Thank you, Chair.
I want to preface my comments on this particular amendment by saying, on behalf of the committee, a tremendous thank you to our labour partners and particularly to the pay equity coalition, which has been pushing hard on this really since 2004. They testified before committee and provided significant detailed amendments. The NDP is not going to move anything that has not gone through that filter. We've done our best to try to take their advice to committee and turn it into our amendments.
Our NDP-14 has captured two significant errors that were identified by the coalition.
The first is the purpose clause of the pay equity act. They said very clearly that the current purpose clause is not acceptable as a human rights and as a pay equity statute. That is particularly because clause 2 contains the qualifying phrase “while taking into account the diverse needs of employers”. The first part of our amendment deletes that.
The witnesses said very clearly there's no reference to the diverse needs of employers in the Canadian Human Rights Act, and the current draft of the purpose clause is unforeseen in Canadian human rights legislation. It does not recognize Canada's commitments to human rights and its international obligations. It's a fundamental human right for all genders to be paid equally for work of equal value. For it to be screened through the needs of employers is unprecedented, and it significantly limits fundamental human rights to have such a qualification.
The witnesses said to the committee that anyone who felt comforted.... If the intention of the language of that qualification was to acknowledge that there are diverse types of employers with different realities and structures in the federal jurisdiction, the witnesses said that objective is accomplished in the operational sections of the act. There are different provisions for different sizes and different types of employers, processes for unionized and non-unionized workplaces, and other types of flexibility built into the regulation. The strong advice from the witnesses was to do part (a) of this amendment and remove that qualification.
The second piece, as captured in part (b) of our amendment, is to include in the purpose clause the requirement for pay equity to be clearly and directly spelled out in the body of the act, to ensure that the obligations and responsibilities are known to the parties. They said this was consistent with the recommendations of the 2004 task force, recommendation 8.2, which set out that the new federal legislation “provide that the employer is responsible for ensuring that pay equity implementation and maintenance are free of gender discrimination.” Ontario's Pay Equity Act sets out those same obligations.
I'm hoping the committee will take the advice of all of the labour parties that testified to committee, and most particularly the advice of the two human rights lawyers who appeared before you.
Thank you, Chair.