Ottawa falling short in assessing gender impact of policy decisions

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

Provides material for reflection given Minister Hajdu’s mandate letter commitment:

Work with the Privy Council Office to ensure that a gender-based analysis is applied to proposals before they arrive at Cabinet for decision-making.

Ideally, of course, this would be expanded to a broader widespread diversity lens, as I have argued in my deck, Multiculturalism – Implementing Diversity and Inclusion (example slide below):

Multiculturalism - Implementing Diversity and Inclusion.001

Two decades after pledging to assess the gender impact of federal government policies, Ottawa is still falling short in its efforts, meaning that obstacles to both men and women still stand, auditor general Michael Ferguson says.

In an audit report released Tuesday, Ferguson reported some progress on the file but cautioned that Ottawa’s commitment to assess the gender impact of its policy decisions was still haphazard.

“We observed that gender-based analysis is still not fully deployed across the federal government 20 years after the government committed to applying this type of analysis to its policy decisions,” Ferguson said.

He noted that while Status of Women Canada, Treasury Board and Privy Council Office have made progress in this area, the gender analyses done by departments and agencies were “not always complete, nor of consistent quality.”

“This means gender considerations, including obstacles to the full participation of diverse groups of men and women, are not always considered in government decisions,” he said.

New Democrat MP David Christopherson said the audit findings are evidence the federal government is not taking the issue seriously.

“Imagine, 20 years later and there (are) still six departments that don’t even have a framework for recording the information, let alone doing something about it. We’re a long, long way from where we need to be,” he told reporters.

At a 1995 United Nations conference on women, Ottawa committed to analyze the “gender-specific” impacts on women and men before making decisions on policies, legislation and programs across government.

Those considerations should include assessing the differences between men and women, which could include age, education, language, geography, culture and income.

Such analysis is meant to flag whether an initiative could have unintended impacts, or perhaps treats men and women differently.

Ferguson’s audit team examined 16 initiatives undertaken by four departments: Employment and Social Development; Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development; Industry Canada; and Natural Resources.

The audit found that the departments performed gender-based analyses for all initiatives but did not always complete them. For example, in one case, analysis of a funding program for skills training did not flag the under-representation of women in the information, communications and technology field.

In another case, the review of an apprentice loan program did not examine barriers to access training and trades for women, visible minorities and immigrant women, the audit found.

Ferguson’s report flagged a number of systemic barriers to gender-based analysis, starting with the fact that such assessments are not mandatory. As well, he noted the tight deadlines for developing policy initiatives and limited ability of some departments and agencies for doing this work.

And the report found that Status of Women Canada was unable to track whether gender-based analysis was being considered in the decision-making across government.

Ferguson’s report urges the Privy Council Office, Status of Women and Treasury Board to “take concrete actions to identify and address barriers that prevent systematic conduct of rigorous gender-based analysis.”

Still, the audit report did find progress in implementing gender-based analysis compared to 2009, the last time the auditor general’s office reviewed the issue.

Patricia Hajdu, the minister of status of women, said she agreed with the audit findings that while progress had been made, “more needs to be done.”

“Our government has been clear about its commitment to consider the gender impacts of our decisions. We will use the auditor general’s report as a renewed call for action within the federal government,” she said Tuesday.

Still, Hajdu said that the government is not considering make gender-based analysis mandatory.

Source: Ottawa falling short in assessing gender impact of policy decisions | Toronto Star

OAG Full Report

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The curious career of the ‘taxpayer’ in Canadian public life: Delacourt

2016/02/04 5 Comments

Good piece by Susan Delacourt on the use of the word ‘taxpayers’ vs ‘citizens’ (I prefer the latter):

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not fond of the word ‘taxpayers’ as a synonym for Canadian citizens.

“Unless you say ‘service-receivers’ at the same time as you say ‘taxpayers,’ you’re only giving half the equation,” Trudeau said in an interview with me last week. “The idea of ‘citizen’ involves both benefits and responsibilities, and I like that a bit better.”

