I'll be speaking. Thank you.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada appreciates this opportunity to share our comments and recommendations in regard to Bill C-471, the Pay Equity Task Force Recommendations Act.
We have provided you with our brief and supporting documentation in French, but I have not had time to prepare speaking notes in French. I apologize for that. So I will give my presentation in English. I will be pleased, of course, to respond to questions in French.
PSAC represents 185,00 members from coast to coast to coast. The majority of our members are women. After years of tribunal hearings and court cases in the pursuit of pay equity, it's no surprise that we and our members were outraged when the Conservative government stripped public sector workers of their right to pay equity by including the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act in the Budget Implementation Act and forcing it through Parliament in just a few weeks.
PSECA is fundamentally flawed and cannot be improved by amendment. It must be abrogated, as provided in BillC-471.
In May 2009, the PSAC came to this committee and outlined in detail our concerns with PSECA, so I'll review them in a very summary way today.
The Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act will, in a nutshell, do four things: make it more difficult to claim pay equity; transform pay equity from a human rights to an equitable compensation matter that must be addressed at the bargaining table; completely remove pay equity from the human rights framework and prohibit federal public sector workers from filing pay equity complaints under the Canadian Human Rights Act; and prohibit unions from representing their own members by fining them for assisting their members in filing pay equity complaints with the Public Service Labour Relations Board.
Our more detailed analysis of the PSECA is in the document entitled “The End of Pay Equity for Women in the Federal Public Service” that is appended to our brief.
The proposed regulatory framework that is being examined by the federal government, and by Treasury Board in particular, would make things even worse. The proposed regulations would impose a higher burden of proof to demonstrate the existence of a so-called “pay equity matter” under PSECA. The regulations would trivialize several female-predominant job classes and would propose the use of wrong comparators for the purpose of comparing women's work of equal value.
This PSECA law is so flawed that PSAC has challenged its constitutional validity in courts. The case is now proceeding. We have also filed a communication with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which is appended to our brief. You can consult that.
The PSECA does not solve any of the many problems identified with the ongoing complaints-based system under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and other federally regulated workplaces are still having to deal with this ineffective system. For example, the PSAC has an outstanding pay equity complaint against Canada Post that we filed in 1983 and it is still before the courts.
It's precisely because of the failure of the complaints-based model and the ineffectiveness and discriminatory impact of the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act that PSAC fully supports Bill C-471 and calls for the immediate abrogation of this ill-advised and ill-conceived piece of legislation.
In addition to eliminating the PSECA, there's a need for real proactive pay equity legislation. In its groundbreaking report entitled “Pay Equity: A Fundamental Human Right”, the task force concluded that the existing complaints-based legislation under the Canadian Human Rights Act needs to be replaced by a proactive pay equity law.
Last week, Treasury Board spokesperson Hélène Laurendeau came to this committee and told you that PSECA is proactive and that it incorporates several key recommendations from the pay equity task force. She even suggested that the PSECA builds on proactive models such as the Quebec Pay Equity Act.
In fact, PSECA takes an approach that is in direct opposition to the task force recommendations. For example, PSECA transforms pay equity into a labour relations issue subject to bargaining. The pay equity task force was very clear in its recommendation that the process for achieving pay equity be separated from the process for negotiating collective agreements. The task force extensively studied, consulted, and discussed the issue, and concluded that pay equity is a human rights issue, not a labour relations matter. Pay equity is a mechanism for achieving women's right to equality in the workplace, not an issue to be used as a bargaining chip.
The task force calls for the adoption of a proactive pay equity law that places positive obligations on the employers to review compensation systems—