Thank you very much for inviting me.
I am also, in my capacity, a human rights expert. I want to focus in my short time on my presentation, which I think will be translated, as it is currently just in English.
Pay equity is an international standard that is actually one of the oldest labour and human rights standards in the world. Increasingly these standards, which Canada has ratified, require proactive implementation by employers, and they require governments to take actions to ensure that this human right is protected. My research report for the task force went through how these domestic and international obligations require that kind of proactive protection.
The task force's recommendations, which this bill is asking to be implemented, in fact said that the Canadian Human Rights Act provisions—which at that point covered both the public and private sectors—needed to be amended to reflect that kind of proactive approach and to ensure there was an expansion of coverage to ensure that all kinds of different employees were covered, particularly because of the nature of women's precarious work.
So the flow of the task force recommendations was completely consistent with a whole number of different reports internationally dealing both with the important role that the pay gap played internationally in eroding economic development and women's equality and with the importance of governments taking action.
What we have here, in contrast, is that instead of action being taken to implement the report—which was based on very extensive consultations—we now have a situation where the private sector federally is still covered by an ineffective CHRA process, and we have the federal public service actually in somewhat of a limbo at the moment, because the PSECA, the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act, is not yet in effect, but the rights of public servants under the Canadian Human Rights Act have been taken away.
That is the situation we currently face.
To give you an idea of some of the contrasts between the recommendation of the task force and the requirements under PSECA, the recommendations of the task force acknowledged that pay equity was a fundamental human right and that because of that you then have to ensure that it can be implemented and ensure an accessible process. The PSECA provisions in fact,say the opposite. They don't ensure that it's a fundamental human right, and in fact they remove that underpinning of the human rights notion from the Human Rights Act and place pay equity essentially, first of all, in a budget-restraint bill—which makes it clear that its main direction is in fact reducing budgets—and secondly, put it in a labour relations statute, where it's left to collective bargaining. That was completely inconsistent both with what the recommendation of the task force was, which is that it should not be left to collective bargaining, and also inconsistent with international standards that require access to a human rights mechanism.
Secondly, the task force, as I say, talked about expanding the notions of coverage, yet PSECA in fact erodes substantive pay equity entitlements. It actually reduces the pool of employees who would have access to the human rights law by actually redefining what women's work is, what kinds of establishments would be covered, and also and most importantly, by introducing the concept of the market and saying that market considerations would now be considered in how we value women's work, when in fact pay equity laws were there to address the market practices that had resulted in the systemic discrimination. So those are the substantive pay equity entitlements.
The second part of it was that the task force recommendations were attempting to set up a more effective process of access, to make it more accessible, to have a specialized commission and specialized enforcement machinery. Instead, we're now put off into this collective bargaining machinery.
The third part of it is that the pay equity task force talked about trying to ensure effective remedial protections. The PSECA statute in fact limits remedial protections by limiting retroactivity that can be paid by putting it into the collective bargaining scheme.
In summary, we would say that in terms of moving forward, the Pay Equity Task Force Recommendations Act is consistent with Canada's international obligations and with its domestic obligations.
Thank you.