I can’t say I’d be unhappy to see a little less casual use of that word ‘taxpayer’ in politics. Bob Rae, the former interim Liberal leader, would occasionally ‘correct’ reporters in scrums when they asked how some policy would affect taxpayers. “You mean citizens,” Rae would say.

The idea of citizenship as a two-way relationship with government seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent decades. Whether it can be revived is an interesting question.

Seeing citizenship as a send-and-receive equation, for instance, also gives us another way to look at Trudeau’s conversations with 10 Canadians on CBC TV the other night.

While all the attention was on what Trudeau had learned from the questioners, I kept wondering how much the questioners themselves were learning about government. Did they come away with their views changed on what we require of political leadership?

CBC did a good job of choosing people with tough questions; not one of them was able to walk away from the Trudeau encounter with easy answers. The prime minister has taken a bit of flak in some quarters for offering too little in the way of comfort or solutions, but that’s an occupational hazard in modern politics. If the answers were easy or quick, wouldn’t someone have offered some by now?

One thing is certain — none of those people came to the Prime Minister’s Office simply asking for their “taxpayers’” money back.

There are all kinds of good reasons to keep reminding politicians that the money they’re spending is public money — a better term, it seems, than “taxpayers’ money”. And the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has served as a useful check on reckless spending over the years.

But taxing and spending are not the sum total of running a country, despite how that rather limited view has been hammered into popular political culture over the years. If they were, those ten citizens who met Trudeau the other night could have been sent away with a nice cheque as a parting gift.

Susan Delacourt takes us on an etymological tour of the word “taxpayer”

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Marni Soupcoff: Reviving the court challenges program is the wrong way to address a real problem

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Soupcoff’s overall point about the excessive costs of going to court and the more fundamental need to address these is valid.

However,  the complexity of reducing costs and the time required to do so, makes restoration of the court challenges program a sensible interim step (disclosure, I used to have the team that managed the program under my branch at Canadian Heritage and it was small and low-cost):

Only if we address the outlandish costs — in both time and money — of suing government will we actually approach a reality of constitutional litigation being a meaningful check on government power and a meaningful protector of Canadians’ rights. The details of who pays those costs are far easier to sort out.

The fact that challenging a law should not be as painless as, say, buying a sandwich, is worth mentioning. Only, we’ve ended up at such an extreme in the opposite direction, with a typical constitutional challenge quite easily requiring several millions of dollars and a good decade of time, that worries about opening the floodgates seem best left for later, once we’ve made battling for constitutional justice slightly more accessible than walking on the moon.

While it might be true that reducing the price tag of a constitutional case by even $50,000 or so (the amount at which the Court Challenges Program used to max out per matter) would help citizens hold government to account, reducing government delay, document dumping, and excessive procedural manoeuvring during constitutional litigation would be even more productive. Assuming that most Canadians who challenge a law are also federal taxpayers who’d be paying for both a Court Challenges Program and the legions of crown lawyers and other government employees defending the status quo, the plaintiffs would be getting a better deal with a streamlined judicial and litigation process than with a challenges program.

Achieving access to justice is complex, but cutting, rather than adding, bureaucracy is usually a dependably positive step.

Source: Marni Soupcoff: Reviving the court challenges program is the wrong way to address a real problem | National Post

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Canadians ask Trudeau the tough questions – and some answers don’t come easy

2016/02/02 Leave a comment

Greater transparency and honesty in responses than we have come to expect:

But if this government is about openness and transparency it must continue to demonstrate that by taking risks like this one. And that sometimes means being confronted by the harsh reality that answers aren’t always possible and that solutions to problems will be difficult and sometimes take an awfully long time.

The prime minister sat face to face with a woman named Nikki, who wanted assurances her indigenous daughter would be safe growing up and that her life was valued. She was emotional. Trudeau spoke bluntly: “Indigenous lives matter. That you even have to say that is, you know, frustrating to me. And then you demonstrate it.”

It’s the demonstrating part that Trudeau acknowledged will be the most challenging. Some of what his government has promised for indigenous peoples, he said, will take “years and even decades.”

That is not surprising, but it is risky to admit this truth so publicly — that “real change” on many issues likely won’t happen as quickly as most people would like or even need.

