Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my friend and hon. colleague, the member for Oakville North—Burlington, for her advocacy. I am very proud of the fact that she seconded the bill at first reading. I am grateful to her.
The economic argument is incredibly powerful. In fact, just last week, Christine Lagarde, who is the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said, and I am quoting her loosely, that equal pay and equal economic opportunity for women and men was an economic no-brainer. The last part really is her language. She said that it was good for growth, it was good for diversification of the economy, it was good for reducing inequality and, from a micro point of view, it was also good for the bottom line of companies.
That really is the way we can bring men, who traditionally have dominated the sector that my hon. colleague was part of, into the equation. We can look to other institutions, like UBS management and the McKinsey Global Institute. If we look at this globally, the economic loss or, depending upon which way we look at it, economic output gain that would increase if we had gender-equality pay equity tomorrow would be in the trillions of dollars, somewhere in the neighbourhood of $10 trillion.
In an economic environment globally where growth is hard to come by, this is an issue that we should pursue from an economic lens.