I think the first one is to develop a plan, to commit as a government to analyzing the situation and to developing a plan similar to how the EU embeds, in its economic strategies and in its women's equality strategies, pay equity. Other countries have done this. They have planning. They integrate it into their planning. That would require the federal government to cooperate with provincial jurisdictions as well. So that's the first thing.
The federal sustainable development strategy talks about three kinds of elements that I think you could adapt. One of them is what is called an integrated whole-of-government picture of actions and results. In that strategy it's environmental sustainability, and here it's closing the gender gap. There's also the link between that and your expenditure planning. In other words, you're making some very concrete connections, and that includes—as I'll get to in a moment—effective measurement and reporting as part of that plan. So that's the first aspect of it.
The second aspect of it is incorporating into government decision-making a “closing the gender pay gap” analysis as part of the gender-based analysis you do. That means in fact saying, “Is the government policy contributing to closing the gender pay gap, is it doing nothing at all to the pay gap, or is it widening it?” We need to know that before we engage in government decision-making. That's another aspect of it that you would look at. That includes the budgeting, whether budgetary measures have those kinds of impacts, both in terms of trying to do positive measures.... I would see child care expenditures as something that would help contribute to closing the gender pay gap.
I think the other thing to look at as well is the leadership role that the public sector can play. Generally around the world, the public sector has had an equalizing effect. There is generally a lower gender pay gap within the public sector. It generally has more progressive employment policies than the private sector does. It has a whole equalizing effect through leadership, which I think is important to keep in mind. This is particularly in relation to where you have privatization; it tends to sometimes destroy that equalizing effect, because when women are laid off into the private sector, often they lose a variety of the benefits they had in public sector employment, which has led to their lower pay gap.
The other final one is the issue of pay transparency. This was one of the key things the European Union did in its latest Equal Pay Day, in February. They required that by December 2015, EU states will report on how they are making pay transparency an obligation with respect to employers. It could be done in a number of different ways.
So one of the other ways the federal government could act is in requiring federally regulated public sector employers, and also federal contractors in terms of contract compliance, to be transparent about their pay. President Obama just issued an executive order with respect to that on the Equal Pay Day in the U.S. in April, talking about it with respect to federal contractors in the U.S. over which they had direct power. But it's one thing that could be done here.
Essentially what the EU talks about is that women shouldn't be paid less because they don't know what males with jobs within the workplace are being paid, and that there shouldn't be pay secrecy policies, which often serve to reinforce pay inequities. Either women don't speak up because they don't actually know what the pay policies are in a workplace, or they may come in and actually be paid differently for the same work: the male was paid more before coming in, asks for what he was previously paid, and someone agrees to pay him that or puts him on a higher step. There's a whole series of reasons why pay transparency is now one of the more innovative ways of trying to get at the pay gap.