The Conservatives need to come clean on government-wide spending cuts and share the details immediately, Liberal Treasury Board critic John McCallum says.

Despite reassurances from Treasury Board President Tony Clement that he will investigate a gag order from his department that would keep the details of spending cuts secret months after the 2012 budget is released, Mr. McCallum said that is not enough.

The Toronto-area MP, who worked on similar restraint exercises in cabinet when the Liberals were in government, hopes the Conservatives will put the spending-cut details in the budget as his party did in 2005.

“If they don’t do it, it’s not because they can’t do it, but because they won’t do it,” Mr. McCallum said. “For this government, which rode into the office on the white horse of accountability, the least they can do is come clean with Canadians.”

Mr. McCallum questioned Mr. Clement’s assertions that the order did not come from him. (The Treasury Board President has positioned himself as a champion of open and transparent government.)

“What I can assure you is, first of all, that memo didn’t come from me,” Mr. Clement said last week. “Secondly, my position is that we have an obligation to provide Parliament with timely and accurate information.”

The memo highlights concerns that even though the Conservative government is readying to launch an austerity program that will see billions of dollars cut from Ottawa’s annual budget, the full details may be hard to come by and would perhaps only emerge from departmental leaks.

“That strains credibility,” Mr. McCallum said, adding that it crippled parliamentarians from doing their jobs. “If we don’t have the detailed information, how can we look at it in committee,” he said.

Earlier Thursday, the union representing employees working in Veteran Affairs expressed concern over rumours that the department could see its budget cut as much as 20 per cent – more than the 5 to 10 per cent the government has said it wants to implement.

Veteran Affairs minister Stephen Blaney’s office did not clarify for The Globe if the department would face greater cuts than other departments.

Michael Blais, the founder of Canadian Veterans Advocacy, said the silence is a “systemic problem in the department.”

“If the cuts are coming, then fine, we need to know what they will be so that we can diligently advocate for our veterans,” Mr. Blais said.

With a report from Bill Curry

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The Toronto District School Board has opened registration for its new boutique academies – including all-boys, all-girls, sports-focused and music-specialized programs – located at nine elementary schools.

The announcement comes as the York Region District School Board considers dismantling its elementary arts program at Baythorn Public School over concerns that students don’t have equal access and are specializing too early. TDSB education director Chris Spence defended his board’s strategy, saying it does not follow the one-size-does-fit-all approach. “Sameness is not synonymous with excellence,” he said. “I believe our biggest issue isn’t underachievement; it’s disengagement.”

Here’s how the boutique academies will work:

Who can apply?

Students are not required to compete or audition to get into the academies. If demand exceeds the number of spots, admissions will be determined by lottery. The five schools holding the sports and health academies are switching over in their entirety to the new programs and will draw students from their catchment areas. The other four schools will each have at least 100 to 150 spots in a school-within-a-school model.

Teachers

Gender will not determine who teaches at the all-girls and all-boys academies. All current teachers at the sports, health and music academies will be offered professional development courses if they do not already specialize in those subjects. Going forward, the academies will move toward hiring teachers who have training in these areas.

Tracking progress

While Dr. Spence did not go into specifics, he said the TDSB will be tracking the success of these new academies, both internally, and through research partnerships with Ontario universities, such as Toronto, York and Nipissing.

Sports and wellness academies

Students are guaranteed at least 150 minutes of physical activity every week, said George Kourtis, program co-ordinator for health and physical education at TDSB. The three schools – Carleton Village Junior and Senior Public School, James S. Bell Junior Middle School and Shoreham Public School – were selected for their pre-existing, excellent sports facilities.

Health and wellness academies

In practice, there isn’t much to distinguish these from sports and wellness academies. Students also have to get at least 30 minutes of exercise daily, but some parents at Rene Gordon Elementary and Donview Middle School had “concerns with the sports focus and felt there might be a misunderstanding that it’s an elite sports program,” Mr. Kourtis said. That’s why the name was changed at these two schools. “Producing athletes isn’t our goal, but it will probably be a by-product, either through intramural sport teams or just add-on lunch time activities like yoga or basketball,” he said.

