Melinda Gates is enormously wealthy. She is a philanthropist who does good works. She commands attention. She is a role model for women. She also said, not all that long ago in a Time magazine video, that she “originally thought that women’s issues were the soft issues. And I was just wrong about that.”Gates is co-chair, with Canadian ambassador to France Isabelle Hudon, of the Gender Equality Advisory Council, created by the Trudeau government as a foundation stone of this country’s G7 presidency being held in early June in Charlevoix, Que. Trudeau is making a big splash about this, pushing gender equality across not just the obvious themes (economic empowerment), but through a gender-lensed approach to climate change and national security, to name just two. Gender equality has not previously shared G7 centre stage to this degree. The advisory council has the considerable mandate of working to ensure that gender equality and gender-based analysis “are integrated across all themes, activities and outcomes of Canada’s G7 presidency.”It is the pervasiveness of gender equality that Trudeau hopes will make this year’s G7 summit not only distinctly “us,” but will travel thematically to future G7s. Think of it as a legacy initiative.We are used to this language here at home. The government’s focus on gender-responsive budgeting last February comes to mind. And with each initiative it is important to point out what a poor job Canada has been doing not only in the lofty corporate realm (the representation of women on boards), how slow we have been to act (the gender pay gap) and how lousy we are at simply digging out the facts. I have previously made mention of an IMF survey of G7 and non-G7 nations that have adopted gender budgeting, by example. Canada rated only a “limited application” grade across such measures as “existence of fiscal data disaggregated by gender” and “spe ...
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