GBA+ is a net minus

When the Liberals last tabled a budget, two years ago, they threw in, as evidence of their commitment to feminism and inclusiveness, a companion “GBA+” (gender-based analysis-plus) spanning 160 pages. These 160 pages were on top of the 46-page “Gender Equality Statement” contained within the budget document itself. Perhaps because having to read more than 200 pages of such material, let alone having to write it, is tiresome for even the most committed progressives, the Liberals dialed the gender analysis down to just 34 pages in their economic statement last fall.

We'll find out next week how much gender analysis they include in Budget 2021 but, as I wrote in last week's column, they ought to drop it altogether — not because the government should not be committed to inclusiveness or care about the effects of economic policies on women, but because the stuff is completely useless. Policy analysis is supposed to inform people whether a certain policy is good or bad, and so whether it is worth implementing or not. The GBA+ does nothing of the kind.

Because the gender analyses are applied to policies the government has already decided to implement, it is predetermined that the policies are beneficial. The analyses are able to reach this conclusion only by ignoring the deleterious unintended consequences of government intervention, even when they are entirely foreseeable, and by instead analyzing only the stated intentions of the policies. Thus, haphazard regulatory and spending programs that fail to solve problems and produce counterproductive outcomes are judged to be excellent policies.

Take, as an example from the fall economic statement, the GBA+ on the $6.6 million in spending in 2021-22, and $3.6 million annually thereafter, to appoint a task force and “modernize the Employment Equity Act to better reflect Canada's diversity.” What is the government's analysis of its own policy? “All Canadians are expected to benefit,” it concludes. Moreover, “members of employment equity and related groups like members of LGBTQ2 communities who work in federally regulated sectors will specifically benefit from the task force's recommendations.”

But if this “modernization” of employment standards proposes an expansion of the existing regulations, then, far from delivering benefits to all Canadians, it will produce net economic losses. First, by making hiring more costly, the expansion of regulation discourages it and so reduces the number of jobs available, including for “members of employment equity and related groups.” Second, by transferring some human resourcing decisions from corporate managers to government officials, the regulations reduce business efficiency and productivity and, by extension, wages — with much of the burden again falling on precisely those groups the government claims will benefit from its policies.

Take another example: the GBA+ of the $2.6 billion the government intends to spend over seven years for home energy-efficiency subsidies. The analysis states that the policy will benefit homeowners and landlords by lowering monthly energy costs, and will create new green jobs for retrofit contractors, who are mostly men. But so what? Would the policy be any better or worse if most retrofit contractors were women? And what exactly have we learned from this gender analysis? It only tells us that by giving handouts to certain people, the government intends to benefit the people receiving the handouts. Sure — but I already knew that before reading the gender analysis. I didn't even need to take the federal government's online GBA+ course to figure that out.

The relevant question is, not whether some people might benefit from the policy, but whether the policy will be, on the whole, a net benefit to Canadians. Lower energy costs are indeed a benefit but would be offset by the $2.6 billion in higher taxes to pay for the subsidies and hassle that homeowners and landlords must undergo to do the retrofits. If the benefits of the retrofits exceed the costs, people would make their homes more energy-efficient in absence of the government program. There is therefore no need for the program; it produces a net loss — an important fact missing from the gender analysis.

At bottom, the GBA+ does not provide any useful information, mainly because the analyses are simply wrong. A wise federal government would drop this stuff from its fiscal planning. The Liberals aren't wise, however, and so probably won't drop it. Anyone who wants a real analysis of Liberal policies, rather than a statement of their intentions, will have to look elsewhere — to this page, for instance.

WHAT EXACTLY HAVE WE LEARNED FROM THIS

GENDER ANALYSIS?