Some change must happen more immediately for strict economic reasons.

At least, that’s what Danny, the oilsands worker from Alberta, demonstrated. He wanted to know the government’s plan to save the oil fields and keep everyone working.

There again, the prime minister admitted not everyone would still have a job at the end of the day — or, at least, not a particularly high-paying one.

Danny asked Trudeau what he should do and the prime minister told him to keep working hard. And he hinted later that measures will be in the budget to help people like Danny and other regions struggling with the low price of oil.

By the end of the exercise, a town hall with a twist, Trudeau seemed to have won over many of the chosen Canadians, who he admitted had been “tough” and “challenging” with him.

He shook their hands, and you could hear them off mic thanking him and wishing him luck.

It is a large part of this government’s gamble: not just the openness, but the listening. The bet that by hearing people out, you can also convince them to come along with you, or stick with you, or have faith in you.

But as Jenna, the first to get 10 minutes with Trudeau, told him so honestly, “Forgive me if we’re a little bit skeptical …”

Source: Canadians ask Trudeau the tough questions – and some answers don’t come easy – Politics – CBC News

And of particular interest:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says a change in culture is needed within Canadian police forces to ensure indigenous people are treated the same as everyone else.

Trudeau told a CBC forum Sunday night that a “pervasive culture” in police forces, governments and religious communities has led to indigenous people being less valued.

He said that culture must be changed and he predicted the push for change will come from the Canadian people.

Police forces need culture change: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

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Quebec cabinet shuffle reflects momentum from Trudeau’s gender parity commitment: Hébert

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Chantal Hébert gets it right on gender parity in her comments on Quebec Premier Couillard’s recent cabinet shuffle:

But before concluding that this only proves that merit is a casualty of gender politics, ask yourself the following question: if one has to run out of competent male candidates before filling senior posts with equally or more talented women, is it any wonder that gender parity has been so elusive in Canada?

Source: Quebec cabinet shuffle reflects momentum from Trudeau’s gender parity commitment: Hébert | Toronto Star

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Conservatives cherry picked certain Syrian refugee files: documents

2016/01/29 1 Comment

Not one of the previous government’s finest hours, even if a case could be made to prefer those from threatened minority communities:

Newly released government documents paint the clearest picture to date of how the Conservative government’s controversial approach to Syrian refugee resettlement played out last year.

Before last winter, the previous government had only committed to take in 1,300 Syrian refugees from the millions fleeing the civil war there and spilling into surrounding countries.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper had been under intense pressure — including from inside his own cabinet — to increase that total, but only agreed to accept a further 10,000 provided that religious and ethnic minorities were prioritized.

The policy, unveiled last January, was contentious. The vast majority of the Syrian refugee population is Muslim. The decision to hone in on “religious minorities” prompted allegations the government was biased against Muslims and was also violating United Nations principles governing refugee resettlement.

The refugees the Canadian government accepts for resettlement are chosen by the UN. They do not use ethnicity or religion as a basis for determining whether someone requires resettlement to a third country.

But documents tabled in the House of Commons this week in response to a question from the NDP show how the Conservatives found a workaround.

In February 2015, visa officers in Jordan and Lebanon were instructed to track “areas of focus” for Syrian refugees, which included tracking whether someone was a member of a vulnerable ethnic or religious minority, the documents say.

They applied that criteria to the files they were receiving from the UN.

“Cases meeting at least one of the areas of focus were identified for expedited processing,” the documents say. “Cases that did not meet the areas of focus were included in the mission’s inventory and processed as a regular case.”

The tracking stopped in November 2015.

The Citizenship and Immigration department, asked repeatedly in recent months for a breakdown of Syrian refugees by religion, has consistently said it does not track that information.

On Wednesday, however, spokesperson Jessica Seguin said while the department applied the areas-of-focus approach, it never recorded how many cases met those criteria in part because the computer system isn’t set up that way.

“It is true that for a short time this information was anecdotally tracked in a few missions, but it was never done systematically,” Seguin said in an e-mail.

“No refugees were screened out of the resettlement process as a result of the areas of focus.”

