Public Services and Procurement Canada
Gender-based analysis plus: 2021 to 2022 Departmental Plan
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Institutional gender-based analysis plus capacity
The department has a gender-based analysis plus (GBA+) responsibility centre situated within its strategic policy unit to provide oversight, direction and promotion of GBA+ across Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), with specific focus on supporting GBA+ governance and management at PSPC, ensuring monitoring and reporting on GBA+ application and compliance with government direction on GBA+, increasing awareness of GBA+ at PSPC and increasing GBA+ capacity within PSPC.
In 2019 to 2020, PSPC established a GBA+ community of practice to guide the consistent, rigorous and robust implementation of GBA+ across the department's programs and services. The community of practice includes representatives from all of the department's branches and regions. Representatives from the GBA+ community of practice will continue to meet several times annually to share information and best practices, and discuss issues related to the implementation of GBA+ at PSPC.
In total, there are approximately 6.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) dedicated to GBA+ at PSPC. This includes:
- 1.5 FTE within the GBA+ responsibility centre dedicated to the promotion of GBA+
- 0.5 FTE within other branches for training, and applying GBA+
- 4.5 FTE from across 18 branches and regions representatives of the PSPC GBA+ community of practice
In 2021 to 2022, the PSPC GBA+ responsibility centre and community of practice will continue to support GBA+ capacity-building at PSPC, increase awareness of GBA+ across the department, and support the tailored application of GBA+ to the various PSPC lines of business, improve the availability of data for GBA+, and improve monitoring and reporting of GBA+ mainstreaming at PSPC.
To align with the Treasury Board Secretariat policy Direction to Modernize the Government of Canada's Sex and Gender Information Practices, some PSPC branches are conducting a review of their service lines to ensure that the policy direction is implemented, that GBA+ is a key consideration in new or existing policies, programs, and initiatives, and that a third gender option (non-binary gender option) is included in documents, forms/letters and surveys/questionnaires. More branches and regions are also opting to collect gender information by default (instead of sex information) when relevant in data collection efforts.
Planned initiatives
Purchase of goods and services
In 2021 to 2022, PSPC will continue to work with Indigenous Services Canada and the Treasury Board Secretariat to create more opportunities for Indigenous businesses by developing new procurement approaches.
In addition, the department will maintain its commitment to providing greater opportunities for supplier diversity. PSPC will bolster its outreach activities to communities that are currently under-represented in federal procurement, and will continue to develop and apply lessons learned from current pilot projects. The department will also launch pilot procurements to open bidding opportunities for Black owned and/or operated businesses. To support accessible procurement, the department will undertake a review and assessment of accessibility in public information and processes related to PSPC procurement.
GBA+ will continue to inform PSPC's work on social and green procurement, and accessibility. Data will be collected on suppliers in support of efforts to increase the participation of Indigenous peoples and under-represented groups in federal procurement. PSPC will work with partners at Indigenous Services Canada and Statistics Canada to support these analyses, as required.
Working to increase the participation of businesses owned by Indigenous Peoples and under-represented groups in government procurement could be expected to help advance equal and full participation in the economy. Improvements will be measured and tracked to monitor performance.
Property and infrastructure
PSPC will continue to conduct technical accessibility assessments on its nationwide Crown-owned and lease purchase portfolio. As a result of these assessments, PSPC will identify accessibility improvements to bring base building elements in conformity with the 2018 accessibility standard and address new legislative requirements under the Accessible Canada Act. PSPC will also identify incremental improvements to go above and beyond requirements. To monitor results in 2021 to 2022, the department will measure the percentage of PSPC Crown-owned and lease purchase assets assessed against the 2018 Canadian Standards Association Standard for Accessibility (CSA B651-2018).
PSPC will continue to explore options and develop and deploy strategies to provide Indigenous organizations, women business owners and other underrepresented groups with greater access to opportunities to participate in and submit proposals in response to Real Property solicitations.
A gender-based assessment is completed for all new real property mechanisms and future real property contracts will include provisions designed to encourage successful proponents to provide increased accessibility to procurement opportunities to businesses owned by women and other underrepresented groups. PSPC will ensure that innovation, lessons learned and best practices are incorporated into each new initiative, providing opportunities for thousands of small and medium enterprises to participate in performing work in federal buildings through competitive sub-contracting, and providing broader opportunities for participation from under-represented groups.
In 2020 to 2021, PSPC developed a plan to ensure that activities and projects under the Parliamentary Precinct and Laboratories Canada initiatives are both respectful, and reflective of Canadian diversity. In 2021 to 2022, the department will routinely reinforce GBA+ practices in support of these initiatives.
Government-wide support
The Translation Bureau is continuing to work with partners to explore options to provide sign language interpretation in American sign language (ASL) and langue des signes Québécoise (LSQ) at high-visibility events. It will improve access to real-time translation (CART) and post-production closed captioning services for all departments. In addition, the Translation Bureau will explore additional services to ensure access to information to Canadians who are deaf, deafblind and deafened, and whose primary language of communication is ASL or LSQ. Moreover, with an increase in virtual meetings, there has been a shift towards the use of remote interpretation. The Translation Bureau will collaborate with other government departments and agencies to increase access to remote interpretation for official, Indigenous and foreign languages and video remote interpretation for sign languages. It will also continue to encourage inclusive writing in all communications and promote its gender and sexual diversity glossary, a resource for linguistic recommendations on gender-inclusive writing in both official languages. This resource is available online to all Canadians.
The Pension Program is committed to ensuring that its delivery of services to public servants is inclusive and reflective of Canada's diversity. In 2021 to 2022, the Pension Program will be modifying forms and correspondence to remove honorifics in salutations to pension plan members, introducing a non-binary gender option to the information architecture of the pension system, and raising GBA+ awareness and increasing training opportunities for employees.
PSPC recognizes that lived experience is the cornerstone of the Digital Accessibility Strategy. By taking into account and emphasizing the lived experiences of persons with disabilities, the strategy seeks to remove the concept of “exception”, choosing rather to view disability as an intersection of the identity of a multi-faceted individual. PSPC is conducting research with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to examine GBA+ regarding biometric bias in support of digital services, which include identity, credential and access management.
The Federal Pay Administration Program provides pay system and services for Government of Canada employees. The Federal Pay Administration Program plans on broadening its use of existing GBA+ data, from the pay system and other sources, such as public service employee survey (PSES) data, to better understand if and how employees of different gender identities may be disproportionally affected by pay issues. Active and backlog pay cases will continue to be queried on an ad-hoc basis to produce GBA+ analyses, as required to inform policy documents and positions. The Federal Pay Administration Program will also continue to play a supporting role with the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat to advance their efforts to implement a third, non-binary gender category in human resource and third-party systems that feed data into the pay system.