Status of Women committee  First off, what you need to understand is that in joint health and safety, which you raised as a reference, those are experts. That is stuff that's done away from the bargaining table. Sometimes some of those things come to the bargaining table, but it's after the experts have dealt with it.

Status of Women committee  The employer is responsible for providing a safe and healthy workplace.

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  When you're dealing with pay equity as the issue, you're going to be bringing in people who are experts in that kind of bargaining, who are focused on it, and who are going to be dealing with getting rid of the gender-based discriminations that exist in many classifications. I've hung around pay equity stuff for a long time, and it took me a while to figure out the effort piece.

Status of Women committee  No.

Status of Women committee  I just want to add something. I am completely...not “confused”, but to my mind, there's just no logical reason for this. We had a pay equity commission that spent two to three years hearing hundreds of presentations, with all sorts of other submissions and all of that sort of stuff.

Status of Women committee  The pay equity task force report? Yes. Again, as Marie-Thérèse has said, it will take the best of the Ontario and Quebec models and improve on them from the experiences we've had there. But you can't in any way say that this will deal with equal pay for work of equal value or help the process along.

Status of Women committee  I want to go back to this idea of, you know.... In some respects, we're lucky that this doesn't refer to pay equity, because it's not. We should be really clear that it is not. It's probably more about inequitable. On the question of individual women having the resources to be able to fight a case all the way through against their employer....

Status of Women committee  The fact is that this is an attack on women's economic equality. People say that there's not discrimination anymore. Well, women see the discrimination in their paycheques every time they take them home. They can see that discrimination, and it's for them and their families.

Status of Women committee  The two models we have referenced in our presentation and in the past are Quebec and Ontario. I know our sisters in those provinces would say the legislation still isn't there yet, but it's a long way from what women had before and it's a really long way from this piece of legislation.

Status of Women committee  For Marie-Thérèse, Gisèle, and I, the question of pay equity is dealt with away from the normal bargaining table. Certainly it's in negotiations, but it's not part of the normal bargaining. The union has access to all of the information about the pay scales, pay inequities, and all that sort of stuff.

Status of Women committee  Another thing is that you cannot say this is proactive legislation, because it isn't initiated that way. It has to be initiated by individuals. Tell me one woman, even one woman in this room, who would go through 25 years of trying to fight for that kind of increase. They don't have the resources, the time--all of those sorts of things.

Status of Women committee  I'll figure out a way to come back to it.

Status of Women committee  No, at that point our officer responsible for our women's department would have been Marie Clarke Walker, who's the other executive vice-president, so she would have appeared. Sue Genge from our women's department certainly did, and Penni Richmond.

Status of Women committee  Yes. I was there, at that meeting.