Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to debate employment equity today. I must admit I am somewhat confused that the subject has come before the House again today. It was only on April 6 that we debated a similar Reform Party motion.
Moreover, for well over a month, as the member proposing the motion well knows, the Standing Committee on Human Rights and the Status of Disabled Persons has been hearing testimony on the existing Employment Equity Act and on Bill C-64, a new act respecting employment equity. That draft legislation is about to return to the House for further consideration. Yet today the Reform Party has seen fit to raise employment equity again in the most contentious terms.
The Reform Party makes a serious error in its judgment, I believe, of the capacity of the Canadian people to appreciate a program that for eight years now has served to strengthen our social fabric. With Bill C-64 it will continue to do so but in a more fair and even-handed manner.
Let me first deal with several misrepresentations of the employment equity legislation that I have heard beginning the first thing this morning.
First, the member who introduced the motion today spoke about the false assumption on which employment equity is based, the assumption that somehow employers are systemically discriminatory and are bad. That is not at all the assumption on which the bill is based. I will be giving more concrete examples later, but the bill is based on the facts that certain people in our society have not had an equal opportunity in employment. They have tended to be employed and to remain in the lowest paying, least skilled jobs notwithstanding their abilities. They have not progressed as others in society have done.
Employment equity is about giving people an equal opportunity by not assuming motive but by simply asking employers to look at why that pattern exists in their workforce. If it does exist it asks what they can do to be more fair in making sure that everybody has an equal opportunity.
Second, the member recommended that individual cases could be settled through the courts and the human rights tribunal. That is like saying there is an outbreak of a certain epidemic in health care but we are going to solve that by sending each one of those people to hospitals to be cured on an individual basis and that we do not have to deal with the overall situation that is causing the individual's illness. That is an expensive, time consuming approach which does not solve the underlying problem but simply perpetuates it.
Third, there has been some discussion about group rights versus individual rights. When the facts indicate clearly to us that people are discriminated against, whether intentionally or not, and usually it is not intentionally, as a group, the only way an individual can have equal opportunity is if we address the fact that the group the individual belongs to is discriminated against.
The bill and the whole issue of employment equity is not about group rights. It is about individual rights. It is about recognizing that in our society certain groups, who happen to represent the majority by the way, have not had an equal opportunity. Until we solve the problem of disadvantages for the group, no individuals in that group, except by rare exception, are going to have an equal opportunity to fulfil their potential.
This is not about arbitrary division as that argument would have us believe. Employment equity is in fact about treating everybody not the same because everybody is not the same, but treating everybody equally. It is about getting rid of those divisions that say a certain kind of person is more suited to management or to certain positions in our society. It is about allowing people to flourish based on their own abilities and not the colour of their skin, the shape of their body or their origins.
Employment equity has been described as coercive in nature, as a setting of imposed quotas. I do not know if it is deliberate misrepresentation, total misunderstanding or total deafness because it has been explained often enough. Employment equity in Canada as it exists and as it is intended to apply now to the public service under the new legislation does not set quotas. It specifically prohibits quotas.
What it does do is it says to employers that there have been employment practices which have gone on for a long time. Unfortunately they have had discriminatory results, even though they were not intended to. We are asking employers to look at their employment practices. We are asking them to get rid of those things in their employment practices that are having discriminatory effects and that are tending to favour one kind of Canadian over others in terms of hiring, promotion, training opportunity, advancement and higher salaries.
The facts are indisputable that this is the situation for Canadian employment and for Canadian employers. I want to emphasize that all we are asking employers to do under employment equity is to look at their own situation, to do a self-examination and to say that they would like to do better, to show where they would like to do better and how they are going to do it.
Quotas are the American model which we have specifically turned our backs on as Canadians. Quotas are enforced from the outside and imposed from the outside. That is not what employment equity in this country is about.