Yes. I actually did a research project looking at what would happen economically if all of those laws were repealed. The result was that it would immediately increase women's average incomes by over $3,000 per year simply by virtue of the way it would leave the individual tax transfer provisions to operate on each individual and not treat women as being bundled into a unit consisting of a usually higher male wage earner and herself. It would be a larger bump up in terms of after-tax incomes for women with the lowest incomes. This definitely would be a poverty reduction move as well. I'm convinced that every one of these joint and unpaid work subsidies has an invidious effect. No matter how humanitarian the impulse behind them is, they are actually undercutting women's interests.
We have a new sector to worry about that wasn't quite on the radar to the same extent back in the early 2000s, and that is the vast growth of people engaged in paid caregiving work. They are the new challenge from a pay equity perspective. When I was doing a detailed analysis of Alberta, there were so few men involved in caregiving that it was literally impossible to identify any male comparisons within that profession.
That's where you get into trying to do proxy comparisons, trying to find some other form of occupation that can be a reasonable comparison. If employers are allowed to choose something like 16-year-old boys who mow lawns for $12 an hour as the comparator group, then we will not be able to solve the problem of women whose careers now are involved in caregiving for pay under usually very precarious employment conditions, which themselves push the limits of existing pay equity laws to be brought into the framework, because they're often treated as being independent contractors or self-employed and not even subject to employment laws like pay equity laws.