Thank you very much to the committee for the opportunity to present today on an issue that is extremely important to my members.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada represents 57,000 professionals across Canada's public sector, over 40% of whom are women, and the vast majority of whom work in the federal public service.
The right of women to equal pay for work of equal value with men has been reinforced by Canada's ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and other international human rights instruments as well as by the Canadian Human Rights Act currently.
For nearly a decade, however, there's been a void in pay equity in the federal public service amongst its relatively higher percentage of unionized and increasingly female workforce. In fact, my very presence here today as president of a union of professionals in the federal public sector evidences this drastic increase in women in these professional categories. This translates for us into an urgent need for pay equity legislation that will provide true, proactive, and timely means to implement pay equity and operate in a manner consistent with, amongst other things, existing human rights obligations, lessons learned from past experience, and pay equity jurisprudence.
I refer back again to the task force report of 2004 and facilitation of effective union participation. The institute maintains that the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act, PSECA, violates the fundamental equality right of women in the federal public sector to be free from wage discrimination in the payment of their work and it perpetuates ongoing sex-based wage discrimination in the federal public sector.
This act fundamentally erodes the substantive right of public sector women to be free from sex-based wage discrimination, denies such women the ability to effectively implement and enforce even these eroded substantive rights, and imposes remedial restrictions that deny such women the right to have sex-based wage discrimination fully eradicated and prevented. In fact, PSECA is so fundamentally flawed, it cannot constitutionally be saved by any enacted regulations. Put simply, pay equity is a right, not an interest.
Individual complaints are not the best way to achieve pay equity within federal jurisdictions. Since the problem is found in the pay system, it makes sense that the parties to the collective agreement review the practices used to establish and implement pay. These parties must be vested with the responsibility to establish pay equity through a separate process. The institute cautions against measures that would tie the settlements of pay equity to collective bargaining timelines and compensation envelopes as included in PSECA. This would contribute to either delays in the setting of terms and conditions of employment through collective bargaining, inadequate attention being paid to the equitable compensation process, or more likely both. Putting pay equity in a separate process from collective bargaining allows both processes to move forward on a timely basis and to not compromise each other.
Any proactive legislation has to include and recognize clear roles, rights, and the responsibility of unions. Unions must be a party to agreements that establish pay equity. In the event that the parties are unable to reach pay equity settlements, either party should have the right to refer the dispute to an independent tribunal with pay equity expertise as well as a mechanism to help the parties resolve their disputes informally.
In conjunction with the Public Service Labour Relations Act and the Financial Administration Act, the PSECA restricts unions and employees from challenging key provisions that directly set the wage rate of employees, primarily the classification system. The federal job classification system will be the biggest challenge to achieving pay equity, keeping in mind that, for my substantive group, the informatics workers in government, that classification standard was established before there were personal computers. So you can understand where the barriers in that system may be.
The multiple plans for multiple occupation groups that still exist are believed to encompass systematic discrimination and do not allow for easy comparison of the value of female work to male work. Past experience from the joint union management initiative, the universal job evaluation plan, and the universal classification standard as well as—I have mentioned—the 2004 federal pay equity review task force report have provided valuable lessons about the implementation of pay equity. These lessons should be considered in any future undertaking.
In closing, I would like to state that it is the institute's view that a proactive federal pay equity regime is a critical, albeit overdue, step in Canada's progress towards a fair and functional labour sector. The PSECA violates the charter and constitutes an unwarranted assault on public service unions. It should be repealed and replaced with new legislation.
The institute is ready to work jointly with the employer in ensuring that the work done by women and men is valued fairly with a view to ending pay discrimination and bringing Canada in line with existing national and international human rights commitments.
Thank you.