The documents also illustrate the impact of another controversial Conservative move last year — auditing government-assisted refugee case files to see whether they were in keeping with the areas of focus and security requirements.

According to the data tabled in the House of Commons, in June 2015, the highest number of government-assisted refugees admitted to Canada so far that year was 62. That same month, Harper ordered the audit.

The following month, admissions fell to just 9 people.

Source: Conservatives cherry picked certain Syrian refugee files: documents

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Trudeau plans repeal of Tory union, citizenship laws as Parliament returns

2016/01/26 1 Comment

These sources suggest a simple full repeal of C-24 rather than a more surgical approach on C-24. Broader than platform and mandate letter commitments:

So the economy will be the priority. But government sources suggest it won’t be the sole preoccupation in the first two weeks as the new government looks to put a positive stamp on these early days in power.

Among the measures expected to be dealt with through new legislation:

  • Repealing the Conservative’s Bill C-24, which allows the government to strip Canadian citizenship from dual citizens who are convicted of terrorism-related offences.

  • Repealing two other Conservative laws that the Liberals argue weaken the rights of trade unions. They are Bill C-377, which requires unions to disclose how they spend members’ dues, as well as Bill C-525, which makes it harder for unions to organize in federally-regulated workplaces.

  • Introducing parliamentary oversight for Canada’s national security agencies, though the commitment to repeal parts of the previous government’s anti-terrorism law, Bill C-51, is expected to come later.

Source: Trudeau plans repeal of Tory union, citizenship laws as Parliament returns – Politics – CBC News

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Can America’s political discourse get any cruder? Neil Macdonald

2016/01/26 Leave a comment

Interesting if uncomfortable parallel Neil Macdonald makes between the religious extremists in the Iranian revolution and the US evangelicals:

In fact, Palin’s speech reminded me of another one I attended, years ago, in Tehran during my time as CBC’s Middle East correspondent.

Mohammed Khatami, the reformer, had been elected president of Iran, and you could taste the craving for change in the city’s mountain air.

On a whim, I decided to attend a Friday sermon by Ayatollah Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, probably the most hardline cleric in the theocracy.

He scorned the reformers and called down divine judgment on them, and exhorted the crowd to go and impose the will of the people.

It was a speech filled with hatred and religious bigotry and nativism, and the crowd absorbed it with the same sort of ecstasy U.S. conservatives evidently experience at Republican rallies nowadays.

I spoke to several people as they exited the sermon; most were rural, uneducated, and were bused in for the event. In cosmopolitan Tehran, Yazdi wouldn’t likely have been able to fill a big classroom, let alone pack in thousands of panting zealots.

‘You’re fired’

Sarah Palin, likewise, feels most comfortable outside America’s big cities, talking to the white evangelical Christians she calls “real Americans,” as opposed to the ethnic stew of the more permissive, homosexual-tolerating, non-God-fearing souls who populate the coastal population centres.

…Watching Palin and Trump, it was impossible not to wonder, once again, how America, a country that has achieved such excellence, and has so often shown the world a better way, descended into a political discourse that demonizes enlightened thought and glamorizes mean-spirited, lowbrow crudeness.

And something else occurred, a notion I’ve always shied away from because I find jingoism distasteful: None of this stuff would go anywhere in Canada. It would draw snickers and derision, not cheers.

The only reason I can cite for this difference in national attitudes is religion. Not the quiet, old-line religiosity whose adherents believe worship is a private matter, best practised in church.

I’m referring to the messianic, aggressive religion of certain evangelical Christian sects, which believe that even other streams of Christianity, never mind other faiths, are false, and that their job is not just to spread the word of God but to impose it, and that the best way to do that is to run the government.

That sort of religion happily ignores inconvenient facts and contradictions, and has always been ripe for the con job pulled by the Republican elite: promise to end atheistic permissiveness, then get into office and implement an economic agenda most friendly to Manhattan billionaires like Trump and multi-millionaires like Palin. (She recently put her 8,000 square-foot Arizona compound up for sale for $2.5 million.)

