My thanks to the committee for inviting me again to talk about my favourite subject in terms of equality.
As you know and as was emphasized by many witnesses you have heard, pay equity is a fundamental right. The question is no longer whether or not it should be implemented and when, but how and what is the most effective way to achieve this objective enshrined in the C100-Equal Remuneration Convention of the International Labour Organization and ratified by Canada about 40 years ago.
I chaired the committee that prepared Quebec's Pay Equity Act. I have also worked extensively on this issue with the International Labour Organization in Geneva. I also gave a lot of training sessions on pay equity in various member countries of the International Labour Organization, including Portugal, Ukraine and Denmark. A host of countries are interested in pay equity and they are all moving toward using a job evaluation system without gender-based discrimination. That’s very important. As noted by the commissioner of the Ontario commission, it is important to have tools that are gender neutral.
Let me mention the document that I have sent to your members (officials) and that explains how to conduct a non-discriminatory evaluation. The document is in French, English and a dozen other languages. This is a very simple document that would really help you become familiar with a non-discriminatory evaluation method, which is the basis of pay equity.
Since the mid-1980s, we have quickly realized that the complaint model, as you heard, is long, expensive and very confrontational. At the end of the process, 10, 15 or 20 years later, one situation of discrimination is settled in a single organization. According to the latest statistics from Quebec’s pay equity commission, which has now merged into a larger commission, in 2015, 84% of employers in Quebec had implemented the Pay Equity Act. Among companies with 100 or more employees, 94% had done so. So a very high percentage of employers have implemented pay equity. If the complaint model were used, it would take 50, 60 or even 100 years to achieve such a result. I think the proactive model is tested and proven.
My presentation will focus on the main features of the Quebec legislation. I will also mention, whenever appropriate, the differences between the legislation and the recommendations of the task force of which I am a member.
An important feature of the Quebec legislation is its universality, meaning that the requirement to achieve pay equity applies to all businesses, all sectors and all employees. But something is missing from the Quebec legislation and all other pieces of legislation, including Ontario's, and that's the fact that they do not extend pay equity to visible minorities, aboriginal people and individuals with disabilities. This was pointed out by several witnesses. I think it is something that concerns you. I will also come back to it.
A second feature of the Quebec legislation is flexibility. I noticed that this is also a concern for the members of the committee. In the Quebec legislation, companies are divided into three categories according to their size, and the requirements for employers are much lighter in small businesses, with 10 to 49 employees, and slightly stricter for those with 50 to 99 employees. The requirements are more structured and demanding for companies with 100 or more employees. So the legislation sort of takes into account the needs and constraints based on the size of companies, which is very important.
Flexibility can be seen when companies are in financial difficulty. In those cases, the pay equity commission can give the companies time to make the payments if they are experiencing difficulties. The idea is not to bankrupt companies because of pay equity.
I would like to provide another example of flexibility, and the market plays an important role in this. In the event of a shortage of qualified individuals for a male-dominated job, where the employer is required to provide a very high salary to attract employees, this higher portion of the salary to attract employees who are rare will not be considered discriminatory compared to female-dominated jobs of the same value.
Another feature is the accuracy of the approach. One of the problems with reactive legislation is the fact that the approach is not stated very clearly, hence very, very lengthy disputes between parties when it goes to a tribunal or the Human Rights Commission. Proactive legislation specifies the thresholds for female-dominated and male-dominated fields. They specify the steps in the pay equity plan, the assessment factors and the salary comparisons.
I would say that the salary comparison that is used the most isn't paired or the average value, but a comparison of jobs by curves. It isn't a matter of having average values, but rather a regression curve. I won't go into the technical clarifications here.
Furthermore, proactive legislation—in Quebec in particular—sets deadlines and a calendar. It's a little too long in Quebec. Employers are given four years to establish their pay equity plan and another four years to pay the adjustments. Our working group recommended that three years be given to draft the plan and three years to pay the adjustments. I have read the Swedish legislation and, there, it's also three years and three years. So it's more limited in time.
One of the issues that came up during the meetings with other experts was the fact that perhaps the phase-in period should be spread out, like what Ontario does. In other words, the first two years would be for large companies, the next two or the next year for smaller companies, and so on. However, I think that if companies are given three years to establish a pay equity plan, that will solve the problem of phasing in in stages because small companies could wait for the third year to do their work. The large companies could start in the first year. I am in favour of standardizing the implementation when it comes to the start of programs.
Another characteristic of the Quebec legislation that is extremely important and that distinguishes it from the Ontario legislation, is the structured and joint participation of representatives of salaried employees and representatives of the employer. All companies with 100 or more employees are required to have a pay equity committee, but smaller companies are not. Fifty percent of the representatives of salaried workers must be women. Why? Because the work of women in female-dominated jobs is often invisible. Everything related to responsibility for other people, everything involved in great attention in the job, fine manual dexterity and everything related to the communication field, all of these things that are found in female-dominated jobs are often invisible. By having representatives of salaried workers—in particular women—participate, we try to find solutions to this issue of invisibility. What is invisible is not evaluated and what is not evaluated is not remunerated. Visibility is an extremely important issue.
The other advantages of participation are that it reduces the cost to the government. In fact, the work is done by a pay equity committee instead of being done by officials from the government or the Commission de l'équité salariale, who will already have a lot to do. It's done within the company and is adapted to it. It's flexible and takes into account the specificities of the company.
This also speeds up the process. When it's done within the company, it's much quicker than if the company had to constantly turn to the commission to find out what to do at one stage or another. The participation is structured, and it is very important.
Another characteristic is transparency. The employer must give the required information to the members of a pay equity committee so that they can do their job. Otherwise—