Yes, absolutely, I'd be happy to speak to the PSECA act, which was part of the 2009 budget.
I was here earlier this week speaking to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women about the importance of the legislation, currently before the House, to repeal the PSECA act. I'm here before the finance committee, so I am doing my best to make clear economic arguments, which I think are valid.
But underpinning that or at the heart of it is the notion that we need to do the right thing, which is what the human rights framework allows us to do. The right thing to do is to pay everyone for their work. We live in a country where women right now work for free one day out of every week, because of pay inequity. Women get paid, by any measure, including the most conservative estimate, something like 80% on the dollar. Other estimates bring that down to 73%; if you're a racialized woman, or a minority woman, or an aboriginal woman, it goes down considerably.
So essentially we have people in Canada who are going to work every day, who are working hard and trying to make the basic needs of their families, and they're not being paid for that work.
To take that problem out of the realm of human rights and say this is something that is subject to market competition is to fail to recognize the right of people to get paid for their work, which seems to be a pretty fundamental claim.
Now, in terms of the economic impact of that, I used my case as an example earlier, but I want to say that I'm in a very lucky position compared with the majority of women in Canada.
This is why it's so important to think about how we are enabling women to achieve economic well-being, because when you deliver assistance through tax policy, for example, there's a huge sector of the female population of Canada who can't access that, because they don't make enough money to pay taxes. And when you try to institute reforms under EI—which you're having your own problems with, including Mayor Lemoyne—