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It’s supposed to be on every bureaucrat’s mind at all times

Training materials for the program urge bureaucrats to develop what they call a “GBA+ reflex.” This makes GBA+ different than other government considerations such as environmental assessments or official bilingualism. Instead of being just another step in the process of approving a project, GBA+ is supposed to be front of mind at all times. “Having a GBA+ reflex means that considering gender and diversity factors has become a routine and automatic part of your work and thought process,” reads a Status of Women description. This isn’t to say that it can’t still be extraordinarily confusing for a policy maker to know what is GBA+ kosher. A GBA+ training scenario on emergency response notes that since many women are caregivers, they can be particularly valuable at helping a community to bounce back after a disaster. However, the trainee is simultaneously asked to capitalize on these maternal resources without “exploiting and reinforcing gender inequality.”

It can’t fix bad policy, it can just make it more equitable

When Bill Morneau says that the latest budget is all GBA+ vetted, this doesn’t mean that it’s a precision-engineered piece of gender equity. All it means is that the Liberals’ chosen policies have simply been rendered as diversity-friendly as possible. If the policies themselves are wrongheaded at helping women (as some have asserted) there’s very little that GBA+ can do to prevent that. Should some future government decide that gender equity is best served by issuing gender-neutral grey unitards to every Canadian, for instance, all GBA+ can do is work out a strategy to best distribute those unitards to marginalized communities. A recent federal example could be the infamous $8.1 million Parliament Hill hockey rink. A GBA+ screening might have concluded that the rink’s location disproportionately benefited wealthy Ottawa kids, and thus a program was needed to fly in diverse backgrounds of children from across Canada to experience the rink for themselves (which is exactly what they did). When, of course, a more equitable answer would have been to scrap the damned thing altogether and divert the funds towards building rinks in struggling communities.