Ottawa appoints 15 new judges to bench amid complaints from Alberta [corrected]

2016/06/20 Leave a comment

Early days and will see whether this trend towards more women judicial appointments continues throughout the year. One visible minority and one Indigenous people also sent signals of increased diversity:

The Liberal government has appointed its first judges since coming to power seven months ago, after a senior Alberta judge complained publicly that the courts were growing desperate, and as vacancies nationwide approach the peak numbers seen in the Harper years.

Of the 15 people appointed, 10 are women, in contrast to the decade-long Harper era, in which just 30 per cent of judges chosen were female [of the judges replaced by the new appointments, 9 were men]. All three of Friday’s appointments to powerful appeal courts – two in Alberta, and one to the Federal Court of Appeal in Ottawa – went to women.

But the appointments barely made a dent for the province with the most vacancies, according to Chief Justice Neil Wittmann of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench. He told The Globe in April that the lack of judicial appointments had left his court in “desperate shape.” Of the six Alberta appointments on Friday, two were promotions from his court to the Court of Appeal, leaving the Court of Queen’s Bench with a net gain of just two judges – of which one was filling a vacancy from last summer.

“Marginal at best,” he said in an interview on Friday of the effect of the appointments.

In Calgary, he said, anyone trying to book a family or civil court trial of more than five days must wait 97 weeks, until April, 2018; for a short trial, the wait is 42 weeks. In Edmonton, long trials and short are being booked 66 weeks away. Criminal trials of more than five days are being booked 55 weeks ahead in Calgary and Edmonton, and nearly as many for short trials.

Liberal Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould has promised to make the appointment process more transparent and increase gender and racial diversity.

“As promised, the Government has moved forward on filling urgent judicial vacancies by drawing on existing lists of recommended candidates,” spokeswoman Joanne Ghiz said in an e-mail.

“The Government will be considering ways to strengthen the judicial appointments process, guided by the principles of openness, transparency, and merit. It is also committed to ensuring that Canada’s judiciary truly reflects the face of Canada. Significant reforms of the judicial appointments process will take time, and require appropriate consultations, including with the judiciary, the legal community and the general public.”

Source: Ottawa appoints 15 new judges to bench amid complaints from Alberta – The Globe and Mail

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Former Intel. Official: American Hate Is a Bigger Threat Than Foreign Terrorism | TIME

2016/06/20 Leave a comment

Yaël Eisenstat, a former advisor on US national security issues, on the current political climate:

As the 2016 elections play out across America, it has become impossible to ignore just how fractured our country has become. Regardless of who wins the election, I fear we have gone too far down the road of anger and hate to heal as a nation, without some form of severe intervention or collective awakening.

What if we could establish a National Reconciliation Task Force? We could repurpose some of the same “hearts and minds” types of campaigns that we wage in war zones, deploy people to towns and cities across the country to host engagement sessions. Unfortunately, that would require government action, a departure point that is already laden with so much distrust that it would be impossible to convince much of the country to participate or believe in the intentions.

So that leaves it to us, private citizens. It is up to us to push ourselves to engage in open dialogue, to bring people together in discussion groups, around dinner tables, on television, in movies. While the cable news networks may continue to seek profit over the greater good, I am certain there are enough private citizens, philanthropists and activists who care as much as I do about this issue to start a movement, however small, to start healing this nation.

The tech industry, in particular, could play a pivotal role. And imagine if movies started showing more diversity of political, religious and social viewpoints in characters that also manage to get along. What if reality TV shows introduced us to a wider variety of our fellow Americans and brought people together to discuss true hot-button issues, without throwing things at each other? What if public universities encouraged all viewpoints, instead of creating “safe spaces”?

I am not suggesting that we all go have dinner parties with leaders of Neo Nazi groups and Westboro Baptist Church members. I have no desire to try to find mutual understanding with someone who advocates violence, just as I never had a burning desire to shake hands and chat with an ISIS or al-Qaeda leader.

But what about the rest of America? Put aside the outliers who preach violence, the fringe who are the most extreme form of bigots. What about everyone else: the millions of people in our country who are disillusioned, angry, or just confused about what the best solutions are for our country? Why shouldn’t my former Texas neighbors (who were a huge part of my ability to open my mind to gun-owning Republicans), my most liberal New York friends and I share a meal and a beer and talk about why we each believe what we do, or why we each support certain policies or candidates? I have no doubt that the conversation would come from a place of respect, even if nobody’s political views are changed.

