I don't think there was a commitment, because it was just going on to study more methodologies, more consultations. When we talk about this dragging on indefinitely, we have an administration that was in power for 13 years during the time when, for instance, the Bell Canada court case was going on for the women, and also no commitment to study pay equity.
Yet our government has said that we respect the principle of pay equity, we know that women are an essential part of the economy, and that when women prosper, everybody prospers. I know that in my own family when I prospered with the same pay as my male cohorts, my family prospered. I was able to go to school.
We took action last year to modernize pay equity in the public sector. We brought in a system that was more timely, that was proactive and that was to ensure equitable compensation. We did this because we knew that a better approach had to be taken to build on the strides that women had made over the decades.
If you look at the 2006 statistics, you'll see that Canada has one of the highest labour participation rates of females in the workforce amongst all the OECD countries. In 1983, we know that fewer than 5% of women were in senior management, but today we have more than 41% of women who are in senior and executive roles in our public service. I commend those women for doing that. We're seeing more and more women achieving top jobs. Not long ago, we had a presentation of women in non-traditional roles, and we're seeing women going into medical schools, with more than 50% of the applicants and the registrants in medical schools now women.
My question, first of all--and this is just to educate me--is this: does a female deputy minister in the public sector, with equitable education and experience, make the same as a male counterpart?