In 2016, Canada’s the newly elected Trudeau government set out a Gender Based Analysis Plus action plan, with the plus referring to intersectionality. GBA+ capacity was increased, and conducting GBA+ became a higher priority throughout government. In 2018 the Canadian Gender Budgeting Act was passed, enshrining gender budgeting as official government policy. In 2019 the federal budget, for the first time, contained a gendered analysis of all new budget initiatives. 

 

In this paper we use the Canadian experience to argue that governments attempting to incorporate GBA+ into the policy process face a trilemma: it is impossible for the GBA+ to be simultaneously complete, open, and politically palatable. A complete GBA+ analysis identifies how policies impact different groups differently: the costs and benefits a policy creates for different groups of men and women. For example, university attendance rates differ substantially between men and women, across regions, and according to ethnic origin and other characteristics. A complete GBA+ analysis of educational policies such as, for example, reducing the interest rates on student loans, would take account such differences in who benefits from the policies, and thus make it clear that some group of people receive, on average, greater benefits from such a policy than others. Yet as soon as it becomes apparent that a policy benefits some groups of people more than others, this fact can be used to mobilize the people who do not benefit from the policy to oppose it. Thus a complete and thorough GBA+ evaluation of policy cannot be made open and transparent, if the government wishes the process to be politically palatable. 

 

In this paper we explore how the Canadian government’s GBA+ initiative has negotiated the tension between completeness, openness, and political survival. We argue that there is no simple way out of this trilemma, but suggest that having an independent agency responsible for evaluating the GBA+ process is one possible solution.