With millions of Americans so deeply entrenched, and the political rhetoric and media complacency appearing past the point of no return, these ideas may sound futile. But the alternative is to just give up, to let the extreme voices become the mainstream, and to toss our ideals to the wind. Throwing in the towel is not the American way. It’s time for the reasonable voices to stand up and take back our country.

Source: Former Intel. Official: American Hate Is a Bigger Threat Than Foreign Terrorism | TIME

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Intergenerational Income Transmission: New Evidence from Canada

2016/06/20 Leave a comment

Interesting study. No breakdown by immigrants/non-immigrants or visible minority/non-visible minority:

Comparative studies of intergenerational earnings and income mobility largely rank Canada as one of the most mobile countries among advanced economies, such as Denmark, Finland and Norway. The assertion that Canada is a highly mobile society is drawn from intergenerational income elasticity estimates reported in Corak and Heisz (1999). Corak and Heisz used data from the earlier version of the Intergenerational Income Database (IID), which tracked the income of Canadian youth only into their early thirties. Recent theoretical literature, however, suggests that the relationship between childrens’ and parents’ lifetime income may not be accurately estimated when children’s income is not observed from their mid-careers—known as lifecycle bias.

The present study addresses this concern by re-examining the extent of intergenerational earnings and income mobility in Canada using the updated version of the IID, which tracks children well into their mid-forties, when mid-career income is observed. This information is essential for intergenerational analysis, as the literature shows that bias arising from lifecycle variation can be greatly mitigated by comparing fathers’ and offspring’s earnings near their mid-careers. Moreover, this paper also examines whether intergenerational mobility differs across the population. With nearly 250,000 observations, the study can differentiate the degree of intergenerational transmission across the full spectrum of the income distribution.

The empirical analysis in this study is based on Statistics Canada’s IID, which was constructed from various tax records to link together children and their parents. The IID consists of youth aged 16 to 19 in 1982 whose tax records are linked to the tax records of their parents by means of the parents’ and the children’s Social Insurance Numbers and information from Statistics Canada’s T1 Family File. The data provide more than 20 years of income history for both parents (1978 to 1999) and children (1986 to 2008) that allows for comparison of the income of children and parents when they were at the main stage of the lifecycle.

The results from the analysis suggest that Canada is still a mobile society, but not to the same extent as previously thought. The new estimate of the father–son earnings elasticity is about 0.32, which is noticeably higher than the values previously reported in the literature (which have been in the neighbourhood of 0.2): lifecycle bias alone explains about two-thirds of the discrepancy between the early estimates and the new result. The extent of intergenerational persistence tends to be greater when market income (i.e., the sum of earnings, self-employment income and asset income) is measured. This suggests that other mechanisms, such as transmission of jobs or entrepreneurial skills, may also be at work. Interestingly, the analysis also shows that the father–daughter elasticity is much less sensitive to these biases. Moreover, the paper documents a clear pattern of nonlinearity in the intergenerational transmission of earnings and income in Canada. In particular, the path to the top of the distribution appears to be quite challenging for sons born to low-income fathers. On the other hand, these same sons appear to have significant chances of moving into the middle class. Social institutions may help explain the latter findings. Finally, this paper demonstrates that the patterns of nonlinearity can be significantly misread when the lifecycle bias is not adequately addressed, especially over the upper part of the distribution.

Source: Intergenerational Income Transmission: New Evidence from Canada

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Islam stands above German law for half Turkish Germans – survey — RT News

2016/06/20 Leave a comment

Ongoing integration challenge:
Almost half the ethnic Turks living in Germany consider following Islamic teaching more important than abiding by the law, a new survey claims. They also view Islam as the “only true religion” with about one in five justifying violence if it is provoked by the West.

The study by the University of Münster titled “Integration and Religion from the viewpoint of the Turkish Germans in Germany” outline some deep divisions within the German society as 47 percent of ethnic Turks living in the country said that following religious dogmas was “more important” to them than obeying “the laws of the land in which I live,” particularly if the two were incompatible. Moreover, 32 percent from those questioned said they yearn to live in the society of the times of the Prophet Mohammed.

The results, gathered by surveying over 1,200 people, came as a surprise for the researchers from one of the biggest German universities. Detlef Pollack, spokesman for the “Religion and Politics”Excellence Cluster said that the authors “didn’t expect that,” Deutsche Welle reported.

However, the survey also revealed that Turks completely understand that it would be much easier for a law-abiding citizen to successfully integrate. Respecting laws was ranked second among the list of conditions to meet in order to integrate into German society, trailing only the language skills.

But despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Turkish Germans, 90 percent, said they are pleased with their life in the country, over half of the respondents feel like “second-class citizens” with no chance to integrate fully into society. Some 70 percent went even further and expressed a readiness to integrate “absolutely and unconditionally.” At the same time, the phrase “no matter what I do, I will never be recognized as a part of German society,” strikes a chord with 54 percent of Turks.

Interestingly, the attitude of the respondents to the adherents of other religions and atheists differed greatly. While the total of 80 percent holds a favorable view of Christians, the number tolerating atheists and Jews is considerably lower. Only half think positively of these groups. The same number consider Islam to be the “only true religion.”

As right-wing German parties claim that Islam poses an “imminent threat” to the country with rallies being held against the so-called “Islamization” of the West against the backdrop of a migrant influx from North Africa and the Middle East, 20 percent of Turks agree that “the threat to Islam posed by the Western world” can justify violence with which Muslims “defend”themselves. A further 7 percent agree that the use of violence can be justified for the sake of spreading Islam.

Asked about the compatibility of Islam and the West, 61 percent of the Turks saw no obstacles in the way of its anchoring in western society. However, according to the study, this standpoint is not popular with the German people as a whole.

Such fundamental values of a modern western civilization as human rights and tolerance are not associated with Islam by Germans, the poll says. Fifty-seven percent of Turkish Germans link the protection of human rights to Islam while only 6 percent of all Germans nationals maintain the same opinion. Only 5 percent of all Germans associate Islam with tolerance, while 56 percent of Turks in Germany believe so.

Based on the findings, pollsters attributed the 13 percent of the surveyed 1,201 people to the category of “religious fundamentalists.” 

The survey’s authors claim that, while the Turks blame Germans for misunderstanding of the inherently peaceful nature of Islam, they note that, Muslims are also to blame for generating negative perception of their religion.

“Quite a few of them hold onto religious positions which don’t do much to counter the magnitude of suspicions and mistrust,” the report concludes.

 Source: Islam stands above German law for half Turkish Germans – survey — RT News

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When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained – The New York Times

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

More on language and terminology, another good piece:

When I asked Mr. Hamid [a scholar at the Brookings Institution] this, he countered with a different question. Given how many labels already exist to describe terrorists that draw on Islam, why insist on this one?

He listed several — “radical jihadists, Salafis, Islamist extremists, jihadis, jihadi-Salafists” — none of which, he said, carry the baggage of “radical Islam.”

But if it’s that baggage that repels scholars, it may also be what draws others. “Radical Islam” has come to imply certain things about issues that are closer to home than abstract terrorist ideology: political correctness, migration, and the question of who belongs.

Those same issues have animated debates over terrorism and terminology in other societies. In Germany, “multiculturalism” has become shorthand for larger questions of how to absorb migrants and whether there is a degree of minimum assimilation. There is endless sparring over “British values,” and what sort of burden this puts on migrants before they will be welcomed into society.

France has had its own parsing of “radical Islam,” though the fight over “secularism” is even fiercer.

Even majority Muslim societies have had versions of this same argument, Mr. Hamid pointed out. In Egypt, he said, the struggle over terms is, in part, a way of litigating whether parties like the Muslim Brotherhood are ideologically akin to terror groups — and therefore whether they should be allowed to participate in society.

What these debates have in common is that arguing about how to define terrorism becomes a way to push and pull the contours of national identity, determining who is invited in to that identity and who is kept out.

In every case, the debate is framed as one of pluralism versus security. Pinning terrorism on “multiculturalism” or non-secularism or foreign values or “radical Islam” all portray inclusiveness as somehow threatening and exclusiveness as safer.

The question of whether pluralism and security are indeed in tension, or whether pluralism in fact enhances security, is one that people around the world have long grappled with. But it’s hard to discuss because it is so core to national identity. Debating semantics is much easier.

Source: When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained – The New York Times

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Why targets and data trump wishing and hoping in gender parity battle: Joanne Stanley

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

Indeed:

For those of us still working for full gender equality in Canadian society, there were two extraordinary announcements out of Ontario recently that deserved more fanfare than they initially received.

The first was from Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Ted McMeekin, indicating that he would leave his cabinet position in order to help Premier Kathleen Wynne achieve gender parity. It is rare in the quest for equality for a member of the dominant group to altruistically set aside self-interest to achieve a larger goal. He said he was inspired by his own daughters to take this step. He also said he was dreaming of the day when questions of gender parity won’t even arise any more.

