the same model forever. Things change, particularly the economic and political climate. By the early to mid-1990s, we shifted into a discourse that the role of government had to be reduced all the time. The basis on which we had introduced gender-responsive budgeting was in more of a Keynesian economic environment where it was possible to get substantial increases in funding for women's issues. When that environment changed, we didn't really have a strategy, other than stopping the worst from happening. [206]

The Committee heard that there is a consultative process in place within government but what is “lacking […] is a strong movement outside government to put pressure on the budget.”[207]

The Committee also heard about the South African experience with gender responsive budgets. Ms. Budlender explained that there have been advances made by two South African provinces in institutionalizing gender budgeting. The provincial departments report in their annual budgets on the “allocations they think contribute the most to gender equality and youth development.” In addition, “they must include a report on what the subprogram that gets the largest amount of money is doing.” [208] At the national level, there is a parliamentary committee on women that commissions Ms. Budlender “to assist them in analyzing the budget and preparing their report on the budget and sharing other skills with them.” [209]

The Committee learned about the Scottish Parliament's experience in initiating a gender responsive budget. The Committee heard from the Scottish Women’s Budget Group, a civil society organization in Scotland which, through their lobbying efforts, convinced the Scottish Equal Opportunities Committee to appoint a special advisor on the budget. Professor Ailsa McKay, who is currently special advisor, helped the Committee look at the budget through a gender lens and prepare a report that was submitted to the Finance Committee. Professor McKay described her work as follows:

My subsequent remit was to advise on prospective witnesses the Committee may want to call to give evidence with regard to the contents of the Scottish budget; to provide the Committee members with guidance on the appropriate line of questioning of those witnesses; to brief the Committee members on the contents of the budget with a specific focus on where equality considerations were evident or, in many situations, where equality considerations were not evident; and, finally, to have input into the equal opportunities Committee's written response to the finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament, which is part of the formal scrutiny process.[210]

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A fourth example that the Committee heard was at the city level—that of San Francisco, which is one of the twenty largest cities in the United States with a population of 750,000 people and a budget of $6 billion.[211] According to Professor Rubin, the City of San Francisco passed its own CEDAW ordinance in 1998, given that the United States had not ratified this convention.

The CEDAW ordinance requires that city departments use a gender and human rights analysis to review their policies regarding budget allocations, as well as employment and service delivery.[212]

In order to accomplish this, the ordinance required the “city departments to undergo a gender analysis in three areas: budget allocation, service delivery, and employment practices.”[213] Professor Rubin provided an example of how gender-based analysis revealed to the employees with the Department of Public Works how their expenditures has an impact on women. In Professor Rubin’s words:

When the department of public works was first approached with this, they said that fixing sidewalks and street lighting really does not have any gender implications.

Everybody is affected by this. The department on the status of women and other people in San Francisco sat down and worked with them, and they came to realize, for example, that when they do curb cuts for wheelchairs and strollers, most of the people who push those wheelchairs and strollers are women. So there is a differential impact. They also saw, for example, with street lights, that in areas near parks and other rather dark areas, the people who are most in danger of crime are women.

They actually came to realize that there were gender implications of many of their expenditures, but they had a very difficult time in collecting the data that could actually document these implications.[214]

Professor Rubin informed the Committee that two key criteria that helped launch the gender responsive budget initiative in San Francisco were leadership and the involvement of civil society.

A final example that the Committee heard of a gender responsive budget initiative was closer to home. In Manitoba, the United Nations Platform for Action Committee (UNPAC) received funding from Status of Women Canada for its gender budgeting project. As part of its gender responsive budgeting work, UNPAC advocated for including gender analysis as part of Manitoba’s budget process. UNPAC met with the Minister of Finance and with senior staff who “expressed an interest in improving gender and diversity analysis skills among provincial civil servants.” UNPAC was involved with developing pilot projects to “both test the usefulness of GBA and to build skills internally.”[215] The first stage involved the province setting priorities for analyzing the “situations of aboriginal women and men and girls and boys, and boys and girls with disabilities.”[216] Once priorities were set, program managers and policy analysts were trained in several departments including Manitoba Family Services and Housing. Lissa Donner, who is a volunteer with UNPAC and a self-employed researcher on gender and women’s issues, informed the Committee that the gender-based analysis training and research that was undertaken by the Manitoba Family Services and Housing revealed the following:

In 2001 there were just over 60,000 Winnipegers living in core housing need. By including gender in our analysis, we discovered that women had a higher incidence of core housing need. In Winnipeg and in Manitoba as a whole, for every 100 males living in core housing need, there were about 125 females. So at the very outset you can see just simple sex disaggregation of the data makes a big difference to our understanding.[217]

B. Key Steps for Implementing a Gender Responsive Budget

The Committee believes that the following steps should be taken when implementing a gender responsive budget.

1. Integrating the Context of Women’s Lives

Witnesses repeatedly informed the Committee that the context of women’s lives must be integral to a gender responsive budget approach. Ms. Peckford noted that Finance Canada’s current approach cannot be considered to be gender responsive:

What I see, in terms of the gender-based analysis to which we've been able to gain access, is that a lot of measures are analyzed, but these measures in some cases are entirely irrelevant to most women's lives and really have no bearing on their equality status, their engagement in the economy, or the ways in which they support their families.[218]

Ms. Peckford explained to the Committee that a gender responsive budget contributes to an understanding of how “women are disadvantaged in the economy, and particularly in their communities.” [219]

Professor Lahey echoed Ms. Peckford and stated that analysts undertaking a gender responsive budget must be able to research on the “realities of women's lives.”[220]

2. Developing a Good Action Plan with Key Indicators to Measure Progress

Budget 2008 announced that the federal government will be developing an “Action Plan that will advance the equality of women across Canada through the improvement of their economic and social conditions and their participation in democratic life.”[221] Ms. Peckford was concerned that such an Action Plan would not be enforceable:

My fear about an action plan is that it will become a bureaucratic exercise, that it won’t have any teeth, that it may sound good on paper and may look like other action plans from around the world, but Status of Women Canada will be charged with this implementation in a way such that it isn’t able to compel the decision-makers, the highest levels of government, to implement it.[222]

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At the same time, she noted that the Action Plan is an opportunity to address women’s specific needs and to improve on the federal government’s gender-based analysis that is already in place. She also identified the need for indicators so as to measure progress:

I think there’s an opportunity, with the action plan that has been committed to, to look very specifically at enhancing, improving, enriching the gender-based analysis strategy that has been put into place, however weak and marginal it might be. One of the key ways to do that, and one of the things the federal plan for gender equality neglected to see done, is to develop a set of indicators that actually helps you to define your success.[223]

Ms. Peckford also informed the Committee that such an Action Plan needs to have the government’s commitment. She recommended that the government demonstrate its commitment to gender equality in the Speech from the Throne, as was also recommended by the Expert Panel on Accountability Mechanisms for Gender Equality.[224]

[O]ne of the things the expert panel recommended was that one of the best indications of a government’s commitment to gender equality and women’s equality is whether or not it appears in the Speech from the Throne. They said the Speech from the Throne should be utilized as a mechanism through which we articulate our broader, visionary goals for women’s equality. No Speech from the Throne in several years under numerous governments has taken that opportunity. I think the time is now.[225]

3. Asking the Right Questions

The Committee heard that when undertaking a gender responsive budget exercise, a list of questions have to be developed and answered by those doing the analysis. An example of such a list of questions was provided by Ms. Peckford:

• Does the budget initiative increase women’s autonomy?

• Does it help low-income women move about the poverty line?

• If the budget initiative is a tax measure, is it refundable?

• Does it consider women with limited access to the workforce?

• Does the budget initiative improve women’s access to essential services?

• Have indicators been developed in consultation with women’s equality groups and other experts?[226]

4. Integrating Gender into the Budgetary Cycle

The Committee heard that a gender responsive budget exercise has to be woven into all the phases of the budgetary process.

What's important is looking at each of the phases from the beginning, when the executive formulates the budget and then passes it to the legislature, and then, in turn, the legislature enacts it. That phase, again, needs to have explicit consideration.[227]

The table below, entitled “Integrating Gender Responsive Budgeting into the Budget Process”, provides an illustration of how gender as a variable is integrated throughout the budgetary cycle.

