Pay Equity Committee on April 11th, 2016

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

It sounds like where there isn't legislation, there needs to be legislation. It sounds like the data about how people are paid needs to come out and be transparent. Then it sounds like there needs to be some kind of enforcement activity. I'm interested in hearing your ideas on what you think would be a good model of promoting an enforcement on employers to make sure they're paying equitably.

[Manon Brassard]

I'm not sure I can answer your question on an enforcement mechanism directly. I want to make a point on the question of my LP, my lawyers from earlier. There'll be a lot of debate on the job description itself. Am I an LP-1 or an LP-2? Never mind pay equity; it's just compensation at that point and where I fit on the scale. There's a lot of discussion around those issues to set out the work itself. Then you get into those pay equity issues: if I'm an LP-2 compared to an engineer, is it the same number of points?

The federal government pay scales can be found on the Internet. In terms of transparency, they are there.

[Anthony Giles]

Just on your question about enforcement, I should say that in one of my other jobs I'm the head of the federal mediation and conciliation service, which spends all its time trying to help the parties get to a solution. Within the labour program, our minds generally don't go to enforcement in the first instance, but rather enforcement in the last instance and designing a system to help better understand what the challenges are, to offer tools, and to offer mediation services.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Thank you.

That's it for your time.

We'll move to the next questioner, Mr. Longfield, for five minutes.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you.

It's great to be a guest at this conversation. There are so many great conversations on the Hill, and I really appreciate the details from our witnesses having been a business owner, and managing businesses, and being involved with business for about 30 years.

One thing that's come to mind is that there's possibly a language gap as well as a gender gap that we're talking about. Businesses don't necessarily see this as a corporate social responsibility. Maybe this is directed toward status of women and promoting pay equity within the public service, as well as private business. Normally businesses look at corporate social responsibility as being outside their walls versus inside their walls, whether this is an item that could fall, or has fallen, or whether you've used this as a means to say there's an inequity that has to be addressed. Under the mandates of B corporations, if you're going to be a B corporation, you have to show diversity and equity within your human resources. It is a complicated situation to try to implement.

In general, is this something you've seen discussed in terms of corporate social responsibility, and would that help bring this forward as a more important issue than just trying to balance the books?

[Justine Akman]

I don't know if there are discussions going on about pay equity in particular as part of CSR, corporate social responsibility. There's a lot of work going on with the private sector, with corporations, and with the non-profit sector to focus on equality issues in general, whether that be with women on boards, having more diverse workforces, or working with the science and technology or trade sectors to try to get them to recruit more women and offer more training for women. That includes not just cities, but rural and remote areas. All of these are things could have an impact on not necessarily pay equity, the narrow slice, but the wage gap generally.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

I think that's a possible role for federal employment. They could be promoting this type of an idea within a control group that is well controlled within the federal civil service. Maybe that would get the attention of private business as well.

But on the balancing of the books, when you looked at the delta among the curves you gave us, do we know the budgetary deficit between what we could be paying, what we should be paying, and what we are paying? If we were to implement what was put forward in 2009, if we were to implement that in the next budget cycle, would we know what the impact would be?

[Manon Brassard]

It's a very complicated calculation to make. As you mentioned earlier, depending on how you define the groups, how you define the comparator, and whether or not you choose to go to the lowest male-predominant comparator, you'll have very different answers to that. It's driven by a number of policy choices.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Then the suspicion that it was something that wasn't implemented because of budgetary reasons isn't necessarily a good assumption to make. It's more the complexity of the problem.

[Manon Brassard]

It is a very complex area.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Okay.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

We'll go to the next round. We have Ms. Benson for three minutes.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

I just want to make a couple of comments.

What I'm hearing is that in the 12 years or so since the report from 2004, we have attempted a complaints-based process, mostly to deal with pay equity. I guess from the results and statistics, you could say, if you were going to be a little facetious, that it doesn't work. Generally speaking, it has not had an impact of a substantial nature on pay equity. We've dropped down as a country. Other countries are going ahead. We have provinces that have put legislation in place.

I understand that it's complicated. I don't think anyone thinks it's not complicated. I think the comparison to occupational health and safety is a good one here. We do have a model that has worked in another area, that is not leaving it to corporate responsibility to be safe. It's saying you have to have a safe workplace, and this is how you do it. It reflects the sizes of organizations. It is a good model, and it was the one thing that was recommended in the report.

The one piece for me that's very clear here is that this isn't about doing the right thing. This is about basic human rights for a group, for half the population to be paid for their work of similar value and to not be discriminated against.

