Canada's Commitment to Equality

Prepared for the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action by Armine Yalnizyan and Associates

Executive Summary

The Beijing Commitments

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.

In 1995, the Government of Canada agreed to undertake a gender
analysis of all its macroeconomic 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 did do (public accounts).

Analyzing the patterns of federal decision-making during the deficit
era (1995 to1997) and during the surplus era (1998 to 2004), it has
become clear that, in good times and bad, federal priorities actually
ran counter to the promises made 10 years ago to improve economic
security for women.

Though the economy grew by 62% between 1994 and 2004 ? meaning
almost $480 billion more a year in market value was being produced by
Canadians ? a growing number of women over the same decade were finding
their pay rates virtually stagnant while the costs of basics like
housing, tuition, child care, transit and utilities continue to soar.
Paying more for less has become the norm for many households over the
last decade. Women working in low-wage and part-time jobs continue to
be hardest hit.

The Deficit Era (1995-1997)

Since women are still society's principal care-givers for children,
the elderly and people with disabilities, social programs, in
particular, have played a central role in their lives over the decades.
Strong social programs can shift some of the burden of care-giving from
women's shoulders, giving them more opportunities to be involved in
paid work, higher education and public life. Also, women have less
income than men and higher poverty rates. This means that income
security programs, like employment insurance and social assistance are
vital supports for women when they are unemployed or sick, or when
relationships are abusive or break down. These income security
programs, and a host of vital social supports, have been eroded over
the past decade.

The federal spending cuts made between 1995 and 1997
disproportionately hurt women, particularly those already most
vulnerable. Billions of dollars in reduced funding translated into
significantly less support for women just at a time when the burdens
they faced were increasing. The harsh effects of the 1990-91 recession
meant that women were increasingly relied on by their families to
support them financially. Women responded with rising labour force
participation rates, higher employment rates, and record hours of paid
work. At the same time, the billions lost resulted in massive service
cutbacks, resulting in women also undertaking more unpaid care of the
young, old, ill and disabled.

Public accounts show that almost $12 billion a year was lost in
federal funds for critical programs between 1994-5 and 1996-7, and more
in the last year of the deficit era, 1997-8. The restructuring of
fiscal arrangements with the provinces and territories, and the
billions of dollars taken out of transfer payments between 1995 and
1998, destabilized programs and services at the provincial and
territorial levels, further eroding community programs, income supports
and public goods that women in Canada rely on.

A review of federal budgets and public accounts reveal that the deep
cuts to spending between 1995 and 1998 balanced the books years ahead
of schedule. This rapid elimination of the deficit, which had dogged
federal budgets since 1971, raises doubts that the severity of the cuts
was necessary, raising the question: Did women and their families
suffer unnecessarily?

The Surplus Era (1998-2004)

Since the beginning of the surplus era, the federal government has
not redressed the damage done during the deficit era, let alone
advanced the agenda for action promised to the women of Canada in 1995.
The way the surplus was allocated between 1998 and 2004 ruled out any
serious response to the systemic problems faced by women and the most
vulnerable and marginalized people in Canada. Instead, initiatives were
selected that essentially redistribute resources towards those already
more advantaged.

Between 1998 and 2004, the federal government allocated $152 billion
to tax cuts (most of which has gone to higher income earners and large
corporations) and $61 billion to pay down the debt. In comparison, only
$34 billion in net new resources were transferred to the provinces for
health care and child care over that seven year period. The changes to
the Employment Insurance scheme made in the deficit era, which resulted
in fewer women qualifying to receive benefits and benefit rates being
reduced, ever , were not reversed. The only expansion of Employment
Insurance was for extending parental leave, costing $3 billion over
that time frame. Departmental spending expanded by $42 billion in new
spending initiatives over the seven years, but much of it went to
defence and "innovation" programs such as public investments in
Research and Development under the Canadian Opportunities Strategy.

Remarkably little of the increase in new funds actually spent in
this seven year period was devoted specifically to enhancing the
security of Canada's most vulnerable individuals - through the building
of affordable housing, the provision of quality child care, the
reduction of the costs of post-secondary education and training, the
expansion of immigrant settlement services, or the assurance of benefit
coverage for part-time and casual workers, including adequate benefits
for the unemployed. Taken together, the federal government's new
spending initiatives in these areas would not have been more than $5
billion over the seven year period.

The single largest initiative to alleviate the effects of poverty
was the increase in the Canada Child Tax Benefit, representing an
additional $15 billion over the 7 years since 1998. These amounts are
counted by the federal government as a tax measure, and represent only
10% of the total costs of the federal tax reform agenda. Despite this
infusion of funds, Canada's poorest families have not benefited,
because the program permits provinces and territories to "claw back"
funds from those on social assistance. Single parent families, the vast
majority of which are headed by women, too often find their incomes
inadequate to cover basic needs of food and shelter.

A small number of tax measures introduced since 1998 have addressed
women's realities - for example, tax credits for care-givers and
increased tax deductions for expenses on child care - but these
measures do not help women who have no taxable income. Tax measures
also do little to fund and regulate services, in order to insure that
reliable social supports are available in the first place, for women in
Canada of all ages and circumstances. But a focus on tax measures
instead of spending initiatives allows the Government of Canada to
maintain its new commitment to "small government".

A Question of Priorities?Ten Years Later

Since the mid 1990s, the scale of federal involvement in society -
which includes investments in programs that could advance the economic
security of women and their families - has been deliberately kept at
levels not seen since the late 1940s.

The federal budget of 1995 set out to "right-size" government, and
shrank federal program spending as a share of the economy from 16% to
12% of GDP in three short years. It has remained at less than 11.6% of
the economy since 2000-01, and is projected to stay at roughly that
level for the foreseeable future. The rate of contraction, and the
holding constant of this transformation, is unmatched in any other
advanced industrialized nation.

But the commitment to small government may be antithetical to the
interests of women, since women need the systems that governments put
into place to protect basic economic security, address violence and
injustice, and ensure quality and accountability in the provision of
public goods, such as childcare and health care.

The economic strength that Canada has demonstrated in recent
years, and the fiscal capacity that flows from it, means that there are
more than enough resources for the federal government to honour the
commitments it has made to women's equality in domestic law, and under
international human rights treaties and agreements. It is simply a
question of priorities.