Thanks very much.
I was anticipating five minutes so I'll be brief. Perhaps there will be more time for questions.
Thank you for asking me to appear today. I appreciate the invitation to speak on Bill C-471.
There has been a lot of discussion about how you measure the wage gap between men and women in Canada, but I think by any measure we can say that pay inequity exists in Canada today. There is no substantial research showing anything other than that, either by the government's own measure or by the measures of organizations such as the OECD. Whether you compare hourly wages or annual earnings, all the data demonstrates that when men and women go to work in Canada, they come home with different paycheques.
When a person shows up for work on time, performs their duties, and meets their obligations to their employers, we expect that they will be paid for their work, yet for nearly two hours out of every full day of work, women are not being paid. More than that, women are not being paid because they are women. This is the heart of the human rights claim: that it is discriminatory, that the wage gap is based on discrimination against women because they are women.
That kind of discrimination is precisely what our own charter protects Canadian citizens against. That is what the Government of Canada is obliged to protect its citizens against, under both its own charter and a number of international norms and conventions, including: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which requires the government to take proactive measures to ensure that such inequity does not continue; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which protects the economic rights of men and women equally; the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which takes as one of its critical areas of concern the economy and women's access and full participation in the economy; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It's worth noting that most of the monitoring bodies internationally that examine Canada's compliance have cited Canada for the continuing gap and failure to redress that gap in pay equity. For example, Canada accepted recommendation 16 under the first Universal Periodic Review to redress the wage gap through, among other things—and these are the words of the government—“pay equity legislation”.
These obligations to the human rights of Canadians cannot be subject to collective bargaining. Subjecting human rights to collective bargaining is analogous to suggesting that when someone breaks their leg they should sit back and wait for a few months while their employer and the government decide who's going to pay, how much, if anything, and when, so that they can maybe access health care.
Repealing the PSEC act and implementing the recommendations of the Pay Equity Task Force in a timely manner—in short, enacting Bill C-471—will ensure that Canada is meeting its obligations to uphold the human rights of everyone who lives and works here in Canada. This is what the government has obligated itself to do under the charter and under the international human rights instruments I've mentioned. This is what I believe they should do.
Thank you very much.