I'm probably taking up too much of my time here, but I do have a very simple question. Is the 2004 report part of any of your departments' basis to go forward? Who within the federal government will lead this piece? My fear is that it will bounce around. We'll talk about it being complicated, and we'll talk about how you have to do this and do that.

I'm obviously not talking to the three of you as individuals. I'm being general here. But why wouldn't you start with...?

For me, I guess the only thing that's changed in 12 years is that things haven't gotten much better. This committee is about going back to that report and doing what I don't think is a huge amount of work to move forward. I think we've had an opportunity to do some different things, but I think it has to be legislative. It has to be recognized as a human right. We have a model in occupational health and safety that I think is a good model. I think our daughters and women would now like to see some progress.

I'm not sure if you want to comment on that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Actually, there's no time to comment. We're at three minutes. Sorry about that.

We'll go back now to the third round of questions, which will be a seven-minute round.

We'll start with Mr. Sheehan for seven minutes.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much, and thank you for the presentation. This is a really good discussion, and we're getting great feedback and answers. The great thing about going towards the end is that it's brought forward a few more questions through the discussion.

We're doing some comparables between the various provinces, and some are doing better than others, and we were looking at perhaps taking a look at them. In my mind—it was sort of talked about earlier but we didn't really delve into it—it was doing the comparables between countries. Which countries have recently dealt with pay equity or are dealing with pay equity? Do we have some examples, some particular names of some countries that we wouldn't mind taking a look at and reviewing what they're doing? Do we have an example of some countries that might...?

[Anthony Giles]

I'm not sure about pay equity in the narrow sense, but I think international statistics generally demonstrate that the Scandinavian countries are world leaders in reducing gender inequalities. If I were interested in looking at models to see what they have accomplished and what they did to accomplish that, I would likely start there.

[Justine Akman]

Yes, I would add to that and, again, it's really important to differentiate between pay equity and wage gaps. I'm not sure if your question was just about pay equity.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

It doesn't hurt to look at both the pay equity and sort of what this committee is looking at. It's sometimes good to do comparables around the world and to take a look at some best practices.

[Justine Akman]

Yes, as my colleague pointed out, Finland would certainly be a good place to start on wage gaps. Again, the Nordic countries have all sorts of different responses to wage gaps, including ways of helping women work more flexible hours, better child care regimes than perhaps we have in Canada right now, subsidized elder care, parental benefits, etc.

There are all sorts of measures for the wage gap, but as for pay equity itself, I wouldn't be the best placed to answer.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Great, and duly noted.

Also in the presentation, it mentions that pay equity in the federal private sector in the last 10 years has been declining, but it's still significant. In 2015, for every dollar earned by a male worker, a female worker earned about 86.9%, and from 2005 it's only been about a nickel difference. That's alarming.

Then it talks about the employees, the unions, or employers who believe that pay equity is not achieved in the workplace. It says that they can go to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

When I take a look at some of the other presentations, in particular the one from the Status of Women on pay equity, they talk about how it really seems to be, I'll say, bad for women who have been working for a while, who are already there and have been there for a while, and that's alarming.

My first question would be, okay, just take me through the process so that I can wrap my head around it. What would someone do in going to the Canadian Human Rights Commission? What's the process from start to finish, and how long does that take? How many cases do we have, in particular, dealing with the federal private sector?

I'll leave it there. I'm just wrapping my head around this.

[Anthony Giles]

I can answer partly. The number of cases is low. I'll just give you, for example, that over the last four years the total number of complaints, private sector or otherwise, were only 10. That jumped up and down over the years.

In terms of the process, I think the Canadian Human Rights Commission is in a better position to provide you with that information. But what is on the public record is that one of the factors that led to the establishment of the Bilson committee, the pay equity task force, was the length of time and cost involved in the existing complaints-based model. I believe it was the Canada Post case that took over 30 years to be resolved and cost an enormous amount of money to both parties as well.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Yes, absolutely, lots of lost time for sure.

The issue therein is the.... Again, I look at all the presentations we've seen. For my particular questions, first of all I want to take a look at the Status of Women presentation from you, Justine. You talked about a number of things, including women being under-represented in the trades.

I spent a bit of my life working with the trades. I think the number was around $28—it's on one of these slides—compared to about $20, give or take. If we take a look at the federal private sector and at places such as Air Canada or CN, is this the case as well within the private federal sector, where tradespeople, regardless of their gender, are making different wages? I'm thinking of a heavy-duty mechanic or aircraft maintenance and that sort of thing.

Is that also happening in our federal service and our federal private service as well?

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Unfortunately, there are only two seconds left. I'm sorry.

[Anthony Giles]

I'm sorry. I don't know.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Okay. We'll go to the next seven-minute question with Mr. Albas.