FAFIA launched its gender budgeting project in October 2007 with the support of Oxfam Canada and the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario. This project has a national focus and relies on the ongoing engagement of many of FAFIA’s members and partners who are dedicated to substantive equality in Canada.

Gender budgeting addresses women’s inequality by examining a government’s budgets through a gender lens and, in particular, where its tax and spending priorities lie.

“Canadian women make up half the electorate and almost half the nation’s income tax payers. They contribute $42.4 billion in personal income taxes to the well-being of all Canadians. Despite this heft, the 2008 budget is written as if women are afterthoughts, mere asterisks in the larger Canadian.”

In the report “Budget 2008: What’s in it for Women,” the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives explores the gender impact of the 2008 federal budget. It highlights how the budget does virtually nothing for Canadian women struggling to balance family and work life, and how its heavy emphasis on tax cuts are strongly tilted in favour of high income men.

The paper also examines the federal government’s priorities laid out in this government’s last three budgets and finds an approach that rewards the rich, but does precious little for the rest of us. Despite availability of huge surpluses, women’s concerns are almost invisible.

Income splitting is when one tax payer transfers a portion of the income they control to someone else for tax purposes, so that they are subject to a lower tax rate. The goal of income splitting is to pay less tax collectively. Income splitting is generally a bad public policy for women. It attempts to achieve family work life balance by encouraging one full timer to go to work and one family member to stay at home. Income splitting demonstrates how tax policy can be used to discriminate against women since income splitting and family taxation are old ideas deeply rooted in women’s disenfranchisement.

In her presentation, Kim Brooks illustrates who benefits from income splitting, who is excluded, as well as detailing the gendered implications of income splitting for women.

Gender Budget Initiatives come in a variety of forms and are all quite diverse. They have been initiated by and have involved different players. Some GBIs are national-level projects, others also target local government. Local GBIs tend to be based on more participatory methods, engaging communities in their analysis and in changing budget priorities and allocations. The most powerful GBIs are frequently those which are citizen-led.

Women in Canada are affected differently than men by tax and spending policies of governments as a result of their varying labour market opportunities, family and community responsibilities, and levels of economic security. Click on the « read more » button below to download FAFIA’s federal budget overview. We assess the value for women of several key items in this year’s federal budget, including anti-poverty measures, tax breaks, and federal funds for social programs, via federal transfers or related initiatives. In our analysis, we also address which Canadians will be the primary benefactors of this budget.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has recently published a new budget response examining whether the 2007 Federal Budget adresses inequality and poverty. This report is attached.

On April 17 2007, the Deputy Minister of the Department of Finance, Mr. Robert Wright, was invited to discuss gender budgeting at the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Read about the efforts of the Finance Department on gender-based analysis, and Mr. Wright’s views on Income Splitting and Status of Women funding.

The City for All Women Initiative (CAWI) is a partnership between City of Ottawa and community organizations committed to gender equality.

To promote gender equality, CAWI focuses on a 2 pronged approach:

• Increase women’s empowerment and knowledge of how the system works
• Systematically integrate gender equality into city planning

The overall goal of UNPAC’s project is to reduce women’s poverty. They understand women’s poverty as financial in that women are too often “money-poor” but we also see that women are what we call “time-poor” in that there are simply not enough hours in a day to do all the things that need to be done.

Government policies and budgetary decisions can either alleviate or exacerbate this time crunch.

[…]in 2006, the Conservative government made several changes affecting women’s equality provisions that call into question the sincerity of its commitment to implement the UN recommendations. […] The justifications for these measures were that women are already strong, already equal, and therefore don’t need these policy supports. In actuality, however, although women have equality rights on paper, much more work needs to be done to make these equality rights a reality for all women in Canada.

Full Report