Many of us share this dream, including Ms. Wynne herself. Her announcement of new gender-diversity targets to ensure more women have the opportunity to reach top leadership positions at government organizations gives a clear indication that she is not prepared to tolerate the glacial pace of the march toward equality. It is a welcome interruption not only for government, but also for the signal it sends to the business community that similar behaviour will be expected from them.

This announcement is powerful for two reasons. First, it sets the drive to parity in an economic context. The linkages between diversity and an organization’s capacity for innovation and good governance are indisputable. Many leading corporations governments understand this and aim to build fully inclusive organizations, yet relatively few have set targets and made commitments to report on progress as forthrightly as Ms. Wynne has. We hope her leadership is emulated.

In the struggle for diversity and inclusion, numbers matter. That’s the second reason this announcement is so powerful. Substantive change rarely happens by accident. Rather, it is accomplished by knowing your current position and setting targets and strategies for improvement. When Ontario achieves its target of ensuring that women make up at least 40 per cent of all provincial boards and agency appointments, substantive change will ensue. This is a vastly more intelligent approach than simply talking about equality as a philosophical concept and hoping that it will take care of itself.

Measuring, setting targets and reporting progress is a proven alternative to wishing and hoping. It is a strategy that Women in Communications and Technology itself has adopted to make change happen in Canada’s digital economy. We’ve been talking about the need for stronger engagement of women for years. And yet, for at least a generation, our gender rate has been stuck at around 25 per cent.

So WCT created an “Up the Numbers” initiative, which will invite digital companies (in broadcasting, communications and technology) to share their gender data with us. We will aggregate this data into an annual report that will track our industry’s progress toward parity. It will also provide a focus for industry-wide initiatives to get us there.

Not only is this a more productive approach, it is also bolder. As soon as an important step toward equality is taken, detractors will object. They predictably haul out time-worn arguments about merit. But these are usually transparent attempts to defend privilege. If after nearly a century of female enfranchisement and a revolution in women’s education we really believe that corporate boards with no women on them or industries where men outnumber women by four to one reflect a “merited” level of female inclusion, then our attempts at nation-building have failed.

So hats off to Mr. McMeekin and Ms. Wynne, and to all those private- and public-sector organizations working intelligently to end the conversation about gender equality by finally achieving it.

Source: Why targets and data trump wishing and hoping in gender parity battle – The Globe and Mail

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Un-Googled: Trudeau government had Harper web pages removed from search results

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

While it appears to have been standard practice in previous transitions, there is a need for easy and transparent access to historical documents.

My experience with the Library and Archives site is mixed in this regard, either directly with LAC or through Google searches:

Dozens of government web pages related to former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s time in office have been removed from all Google search results at the new Liberal government’s request.

In fact, the requests on behalf of the Privy Council Office to remove sites such as Harper’s daily.pm.gc.ca site and the former PMO’s 24seven video website from search results began Nov. 4, 2015 – the day Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was sworn into office.

A few days later, on Nov. 9, 2015, the government asked Google to clear the index for the prime ministerial website pm.gc.ca for any page published prior to Nov. 4, 2015. The request was unsuccessful, however, because Google did not offer that option, according to documents tabled by the government in the House of Commons.

On Jan. 27, 2016, the government asked Google to remove dozens of sites containing Harper’s news releases in English and in French from search results.

Cameron Ahmad, spokesman for Trudeau, insisted the prime minister’s office did not make the request to have the websites related to Harper removed from Google search results and was not aware it had happened.

Christiane Fox, assistant secretary for communications in the Privy Council, said the requests to Google were part of the Privy Council’s standard transition from the Harper government to Trudeau’s. She said the content of Harper’s prime ministerial website was transferred to Library and Archives Canada but did not know whether it was online and available to the public.

In total, the documents tabled in the House of Commons show the government made 51 requests to Google between November 4, 2015 and March 3, 2016 to remove the government record of Harper’s time in office from its search results.

Attempts to access those url’s produce error messages – regardless of whether you search using Google or a web browser like Safari. Googling “Prime Minister Stephen Harper” and “news releases” leads you to Trudeau’s news releases, which begin the day his government was sworn in.

While government departments generally make the previous government’s news releases available on their websites there is no pointer on the prime minister’s website to archived news releases from any of his predecessors.

A check of an Internet Archive version of Stephen Harper’s prime ministerial website after he took power in 2006 does not include press releases from his predecessors. It is not known if requests were made at the time to remove his predecessor’s web pages from Google search results.

