Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Ministers, for being here, we appreciate your time and the work you do.
We've been hearing lots of different witnesses and a lot of the discussion has come from the 2004 report. We've heard unanimously that a pay equity committee within every organization is a key part of the success.
On the legislation part of it, we've heard varying things. Minister Brison, your point about the improvements that have happened in the federal government to close the wage gap without the legislation being there is fair, and that's the same message we heard from the Canadian banks. That said, we see that Quebec has the narrowest gap—they're lowered it to 8%—but that Nova Scotia's legislation produced the biggest improvement in a short period of time. When we start looking at the time frame of how we close the gap quickly, they told us the Quebec legislation took two years from the beginning, when they started crafting it, to the time it was implemented, which is hugely long.
I definitely want to encourage Ms. Ballantyne to continue her efforts on trying to encourage women in STEM, women on boards, women who are under-represented. Those areas will close the gap in a much faster way. There was unanimous agreement that the existing complaint resolution, 15 years for $30 million, is not working for anyone so there definitely needs to be some mechanism that is a faster resolution mode.
But that said, it's still not clear to me whether the legislation is needed or not. When you talk about addressing the gap, you're down to the last 9% in some areas, like in the federal government. StatsCan has said to us, that's where these unknown factors come in and now you're going to need to do some research to figure out what it is. Is it women leaving, or whatever?
Minister Brison, would you support doing research with Statistics Canada to try to analyze that for the federal sector?