Mr. Speaker, other than the fact that it exposed the true agenda of the Conservative government on pay equity, Tom Flanagan's op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail today is a gross affront to women's human rights. In it Flanagan demonstrates once again his regressive views on gender equality.
This is the same man who called the elimination of the court challenges program and the cuts to Status of Women Canada a “nice step”. Now he says, “Equal value was one of those really bad ideas of the 1970s...[an] irrational concept...[and] is antithetical to the basic principles of a market economy”.
He has forgotten that women are an integral part of that economy. Equal work for pay of equal value has been a part of the Canadian Human Rights Act since 1977 and his call for equal--