Madam Speaker, I too want an opportunity to elaborate on some features of the legislation before us. I say to the minister that I am proud the government has tabled such progressive amendments that I believe will strengthen the Employment Equity Act.
The changes proposed will assure fair and equal treatment for millions of disadvantaged Canadians. These amendments offer the hope of better times for women, for persons with disabilities, for aboriginal peoples and for members of visible minorities.
Since the adoption of the Employment Equity Act there has been significant progress in making the workplace more inclusive of all Canadians. It has been proven that employment equity can promote fairness and equal opportunity in the world of work. The present legislation was a good beginning but has not kept pace with the times, and hence the need for the amendments now before us.
More and more Canadians are members of designated groups, yet the sad fact is that despite the increase in their numbers their opportunities have actually decreased. For example, the latest annual report on employment equity indicates that in 1993 the number of employees covered under the Employment Equity Act actually dropped by 4.27 per cent or by 26,000 jobs across the country.
According to the statistics for 1994, 74 of the 348 companies covered under the Employment Equity Act 74 or 20 per cent had no aboriginal employees at all. There were 65 of those companies with no provision for persons with disabilities on the payroll and 28 of those companies had no visible minority members working for them. There were still four employers with no women on their staffs. This is in a country where 52 per cent of the people are women.
Can we fathom any company of any significant size not even bothering to address that question? Were I malicious-and you would know, Madam Speaker, that I could never be malicious-I would wonder aloud whether such an exclusion of women by those four companies was not deliberate. How could they manage in a situation where half the available workforce is women to hire everyone but women unless they worked at it? Hence the need for the kinds of amendments we are talking about today.
Obviously much more remains to be done if we are to live up to the values of fairness, decency and equality which form the foundation of our society, our system of values in the country.
We need to bring the act into the nineties to reflect our current reality and to prepare us for the century ahead. That is precisely the kind of country we as a party promised Canadians when we wrote "Creating Opportunity".
The amendments before us are the fulfilment of our red book commitments. We said that we would bring the federal public service as well as federal agencies and commissions under the Employment Equity Act. We are doing that with this legislation. We said that we would empower the Canadian Human Rights Commission to initiate investigations and conduct workplace audits to ensure enforcement of the legislation. We are doing that. We said that we would ensure federal contractors would be subject to mandatory compliance with the principles of the act.