Table 4—Integrating Gender Responsive Budgeting into the Budget Process[228]

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5. Using the Right Tools for Analysis

Witnesses informed the Committee that there needs to be a set of analytical tools and models to analyze a gender responsive budget:

International experience shows that a combination of tools is used to create analytical models to analyze income distribution, among other things. Examples of some of these tools are the gender audits and gender impact assessments, gender-disaggregated beneficiary assessments, gender-disaggregated policy expenditure incident analysis, and gender-disaggregated tax incidents.[229]

According to Professor Lahey, “[o]ne of the hallmarks of a proper gender analysis is not to make assumptions, not to use stereotypical thinking, but to use the actual data.”[230]

6. Ensuring Sustainability

Several witnesses indicated to the Committee that a gender responsive budget approach must be sustainable:

The test, really, is whether it can survive a change of administrations. That's always been the issue. It needs to justify the work that it takes to do it, but we've seen it work, and I think it's more a matter of commitment than it is anything else.[231]

The next chapter will elaborate in greater detail on the topic of sustainability through the implementation of a legislative framework and audits.

7. Including Civil Society in the Budgetary Process

The Committee consistently heard that a successful gender responsive budget exercise requires the input of civil society. Professor Philips described the role of civil society in the following manner:

There have to be civil society agencies that will create expectations, insist upon gender analysis, and provide independent analysis to review what the government does in order for the government exercise to happen in the first place and then to be effective.[232]

Witnesses informed the Committee that Finance Canada’s pre-budget consultation process needs to be expanded to include a wider selection of women’s organizations. Such a broad-based consultation process is needed in order to develop a gender responsive budget.

Finance Canada stated that it received submissions from several women’s organizations, but it did not specify which organizations it met with during the 2008 pre-budget consultation process. According to one witness, only a few women’s organizations were consulted, which is insufficient to truly reflect the needs of women:

[The existing] level of consultation and the terms under which that consultation takes place is simply insufficient for the purposes of coming up with a budget that is truly gender-responsive, that truly acknowledges and tries to respond to women’s economic realities.[233]

C. The Way Forward

While the Committee commends Finance Canada for taking a first step towards integrating gender into its analysis of the tax policy changes, the Committee is concerned that the analysis performed does not address the context of women’s lives and does not incorporate gender equality goals as an overriding framework for its analysis.[234] The Committee has heard from witnesses that the GBA of recent federal budgets provided by Finance Canada is not evidence-based. Furthermore, the Committee is concerned that Finance Canada has not sought to incorporate Statistics Canada data to enhance its analysis. For example, Professor Lahey indicated to the Committee that Finance Canada’s analysis of Budget 2008 Tax Free Savings Account did not consider Statistics Canada data that showed “the bottom two or three quintiles of family income in Canada are in a net debt position year after year” and hence, are not in a position to save.[235] The Committee is also concerned that Finance Canada has not adequately sought out the expertise of women’s organizations, which the Committee believes is an important step in moving forward with gender responsive budgeting. Finally, in an effort to increase transparency, the Committee would like to see any future gender-based analysis of the budget performed by Finance Canada receive wider distribution by being included in the official budget publication. Therefore:

RECOMMENDATION 18

The Committee recommends that Finance Canada, in cooperation with Status of Women Canada, develop a plan for integrating gender into the budgetary cycle by January 2010; and that Finance Canada report to the Committee on the status of this plan in May 2009.

RECOMMENDATION 19

The Committee recommends that Finance Canada, beginning with the next federal budget, conduct broad-based pre-budget consultations that include women’s organizations, in order to develop a gender responsive budget that addresses the context of women’s lives; that a report be published that discusses the issues raised; and, that the federal budget take into account the issues and recommendations brought forth by women’s organizations.

RECOMMENDATION 20

The Committee recommends that Finance Canada publish, and that the Minister of Finance table in Parliament, with all subsequent federal budgets, Finance Canada’s gender-based analysis of the measures included therein.