Pay Equity Committee on May 2nd, 2016

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

The regulations could be put in place in a broad way, but then individual companies—particularly ones, for example, like Gap—that make it a priority, or ones that find that there's something out of whack, could form these equal pay audits and do some of things you're talking about to correct their course. Is that right?

[Serena Fong]

Yes.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

I sincerely appreciate that.

I'm just going to touch on the no-negotiation policy. That was done as an executive order to the public service in the United States. Can you briefly touch on that? Perhaps if there's any Canadian context you might say how it might be adapted or at least examined. I think that's an important part.

[Serena Fong]

Don't have negotiations. Just say this is what the salary is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Okay. There will be a chance to follow up from that side.

We will now go to Ms. Benson for seven minutes.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you very much.

Thanks, everyone, for the presentation. It's starting to jell around some pieces, and we certainly heard from different witnesses about some of the things that are jelling around what we could do as a committee to finally move this piece forward.

Beth, one thing you said was quite helpful for me, and we've had various witnesses talk a bit differently about it. It was about the complexity around pay equity in comparison to some of the other things we've been able to address more easily around outright wage discrimination and employment equity. Is that complexity one of the reasons for the need to have a stand-alone organization that has some expertise?

What I hear you say is that part of the reason some of those complaint-based pay equity cases took so long—20 years for one of them—was that doing it piecemeal every time you got together to do one meant everyone was doing it over again for that particular complaint.

Is that what you're saying?

[Prof. Beth Bilson]

Yes, I think that's right.

One of the reasons for setting up administrative bodies and administrative tribunals to work under statutory mandates has to do with their specialized expertise. The pay equity litigation that took place under the Canadian Human Rights Act followed the normal process under that act, which was through the Canadian Human Rights Commission or the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

They had a wide mandate covering all kinds of discrimination. You would have a panel of the Human Rights Tribunal that would sit on one of those cases and then never sit on another one. There was no ability to build expertise or to have people become comfortable with complex ideas, and the implementation is quite complicated.

As I said last time, it's a simple proposition, but putting it into effect does have some complexities. The idea of having a specialized tribunal is what underlies our recommendations.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you.

Ms. Fong, you talked about Gap being the first Fortune 500 company in the United States to publicly disclose and validate that it pays women and men equally. Are they the only one?

[Serena Fong]

No. Since then, other companies have come forth and announced they've run pay equity studies. Salesforce was one that announced they did an audit, and they found they did have a gap. I think they ended up saying they spent two million dollars to three million dollars to close the gap within their company. Others are doing it.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

Do you think the leadership of their peer group...?

It seems to be what you're saying is that part of the role of your organization is to help leaders to come forward and to set some kind of bar that others want to reach.

[Serena Fong]

Right, exactly.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

Good.

Janet, I think the points that you brought up, which I think Serena made as well, are important. It's complex. If you're just tackling one piece, you're only going to see the pay gap narrowed for that particular reason.

I think you were talking about the systemic piece that we need to get at. That's the piece that's critical. It's easy to say, as some people have mentioned, that if you have the same job as someone else and you're not being paid the same, that's wage discrimination, but to actually get at systemic inequities, we need to have mandates and government leadership. It's not just going to happen on its own by virtue of the market, because that's one of the reasons we are where we are. Does that make sense?

[Janet Borowy]

Yes, it does.

There are two pieces, two arguments that we make. Number one is that you absolutely need proactive legislation and clear timelines. Ontario and Quebec had timelines for the creation of the plans, for example. There are models out there that demonstrate it doesn't have to be a 20-year laborious process where you're reinventing the wheel every time you appear in front of a tribunal.

Certainly there are the recommendations of the 2004 task force, which I frankly have to say is one of the most complete analyses of pay equity done internationally. It's a phenomenal piece of work, and I hope that the committee doesn't feel it has to turn around and replicate it, because it is so important.

So one aspect is a proactive law. That's a key element, a legislative element.

I do want to mention the importance of transparency. It was recommended in 2004 and echoed by Ms. Fong. The task force called for the posting of pay equity plans and the registration of those plans with a specialized agency. That's a key part of transparency. Recent legislation in the U.K. and the U.S. calling for the posting of wage information within each private sector employer is equally important. That's one aspect, but we do know at the coalition, after 40 years of work, that a single piece of legislation won't close the gap.

In Ontario in 1985, the green paper on pay equity recognized that there was a 38% wage gap with respect to earnings. Since the introduction of Ontario's Pay Equity Act, we're now roughly at 29% or 30% in the province, so we've seen an 8% reduction. That's important, but we know that there needs to be a comprehensive plan with elements including a national child care program, training, and gender-based analysis in all aspects of the government.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Thank you, Ms. Borowy. That was your time.

Now we will go to Mr. DeCourcey for seven minutes.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Thank you very much again, Madam Chair, and thank you, everyone, for being here this evening.

Ms. Bilson, it's nice to have the opportunity to ask you a few questions, as I didn't have that chance several weeks ago.

Since you came and spoke about your recommendations from the 2004 report and the process that was undertaken to deliver that, we've had a range of testimony from witnesses, some of whom I would characterize as proponents of the framework laid out in your recommendations. They have talked about some of the areas, though not in specifics, where it wasn't quite palatable for government to move forward with implementation. They've talked about ways that the implementation of a proactive pay equity system could be done in stages and could have some flexibility for different-sized organizations, different sectors.

I wonder if you have any reflection on that. If we were to ground a system broadly in your recommendations, where are some areas that might have some flexibility or that could be implemented through a graduated approach?

