QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Justice
Gender-Based Analysis
November 19, 2025
Minister Fraser, your Liberal government promised during the April election that “. . . every measure in this platform will be implemented with a full GBA+ analysis . . . .”
Before Mark Carney became the Prime Minister, there were more than 100 mentions of Gender-based Analysis Plus in mandate letters to cabinet ministers. Now it has been completely erased from Prime Minister Carney’s universal mandate letter to ministers.
A GBA Plus analysis used to be available online when a government bill was introduced in Parliament. Now they are nowhere to be seen, including with your Bill C-9. The previous Trudeau government was a fake feminist government that paid lip service to the equality rights of women. That government — of which you were a key part — was infamous for its multitude of broken promises.
Is your so-called new government just carrying on this fine Liberal tradition?
It will not come as a surprise that I have a different characterization of the role of Gender-based Analysis and the high regard with which we hold the need to consider the feminist perspective when adopting different policies.
We do still conduct gender-based analyses to understand the unique impacts of decisions that we take as governments on women and women of different backgrounds to ensure that we’re looking at those intersecting grounds of discrimination.
We also have made the decision to reinstitute funding for women and gender equality to continue to not only consider the impacts as we’re developing laws but also to support the organizations that are on the front line helping advance the rights of women in communities.
We may disagree on the success or failure of those policies, but rest assured, they’re an ever-present feature of the political conversations we have when we make decisions about which laws to adopt in Canada.
So the Gender-based Analysis now is secret.
Minister, for the last 10 years, your government claimed that GBA Plus is a key lens for evaluating legislation, and you promised to conduct this analysis, but there’s now nothing public for parliamentarians and Canadians to review. In so many areas, the Carney government is even less transparent than the Trudeau government was.
Are you keeping your GBA Plus analysis secret because it has nothing favourable to say about your government’s legislation?
No. I don’t think that we have to turn gender-based violence or gender considerations into a partisan exercise. If you wish to, I can point out that the Conservative Party of Canada voted against the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence.
I would rather have a conversation about what decisions we’re actually going to make to advance the rights of women and advance the well-being of Canadians. We want to continue to understand the impacts that our laws are going to have on people from different walks of life and from different life experiences, and for that reason, gender-based analysis is still an important tool that is used to strengthen the impacts that our laws are going to have.