To be fair, this loopy form of religio-political fantasy is particular to the Republicans, and lots of religious Americans find it offensive to rational thought.

But it should not be dismissed, as clownish as its heroes can seem.

Think about Iran: Yazdi and his fellow hardliners triumphed. The reformers were shut down and jailed. The urban elites were cowed. It can happen.

Source: Can America’s political discourse get any cruder? – World – CBC News

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Top 100 Most Powerful and Influential People in Canadian Government and Politics, 2016

2016/01/26 Leave a comment

From The Hill Times, the diversity highlights of their Top 100:

The Top 100 list is a reflection of power and influence today. Following the election and with a change in government, it’s quite a different list from the previous eight. There are 58 new names. Thirty on the list are women, including 10 among the Top 25 [30 percent]. That’s six more than last year, primarily because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed women to powerful positions within cabinet. There are also six visible minorities on the list [six percent], double from last year, and two indigenous people.

Source: P AND I WINTER2016 | hilltimes.com

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The angry, radical right: Martin Patriquin

2016/01/22 Leave a comment

Just as many pundits noted “Harper derangement syndrome” on the left, we now have “Trudeau (the younger) derangement syndrome” on the right following the election.

Ironic, given that the Conservative Party, now in opposition, has been running away from some of the policies and practices it implemented (e.g., cancellation of the Census, refusal to have an enquiry on murdered aboriginal women, the sale of LAVs to Saudi Arabia).

There will always be fringes on both sides of the political spectrum and the question is whether this will remain on the fringes or be picked up in some form by mainstream political parties (as arguably happened with the Conservatives’ use of identity politics with respect to Canadian Muslims during the election):

The RCMP, meanwhile, has seen an uptick in threats against Trudeau, according to police sources. “It’s somewhat expected, because Trudeau is anathema to right-wing extremists, and right-wing extremists tend to be the most explicit and reckless of those who make these kinds of threats,” says a former member of the RCMP’s threat-assessment group, a national security unit that safeguards domestic and visiting political leaders, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he remains a member of the RCMP.

Much of the rhetoric comes from a range of online groups whose ideologies vary as much as their popularity. Pegida Canada and Canadian Defence League, for example, are offshoots of European anti-Islamic groups. Others, including Separation of Alberta from the Liberal East, have specific Canadian political goals. Others still are Zionist in nature, including the Jewish Defence League and Christians United For Israel. With its 25,000 followers, Never Again Canada looms large.

The Never Again Canada Facebook page first appeared in mid-2014. The group, such as it is, bills itself as an “organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, propaganda, terror and Jew hatred in Canada . . . Hatred is like cancer, the more you don’t treat it and ignore it, the worse it gets.” Its page, often updated several times an hour, is almost uniquely dedicated to criticism of Justin Trudeau—sometimes referred to as “Justine”—and Islam. (“Never Again” is an apparent reference to the slogan of the Jewish Defence League, the U.S.-based militant Zionist organization, which has a chapter in Canada.)

The commentators on Never Again are a hodgepodge of Zionists, former and current military, Christian militants, the occasional white nationalist—an irony, given that the white nationalist movement isn’t typically very charitable toward Jews—and many anti-Muslim types like Witko and Larry Langenauer. A 67-year-old small business owner, Langenauer says he began posting on Never Again’s Facebook page four months ago.

On Dec. 10 Langenauer wrote that “the most convincing non-confidence statement” against Trudeau would be to shoot him. He has made similar threats about the Saudi-born Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, who was recently appointed parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs. (In Canada, uttering threats is an offence punishable by up to five years in jail. Committing hate speech is punishable by up to two years in jail.)

“I guess anyone that feels that way is probably thinking that [Trudeau] is the man who almost single-handedly, with the people in office with him, has enabled violent immigrants,” Langenauer said in a recent telephone interview from his Montreal home. “It’s their responsibility. Why would Canada be exempt from this type of behaviour by the radical Islamic immigrants? They say they’re refugees, they’re not really refugees. People are going to resent it, and eventually they will act upon it toward the people whom they feel are responsible.”

Source: The angry, radical right – Macleans.ca

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