Conservative MP Candice Bergen, who tabled the order paper question asking about government requests to have material removed from search results, said she was “shocked” to learn the government had removed the pages related to Harper’s time in office from Google search results.

“Regardless of what somebody might think of Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper served the Canadian public as a member of parliament and then as prime minister for over 10 years.”

Bergen described the move as “Orwellian” and “censorship”, adding it was “sneaky”, “petty” and “not transparent.”

Bergen said she wants to know who decided to request the Harper pages be removed from search results and whether there was political direction behind the move.

Fox could not explain why some of the requests to Google to remove Harper era websites from search results were made in November at the time of the transition and dozens of others were only made in January.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was critical of the decision to remove Harper’s web pages from search results.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate. There’s a new government and I think people who want to google things in our past should be able to google things in our past.”

Source: Un-Googled: Trudeau government had Harper web pages removed from search results

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Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

Always interesting to see just how sophisticated and strategic large corporations can be:

Inside Microsoft, however, some staffers have been known to cheekily refer to the Vancouver operation as “Ellis Island,” after the historic U.S. immigration entry station. What Microsoft really wants is to import far more foreign workers to its home base in Washington State than it can under the United States’ incredibly restrictive immigration rules. So it uses Vancouver as a staging post.

Foreign workers temporarily migrate to Canada and work for Microsoft here long enough to qualify for an intracompany transfer to the United States, a far less restrictive immigration process. That doesn’t apply to everyone at the Vancouver centre – most of the roughly 425 “core” employees are Canadian. But another 140 or so “rotational” workers are foreign nationals who will be moved after 18 months, presumably to the United States.

Microsoft has been brazen about using Vancouver as a U.S. immigration back door. Then-chief executive Steve Ballmer said in 2007, when the company returned to Vancouver: “We opened a lab because we were having trouble getting visas for the best and the brightest.” Deputy general counsel Karen Jones told Bloomberg in 2014 that the restrictive U.S. rules “clearly did not meet our needs,” leaving the company about 750 foreign hires short of its desired U.S. intake. “We have to look to other places.” Expanding to Vancouver wasn’t “purely for immigration purposes,” she said, “but immigration is a factor.” Mr. Smith acknowledged “the more open immigration system of Canada does play a vital role in our ability to invest in a big way in the future of this kind of centre in B.C.”

More surprising is that our government thinks it’s smart for Canada to become a way station for U.S.-bound global talent (Microsoft isn’t the only U.S. company to do this) and has made it even easier for Microsoft to build Ellis Island Northwest.

In April, 2015, the federal Immigration Department, at the B.C. government’s request, exempted the Microsoft centre from undergoing onerous “labour market impact assessments” (LMIA) when seeking approval for inbound foreign employees, shaving months off the immigration process. Such exemptions are allowed under federal-provincial immigration deals for major projects that result in big investments and don’t displace local workers, among other criteria. Mr. Smith acknowledged the exemption was an “important” consideration in Microsoft’s decision where to locate the centre.

This would be easier to stomach if Microsoft was importing talent to remain in Canada or if the company placed leadership of key products or projects here (other than existing game studios, the new engineers will report to businesses managed elsewhere, such as Skype).

It would be more acceptable if the exemption was available to all tech companies. Canada is awash in fast-growing tech firms eager to import top talent from around the world. But they have to wait six to 12 months as a result of the prolonged immigration process, which submits fast-growing tech firms to the same drawn-out LMIA process as abusers of the temporary foreign-worker program. That is ridiculously long given that they are in a global race for highly coveted engineering and executive talent. Microsoft, a U.S. company hiring foreign workers to ultimately work in the United States, gets to skip all that.

This exemption places the needs of a foreign multinational above Canadian companies, which ultimately puts Canada at an economic disadvantage. “We need to correct these failed policies that unfairly advantage foreign multinationals and instead focus on growing our domestic scale-ups,” said Benjamin Bergen, executive director of the Council of Canadian Innovators, which represents Canada’s top emerging tech companies. “At the very least, Canadian tech companies should enjoy the same benefits and access to talent as foreign branch plants do here in Canada.”

An exemption for Microsoft is dubious policy, as is championing investments by foreign tech companies here that would likely melt away if the U.S. government simply freed up more visas for foreign workers. It makes us look like a branch-plant economy. So do the PM’s attempts to appear innovative by courting foreign tech giants Google, Ubisoft and Facebook, while ignoring Canada’s emerging homegrown tech companies. Don’t think he hasn’t been invited to visit them, too.

