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In 1995, 188 countries, including Canada, adopted the Beijing Platform for Action, setting out a detailed plan for addressing women’s poverty, economic security and health. A decade later, the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action is asking: are women in Canada better off?

Undoubtedly, some women can show how life improved for them since 1995, but many more women point to the ways in which life seems harder. So how would one assess if women are better or worse off than a decade ago, on the whole? This project is the first attempt in Canada to answer that question in measurable terms. It should not have been.

n 1995, the Government of Canada agreed to undertake a gender analysis of all its macro-economic policies and its budgets. To date, no federal Minister of Finance has begun this process. A commitment to greater equality cannot occur without a commitment of resources for programs that make change possible. Fiscal policy is the way resources get raised and allocated, the way commitments become realities.

Canada’s Commitment to Equality: A Gender Analysis of the Last Ten Federal Budgets (1995-2004) is the first gender budget analysis of its kind in Canada. It tracks a decade of federal fiscal policy, looking at what the Government of Canada said it was going to do (budgets) and what it (em)did do (public accounts).