Mr. Speaker, I think it would be pretty clear to anyone in the House today, who has listened to many of the women speak to this issue, the frustration that women in the House of Commons feel about the lack of progress on the issue of pay equity for women. It is incredible to me that in all the years that the Liberals have been in power they did not do anything in a proactive way to address this issue through legislation.
The frustration of women at the grassroots level across the country, women who have worked in organizations for the past 30 years to advance women's equality, is very high and it is past time that the Canadian government took that seriously and made advances in legislation on pay equity to address the issue effectively.
Analysis of the gender wage gaps for university grads in science and technology confirmed that for even the most recent university graduates of the same age and education, the wage gap increases when they enter the labour market. I do not think a lot of Canadians who have not studied this issue or even a lot of young men and women graduating from universities today really understand that, that with the same level of education, doing the same kind of work, the wage gap is there for women in science and technologies too.
When we talk about the level of the wage gap for university graduates, we should also be very cognizant of the fact that for visible minority women and immigrant women, the wage gap is even much larger and much more difficult for those women. They are, in actual fact, in double jeopardy in terms of the wage economy in Canada.
The other thing for all of us in this House to remember is that Canada has signed many international accords which recognize the principles of equal pay for work of equal value. Signing these accords by our government is supposed to mean a commitment to implementation measures. The failure to act by the previous Liberal government and by the present government are tantamount to ignoring the international covenants that Canada has signed.
In the meantime, we have a new government, which has only been in place for nine months, that has cut the very instruments that women and disadvantaged groups in our society have been able to access to push forward an agenda of equality and fairness.
The government has totally cut the court challenges program, a program that cost a pittance in terms of government spending but was very important to disadvantaged groups in our society in pushing forward an agenda of equality, fairness and justice. It cut Status of Women Canada. It cut literacy programs. All of the cuts that the government has made recently most adversely affect the welfare of women. That is a condemnation on the actions of the government that has a huge surplus right now and yet cuts the very programs that may bring the bottom levels of our society up to a more acceptable standard of economic justice.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission, which now deals with the complaints based system, has asked for legislative changes to get away from the complaints based system which clearly does not work and which the Canadian Human Rights Commission has said does not work. We need legislation. Our only legislation now relies on a voluntary compliance and a complaint mechanism that is totally inadequate.
We can see the results of the current system in how little progress women have actually made for economic equality and closing the wage gap. When I was in this House in the early nineties, we were pushing this agenda forward and, in reality, women may have closed the wage gap by less than 1%. At that time women were earning, on average, 70% of what men earned for full time work. Women are now earning 72%. At this rate, it will take another 100 years or more until women actually have economic equality in the workplace.
The consultation of this report was very thorough. There was consultation with workers, with trade unions, with employers and with tribunal members. Virtually everyone who was consulted, along with the tribunal members, agreed. There was a universal agreement that the current system does not work.
The system that we have in place now does not constitute an effective means of advancing justice for women in pay equity. The current system breeds frustration, anger, uncertainty, lengthy delays and an acrimonious atmosphere, but, even more than that, a staggering cost. The government claims to be the astute guardian of the public purse and yet it is happy to continue with this antiquated process that does not help women and actually costs more than effective pay equity legislation would cost. A proactive model favours cooperation over confrontation and we know that where pay equity has been implemented, the cost to organizations themselves are lower than the complaint based process.
The cost to society in general is even higher when we factor in the reality of women's lives, such as lone parent families where women are trying to provide for their children in a country where there is no national child care system. The lack of support for the Canadian family by the government and the previous Liberal government is actually staggering.
If the government will not act in the name of justice, equality and fairness for women, it should look at the financial burden to society and address the issue from an economic basis. We had the failure of the previous Liberal government over 13 years to bring in any effective measures to counter women's economic inequality in our society and now we have a government in place that appears to ignore all the hard work that has been done and based on facts in the report to implement a system that will finally address women's inequality in our society.
The evidence to support pay equity is before us. We have it in this report. It is clear what we need to do. What we need now is the political will to implement legislation that does have targets, timetables and effective enforcement mechanisms.
We leave far too many women behind with this antiquated complaint based system. Far too many women are left without a process to advance their own human rights in terms of pay equity. It is really past the time for the government to take this issue seriously and implement legislation that will work to close the wage gap for Canadian women.