Source: Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy – The Globe and Mail

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Diversity of young adults living with their parents, 1981 to 2011

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

Another interesting study by StatsCan:

Parental co-residence more prevalent among immigrants who arrived in Canada as children

In 2011, close to two-thirds of immigrants aged 20 to 29 who arrived in Canada before the age of 15 were living with their parents. This compared with one-third for those who arrived as immigrants at age 15 or older.

Over one-half (52%) of young adults who belonged to a visible minority group lived with their parents. That proportion, though, was higher for some groups than others.

For example, living with parents was more common for some Asian youth, including West Asians (57%), Filipinos (55%), Koreans (55%) and South Asians (54%).

Among those who did not belong to a visible minority group, less than 40% lived with their parents.

Mother tongue and religious affiliation also associated with parental co-residence

In 2011, 48% of young adults aged 20 to 29 whose only mother tongue was not an official language lived with their parents, compared with 41% among those whose mother tongue was either English, French or both.

The proportion of those living with their parents was significantly higher among those whose mother tongue was Greek (72%) or Italian (68%). These groups, however, represented a small proportion of the overall population of young adults.

The proportion was also comparatively high among young adults whose mother tongue was Persian (57%) or Urdu (56%).

Young adults who had a religious affiliation were also more likely to live with their parents. In 2011, 48% of those who reported a Christian affiliation lived with their parents, as did 50% of those with a non-Christian affiliation.

By comparison, about 30% of those who did not have a religious affiliation lived with their parents.

Source: The Daily — Study: Diversity of young adults living with their parents, 1981 to 2011

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Status of Women committee demands gender-based analysis bill

2016/06/17 Leave a comment

While requiring gender-based analysis (GBA+) makes sense, it is disappointing that the Government, despite its broad diversity and inclusion agenda, largely limited this requirement to gender (as per Minister Hajdu’s mandate letter).

GBA+ includes other diversity elements in its gender-based analysis but a broader approach would be”inclusivity-based” analysis that would look at gender, visible minorities, Indigenous peoples, and other forms of diversity:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has proudly declared he is a feminist, but now his Liberal government is being urged to back up those claims by considering how each of its decisions affects women and girls.

The Status of Women committee is recommending that gender-based analysis — a tool that helps government study how policy, legislation and program decisions might impact women and men in different ways — be mandatory across all government departments and agencies.

“Gender inequity is not something that happened by accident,” said Liberal MP Sean Fraser, surrounded by his committee colleagues, all newly elected MPs.

“It’s the result of a series of decisions that have been taken, or perhaps not taken, by elected officials over the course of our nation’s history.

“The cost of not considering gender when it comes to policy formation is too great to ignore.”

Their report recommends the federal government introduce legislation by next June requiring the gender-based lens be applied to all proposals before they arrive at the cabinet table, as well to submissions to the Privy Council Office, Treasury Board and Finance Department – who must send them back if that step was skipped.

Status of Women Minister Patricia Hajdu, who has been raising awareness about gender-based analysis and advocating for it around the cabinet table, called it one way for the Liberals to show they mean business when it comes to promoting gender equity.

“It’s a really big step towards making sure we keep gender equality at the forefront and that it’s not just window dressing,” Hajdu said in an interview.

Hajdu said she looked forward to reviewing the report.

The idea behind gender-based analysis is to think about how a certain policy might affect men and women, boys and girls in different ways, also taking age, income, culture and other intersecting factors into account.

If the analysis then reveals one gender will experience disproportionately negative impacts, policy-makers have the opportunity to make adjustments or otherwise mitigate those effects.

For example, Fraser said, applying gender-based analysis to the billions in infrastructure spending the Liberal government has promised would show that while the money could lead to a boost in employment, the jobs would be in skilled trades that disproportionately employ men.

“We should be using this information to encourage more women to get involved in the skilled trades, so when the government makes a massive investment in infrastructure, the benefits are shared equally between different genders,” he said.

Fraser also said gender-based analysis should be part of the environmental assessment process for natural resource projects.

Ottawa committed to using gender-based analysis in 1995, as part of ratifying the UN Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

But Auditor General Michael Ferguson revealed in his February report that relatively few departments and agencies were using it and that when they do go through the exercise, the results are often incomplete or inconsistent.

That is one reason the report recommends setting up an Office of the Commissioner for Gender Equality to give the legislation some teeth.

“We need to have someone who has the authority within government . . . to make sure that it’s implemented,” said Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu, the committee chair.

Source: Status of Women committee demands gender-based analysis bill

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