Thank you very much.
Thanks to all of you for coming here this morning and making some very compelling presentations.
My first question is for Ms. Howard.
I was the chair of the pay equity committee, which went into great depth. Our final recommendation was that we enact proactive pay equity legislation, recognizing pay equity as a human right that can't be bargained away, and part of that would involve repealing PSECA.
When the Public Service Alliance testified before our committee, one of the things we heard—and this is one of the reasons we wanted to make sure we had the right amount of time to do this—was that it is a very technical area. At the moment in the public service there are areas in which the job classification system has not been updated since before the personal computer. Considering the amount of time it will take to develop those processes, this time we have to get it right. Pretty much every witness roundly said that the PSECA legislation was not the right way to go, and that this time we needed to make sure it was correct.
I'm just wondering about your testimony on hurrying the pay equity legislation. I've talked to a number of public servants. I represent an Ottawa riding, so I have a lot of public servants in my riding, and they have said this isn't something that can be rushed. It has to be right this time. Otherwise we may lose another decade trying to reverse it.
Do you have any comment on that?