Vocal music academies

This program, offered to students in Grade 4 through 8 at Heather Heights Junior Public School and Ryerson Community School, will place a strong emphasis on ensemble singing and developing musicianship. Lessons would include students performing music from various historical eras and studying sound frequency in their science class using musical instruments.

Boys and girls leadership academies

TDSB officials hope the boys leadership academy for Grade 4 through 6 at The Elms Junior Middle School will keep their male students more engaged through hands-on activities and the provision of role models. Similarly the curriculum will be adapted for the girls leadership academy in Grade 4 through 6 at Highland Heights Junior Public School. “It could be something as simple as having a female geologist come in to talk about rocks and science,” said Marguerite Campbell, the board’s central co-ordinating principal for innovative programs. “We need to break down gender stereotypes for both boys and girls.”

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Canadian teenagers may talk the talk on gender equality but they also harbour some markedly stereotypical views of appropriate roles and behaviours for men and women.

That’s one conclusion drawn from a report released Thursday that surveyed 1,000 young Canadians, as well as nearly 4,000 teens from India, Rwanda and the United Kingdom.

While 90 per cent of Canadian youth said they agree gender equality is good for both men and women, nearly 45 per cent agree that “to be a man you need to be tough.” By comparison, only 13 per cent of youth in the U.K. and 26 per cent in Rwanda hold similar tough-guy notions, the survey shows.

“We thought our numbers would be closer to U.K.,” said Rosemary McCarney, president of Plan Canada, an anti-poverty development group that produced the report for its “Because I am a girl” campaign. “But they were actually closer to Rwanda, and our reaction was, how does that happen?”

The survey also revealed that 31 per cent of Canadian boys think a woman’s most important role is to take care of her home and cook for the family. In the U.K., only 15 per cent of young boys think the same, while the number is 74 per cent in India.

The way the Canadian respondents tell it, they feel pressure to conform to traditional stereotypes of male and female roles. Some 66 per cent say they feel peer-pressured; 46 per cent say the pressure comes from the media, and 35 per cent from family.

“Gender stereotypes in our own country put a heavy burden on boys and men here … the reality is that if they feel the pressure to shoulder all the household income or to have a manly attitude, we are going to leave both groups [of men and women] behind,” Ms. McCarney said.

The report of the “Because I am a girl” campaign focuses this year on young men, regarding them as part of the solution to eradicating poverty and attaining female empowerment. “Gender equality isn’t just about girls. It’s about girls and boys,” Ms. McCarney said.

Karen Craggs-Milne, gender adviser at Plan Canada, sees the pressure on the home front. Initially, she said, her three-year-old son, Kameron, played with dolls, while her daughter, Asha, tinkers away on her broken toys with a screwdriver.

“But then from somewhere, school I suppose, he picked up that boys wear blue and don’t play with dolls,” she said. “My daughter is comfortable not being stereotyped, but somehow my son hasn’t made those same leaps. Every day at work, I’m working toward removing gender barriers, only to see it play out at home. It just made it clear to me that boys need to be a large part of the conversation in achieving gender equality.”

The Plan campaign is taking that message worldwide, hoping to encourage governments to develop enlightened social policy. Many successful advocacy and aid groups are already on side.

Todd Minerson, executive director of White Ribbon Campaign, says responding to poverty issues globally is rooted in challenging gender stereotypes. The group was launched by men working against violence against women after the Montreal massacre of female engineering students in 1989.

“It’s definitely a stretch for some people to get from dealing with poverty to empowering women and dealing with male stereotypes,” Mr. Minerson said. “When you see the famine in the Horn of Africa, for example, the instinctive reactionary response is to get aid and hands on the ground. But most of the research out there tells us that educating men and women about gender equality, it improves their quality of life.”

Margaret Capelazo, senior gender adviser at CARE Canada, works mostly with men in developing countries such as Vietnam, Pakistan and Kenya. Usually men work on cash crops, while women work on food crops, but CARE encourages the men to let their women counterparts also take in agricultural training.

“That way, both women and men get training,” she said. “Everybody eats and everybody has money, and there is generally a lot more satisfaction.”

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Because I am a Girl Report 2011

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