Madam Chair, thank you very much.
The Equal Pay Coalition, by way of background, is an organization of over 30 women's groups, trade unions, community groups, and business organizations, first formed in 1976.
The objective is to secure action through laws, collective bargaining, policies, and programs to eradicate the gender pay gap and of course eradicate those factors creating and reproducing gender pay discrimination. Some 40 years later, the coalition continues to pursue its vision.
There's an approximately 30% gender pay gap that exists in Canada's labour market today, and that's a statistic based on earnings. Our objective is to see that this disappears to 0%.
Frankly, the gender pay gap is an urgent human rights crisis. There's an impact on our mothers and their pensions, on our daughters in the impact on their earnings over their lifetimes, and on our granddaughters who are about to enter into the labour market and face a significant human rights crisis. Frankly, for our families, our communities, and Canadian society at large, the losses brought by the gender pay gap are staggering.
The Equal Pay Coalition very much supports the committee's work in a forward-looking and progressive approach to securing pay equity in the federal jurisdiction. We have provided you with detailed submissions. We won't repeat those, obviously, and we encourage you to review them when they become available to you.
There are three points we wanted to make this evening, but to start our comments, we want to say that it's widely recognized that the gender pay gap arises from systemic discrimination against women. What has been lacking is a comprehensive government action plan, which would include proactive legislation and policies and programs to explicitly and directly close the pay gap. Pay equity is, as you've heard from many deputants, an internationally recognized fundamental human rights legal standard that guarantees men and women receive equal pay for work of equal value.
This is for three reasons: first, women are segregated from men into different work in different workplaces. Second, the gender segregation of the labour market is accompanied by wage inequality: female domination of a job and low pay are directly linked. Third, despite the attempts to explain away this gap by looking at the personal characteristics of women or the hours and the nature of their work, what fundamentally is taking place is an undervaluation of women's work, their skills, their efforts, their responsibilities, and their working conditions. It's pay equity in the form proactive legislation that steps in to help cure that undervaluation.
The coalition calls upon this committee and the federal government to develop a comprehensive action plan to accomplish a goal of 0% gender pay equity gap within 10 years. In order to do that, we argue there are three steps that need to be taken.
First and foremost, the starting point for the foundation of a comprehensive action plan is to immediately act upon the 2004 pay equity task force recommendations and introduce proactive pay equity legislation.
Those recommendations included legislation to provide a comprehensive way to cover as many federally regulated employers and contractors and as many types of employment relationships as possible. The legislation needs to apply to female-dominated workplaces and enable proxy comparison methods.
It needs to include mechanisms to maintain pay equity of all of the plans that would have been negotiated to achieve this. It needs to include a special oversight agency to administer and to interpret new plans and to receive copies of pay equity plans to ensure the transparency that Ms. Fong just testified to.
The task force itself recommended innovative processes to develop access to pay equity complaints considering multiple grounds of discrimination because of the deeper types of structural inequity that exist for the equality-seeking groups. We support all of that.
Our second major point, frankly, is that this committee should recommend the quick and immediate repeal of the Orwellian-titled Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act. It was enacted but not proclaimed by the prior Conservative government. From the coalition's vantage point, this legislation is regressive. It does not guarantee a fundamental right of equal pay for work of equal value. It introduced market forces into the calculation of the value of work, which are the same forces that created and reproduced the gender pay gap to begin with. Discrimination embedded in market mechanisms helps explain the persistent gender wage gap.
Our third argument is that in order to effectively reduce the gender pay gap, the government needs to introduce and develop a comprehensive action plan. That requires an uprooting, if you will, of systemic discrimination through a fully multi-dimensional action plan.
Included in that, as you will see in our brief to you, is a national child care program, improvement to the federal minimum wage, and improvement in and access to a robust form of collective bargaining for women in various forms of employment relationships. In order for this to be done, the government must actually apply a robust gender-based analysis to all forms of work and all forms of programs and policies that exist at the federal level.
We appreciate that getting from nearly 30% to 0% will take a tremendous effort, but it's time to put women, in all their diversity, at the head of the line in terms of economic and social priorities; otherwise, Canada leaves women languishing in lower-paid inferior jobs or without jobs because of their care responsibilities or the barriers they face to gaining decent work.
We look forward to bringing an end to systemic pay discrimination in collaboration with you and with decision-makers, policy-makers, community organizations, businesses, trade unions, and women's groups. Now is the time the federal government can take bold and innovative action to close the gender gap.
Thank you very much. We look forward to your questions.