Madam Speaker, I would like to respond to the member from Richmond and say to him that as the member for Bruce-Grey I came from the place of the historic women mentioned previously, Agnes Macphail and Nellie McClung.
In 1994 women are still suffering from the trauma of abuse in the home, not being able to walk the streets and of stalking. They are still not receiving their child support payments.
I welcome this motion from the members of the opposition. I think it is fitting that today, International Women's Day, we discuss this.
However, I am not here to talk about the history of what happened. I think today we should act.
I was mayor of the city of Owen Sound. I made proposals then and we should make similar proposals now. There are costs. Part of the problem that we get as we try to move women into positions they should be in where they are not disadvantaged is that every time we want to make a move with this pay equity there is a lot of pressure. In my force, for instance, there were 35 males and we had to try to make it equitable. The last five people we hired on that force were women.
However, I received a lot of pressure within my community about that. At that time I advocated that perhaps what we should do right there and then was split the thing in half so that we would retire those people who were older and probably looking at retirement anyway and make it right, rather than every year when a vacancy came up going through this whole process again.
I would like to ask the hon. member from Richmond what he thinks of that proposal. It is great to talk about that kind of stuff in this House but nothing will occur because of the pressure of the wage situation we have.
There is also pressure within society with males. Men are still quite macho and all that. A lot of us in this House get up and talk about this but in the end nothing happens. Therefore, I would like to ask the member if when we try to look for this equity whether we do not split the thing right down the middle and get on with it rather than every time we come to this pressure point we talk about it and then it goes away.