Internal docs show many federal departments not meeting gender analysis targets
Toronto Star February 02, 2019
The Trudeau Liberals’ promise to examine how their plans affect women and men differently hasn’t been fulfilled across the federal government, internal documents say.
Results from an internal survey conducted by Status of Women Canada measuring the implementation of “gender-based analysis plus” (GBA+, in the government’s jargon) found fewer than half of departments and agencies have a GBA+ plan, with most departments saying they lack the internal mechanisms to apply one.
Trudeau instructed Status of Women Minister Maryam Monsef to make sure the government uses GBA+ more in decision-making and in 2017 the Liberals said they’d applied a gender-based analysis to a federal budget for the first time. But major gaps remain, according to the government’s own findings. For example, in 2016, the Trudeau government made it mandatory that all memos to cabinet and Treasury Board submissions — which often form the basis of big spending or policy decisions — have a gender-based analysis. Fewer than half of departments have tracked whether this has indeed been done for these or other documents, according to the internal survey.