Status of Women Committee on Dec. 8th, 2020

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you very much, witnesses. This is indeed a very important issue.

Following what my colleague said, the pay equity commissioner has only been in office for nine months. That means that before that, nothing on the government side has been done to make things happen.

How about those who are challenged? For example, as part of your role, you are responsible for assisting persons to understand their rights and obligations under the PEA. My concern is about those who are very vulnerable and who may not have the ability to understand. How about those of different ethnicities, people with disabilities and people who do not work full-time because of unpaid family care responsibilities? How would your office be able to help and educate these people, or is the job of the government to make sure that those employees will be educated?

[Yves Giroux]

Thank you for the question.

Madam Chair, the responsibility of my office is to provide non-partisan, unbiased information to parliamentarians such as yourselves. The role of educating Canadians about government programs and employer obligations is not really under my mandate as per legislation. I believe this responsibility would be that of the government as well as employers to educate and inform their own employees as to their obligations under the pay equity legislation. The government, also being an employer, as one member of the committee pointed out, has the double obligation of informing its own employees about their responsibilities and their rights under the pay equity legislation.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Thank you.

My next question looks at the fact that many employees will be affected because of their pensions. I'm also looking at seniors who will probably be impacted by the lack of action by the government, because it's been five years. If you accumulate it over the years, it will mean a lot to them.

Can any one of you comment on that, please?

[Yves Giroux]

Madam Chair, the impact on seniors will mostly be on future seniors—those who are not yet retired.

As Madam Wong pointed out, however, all of the current seniors who have not benefited from the Pay Equity Act will suffer from not having had higher remuneration throughout their careers and therefore now having a lower pension in retirement than they would have had if the legislation had been in place, for example, since 1996, had it been implemented at the same time as in provinces such as Quebec.

Future seniors, then, will benefit from increased remuneration or pay, but current seniors don't benefit from legislation that is implemented only in 2020-21. In that sense, then, yes.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

How about part-time workers? Obviously, benefits for part-time workers will be much less. Women, for various reasons, may not be working full time because of family caregiving responsibilities.

How would you evaluate that? What would the impact be on those people?

[Yves Giroux]

Madam Chair, I'll ask Salma or Rob whether they can speak very briefly about the impact upon part-time workers.

[Robert Behrend]

Madam Chair, in pay equity, the evaluation was made based on an analysis of hourly earnings, so it would have captured all full-time and part-time workers. An assessment by certain groups was not done in this analysis to disaggregate the full amount.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

Now, Ms. Hutchings, take us home. You have the last five minutes of questions.

[Gudie Hutchings, Liberal, Long Range Mountains, NL]

I'm going to give my time to Mr. Serré.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I will share my speaking time with Ms. Sidhu.

I'd like to thank you, Mr. Giroux, for the work being done by you and your team.

You mentioned that the government was not being transparent with some of the numbers, but the cost estimates and the regulations were published in Part I of the Canada Gazette on November 14.

So, can you explain why you believe the government was not transparent about the costs and the regulations?

[Yves Giroux]

Madam Chair, when I speak about a lack of transparency, what I'm referring to is mainly information supplied to my office. I'm not questioning the fact that the government was transparent in terms of publishing the legislative measure and the regulation. Publishing regulations and summaries of regulatory impact studies is a legislative requirement.

My criticisms were mainly about the fact that the government did not provide us with the information we needed to estimate the costs of public service compensation. It used legal provisions that allowed it not to disclose information stemming from Cabinet deliberations, which meant that my office did not have access to disaggregated and sufficiently detailed data on the percentage of men and women in certain groups of public servants, or about their pay.

We did not have access to these data because the government said they were part of cabinet deliberations. That's why I made my comment about the lack of transparency. It's about the disclosure of information my office needs to estimate the costs associated with this act, and not the publication of regulations.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Okay, so we were transparent about the publication of the documents and so on. Thank you for having clarified your comment.

You also mentioned costs. I find it interesting that our Conservative colleagues here don't talk about the costs, particularly with respect to COVID-19. Canada is one of the best among the G-7 countries in terms of what it did on behalf of individuals and companies. There appears to be confusion among the Conservatives. They say that we spent too much money in response to COVID-19 and that we don't have the money to spend on pay equity.

Were talking about $629 million and $2 billion. It's always important to look at the costs, but pay equity is important. We need to move forward whatever the costs may be, do we not?

[Yves Giroux]

Madam Chair, I don't think this question is intended for me, but rather as a comment by Mr. Serré. I would simply add that federal government costs are also beneficial to others, including those who would receive the additional pay. My mandate is to estimate the costs and the financial impacts of certain measures. That's what we did in the report.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Sidhu, As we are sharing our speaking time, I would like to point out that there is a minute and 20 seconds remaining.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Marc, thank you for sharing the time.

Thank you to all of the witnesses for being here to speak with us about the Pay Equity Act, Canada's first proactive pay system. I was proud to vote for this alongside the members of the Liberal caucus, despite the nay vote by the Conservative Party for the budget implementation act.

Approximately 1.3 million employees are covered by the Pay Equity Act, about 390,000 in the public sector and 900,000 federally regulated employees in the private sector.

What plans, if any, does the PBO have to do a cost estimate of the implementation of the pay-equity regime in the private sector? What are the challenges in conducting such a cost estimate?

[Yves Giroux]

Madam Chair, I saw you wave a yellow card, so I know time is running out.

The challenge in estimating the costs or the benefits for private sector employees is the collection of information from hundreds, if not thousands, of different employers that are in the federally regulated system. That would be a big challenge.

Do we have plans to estimate the costs or the benefits for employees? We do not yet, but we try to be very responsive to the needs of parliamentarians, so should a committee such as yours request that we do such a study, we would certainly consider estimating the costs or benefits for employees in the federally regulated private sector.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's excellent.

That's our time for today. I really thank our Parliamentary Budget Officer and his colleagues from his office for answering so well.

To our committee, I'm looking forward to seeing you on Thursday.

With that, the meeting is adjourned.