Budget Research

A GBA+ lens on the Manitoba Budget

In the early 2000s United Nations Platform for Action (UNPAC) led work on advancing gender budgeting in Manitoba. This included training department staff responsible for preparing the budget, creating a GBA policy for the Manitoba Treasury Board and building similar budget capacity in Manitoba communities through workshops and materials. You can find those materials here.

In 2008 a paper called Operationalizing Compassion - A Gender Budget for Manitoba, by Follow the Money Honey group was released. This work is being picked up by the Reweaving Support Project as paying for improved social safety net is an obvious question. Reweaving Support will update the Follow the Money, Honey paper to include funding for 2023-2024. It is by now common knowledge that investing in children and families to prevent abuse, neglect and poverty pays for itself down the road in savings in many ways. We also know there is a strong negative correlation between CFS, EIA, and gender based violence with children who grow up not completing grade 12, involved with the justice system, suffering ill health, particularly poor mental health, homelessness, and addictions.

The Reweaving Support Project envisions Manitoba Budgets invest in the social determinants of health to create public systems to reverse these trends. This project realizes that food banks and other charity approaches are not going to address these problems that require investment into prevention through:

new systems for guaranteed basic livable income that will support the health and well being need to work and raise children,
social housing and rent regulation to ensure access to low rent housing,
access to quality, affordable child care and early childhood education so all parents can work with confidence their children are well cared for,
a system to support healthy parenting to raise health kids rather than apprehend children after abuse or neglect.
And effective programs to prevent families break down due to violence and abuse, or to intervene effectively in a trauma informed way.

The Reweaving Support Project seeks to bring the collaboration for systems change approach to the provincial budget recognizing that access to the budget making process by the community sector in these five areas through participatory intersectional gender budgets is one way to ensure these needed changes are made and that revenue in the budget is redistributed in a way to wisely invest in social safety net systems that see positive results. Participatory Intersectional Gender Budgets would ensure the interests of all Manitoban's are represented in the budget process as well as the documents produced. We can't just keep putting money into outdated systems that need to be upgraded, we need to both improve the social safety net and better invest in a social safety net that empowers or lifts people up.