[Prof. Beth Bilson]

I think that our recommendations actually have quite a lot of capacity for flexibility, partly because one of the characteristics of the system we were proposing involved a lot of participation by employees and employers together to work out the plan that they wanted to put in place. I think that kind of provision—obviously there would need to be a little more meat on it than that—can provide for a lot of flexibility. That is, it can reflect small workplaces or large workplaces, public sector or private sector, a wide range of jobs or a fairly homogeneous workplace. I think all of those things are possible under that kind of legislation, and there is some built-in flexibility there.

I'm not sure what your question is in terms of the implementation and the timing. Obviously, if you're going to establish timelines, which the Ontario and Quebec legislation certainly did, they have to be realistic. You have to understand that it's going to take people some time to work through the job comparisons and agree on the plan that they're going to put forward. On the other hand, time limits can be used to kind of delay implementation, and I certainly think the task force didn't favour that. I think we favoured having realistic timelines, but having some kind of goals in terms of time for implementing the system.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

What stuck with me from some of the testimony is that there are good things here. Can we implement them in bite-sized chunks so they can be digested, and then government can move forward with working on the next pieces? I therefore certainly appreciate your reflection on that issue.

Something else we've heard of is the need—and maybe I'll ask everyone here for comment—for ongoing maintenance of pay equity once it's established.

Ms. Bilson, and perhaps Ms. Borowy and Ms. Fong, can you talk about some of the best ways to ensure maintenance of pay equity once legislation or a system is in place and is being achieved?

[Prof. Beth Bilson]

I think the most obvious one is the reporting requirements. That is, the pay equity plan needs to be reported. That was one of our recommendations. There need to be periodic reports from an employer on the picture under the plan as they've implemented it, and then some kind of monitoring of the results of that to see whether the gap is narrowing or whether it's for some reason staying stagnant or even widening again.

[Serena Fong]

When we talk about maintenance of pay equity, it means you have to continue to run your audits.

To go back to something that Ms. Borowy also talked about, the gap is a reflection of a bigger issue in terms of gaps. For example, if you have a company that says they did a pay audit and they actually don't have a gap, yet you see the women in leadership are very few, the way they can say they closed their gap is by claiming that if they only have 10 employees in a department and one of them is a woman, then they can say they're paying the woman equally to the rest of the men because there's only one of them.

You have to continue to see what other biases are happening. You also have to cut the data in different ways. You also have to look at what's happening, which is why you have to continue to report. It's not a matter that once you set forth and reach pay equity, so to speak, within a company or within a business, you're done. You have to continue to look at it on a macro level and just cut the data differently, and also look at what's happening in terms of representation of women and men in other areas.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Ms. Borowy, maybe I'll ask you to comment. I think you mentioned a proactive system being part of a more complex system around pay equity, so perhaps that speaks to some other mechanism where maintenance is ongoing.

[Janet Borowy]

I think in terms of maintenance, I'd turn to the Ontario act, which states that every employer shall establish and maintain compensation practices that provide for pay equity. That is a proactive obligation on employers that should be monitored or audited on a regular basis. I think you would find in Ontario in unionized workplaces that people are looking at their pay equity plans on a regular basis, every two years.

The act also provides for changed circumstances. With restructuring, for example, in a workplace, the parties then go back and assess whether they should amend the plan or negotiate a brand new plan based on the broader issues that Ms. Fong was talking about. Now, in—

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Thank you very much, Ms. Borowy. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we're already 30 seconds over. We have to go to the next questioner.

Ms. Stubbs, you will have five minutes and 30 seconds.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Okay. Hopefully I will be quick.

I would like some more information on the international context, if you can provide it. Given the international scope of your organization and the experiences of your companies in various countries, I wonder if you could share more on your perspective about those countries that have been successful at advancing gender pay equity, and if you have any views on what the reasons are for those successes. Cover, if you can, the whole gamut of public policy decisions, legislative measures, and also non-legislative tools that may exist in the countries that are the most successful.

Second, perhaps you could comment on what you perceive to be the barriers, or the gaps, or the downward pressures on countries that aren't as successful at advancing gender pay equity.

[Serena Fong]

I read and listened to some of the previous testimony, and I know they mentioned some countries internationally, such as Sweden and Norway. One of the things you find there—again, it's what others have said before—is that their approach to the issue of pay equity has been wide-ranging, not only in terms of the legislative actions they have taken, such as the minimum wage, access to affordable day care, non-gendered parental leave, and those kinds of things, but also in terms of the representation of women on boards and in leadership. All of that has helped.

Then you look at their partnership, as I mentioned, with the private sector.

When you have all of this working together, with the kind of legislation that is being passed, that puts pressure, I think, on the private sector to really step up. They want to be good, to close their gaps, and to be seen as examples. I think that's why you're having those situations internationally. There are good partnerships going on, and you also have the legislative action as well as the actions that the businesses are taking upon themselves.

In countries where the gaps are bigger, you have a lot of cultural issues. In Japan, for example, the Abe administration is doing a lot of work. They have recognized what the business case is for increasing women's representation. They have to do it, because they are losing their labour force, but there are a lot of cultural issues they have to break through in terms of the way they see women and women's roles in society. It takes a long time.

Unfortunately, because this is so complex, it's something we need to act on immediately. It will take time to break down those societal barriers.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Thank you.

Mrs. Bilson, I have a question for you about one of the recommendations in the 2004 report, which was that companies under the federal contractors program should be required to comply with proactive federal pay equity or whatever kind of regime may be put forward federally. I just wondered, then, if in your view pay equity compliance should also be a condition for companies that may be recipients of federal subsidies or grants—if they're not compliant, for instance.