Mr. Speaker, I want to bring the House back to the conversation we were having about pay equity and the advancement of that issue in the House. Canada remains without federal pay equity legislation despite having made that commitment 40 years ago.
I am going to describe a few leaders in our country who are urging action.
Margot Young of the University of British Columbia has pointed out that “talk about gender equity, slogans like ‘it's 2015’, are purely empty rhetoric without such things in place as proper and full pay equity law.”
Barbara Byers, secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress, has stated:
After 12 years, working women deserve nothing less than proactive pay equity legislation.... We can't let it languish in the archives any longer. Let us also be mindful that women have been waiting for longer than 12 years. We've been waiting for decades and decades, and while we wait, the debt owed to those who are caught in the wage gap continues to mount.
I was honoured in the House as a new MP to stand and present the NDP's motion on pay equity. I was so glad to have the government's support. The government did agree to strike a special committee, and my colleague, the New Democrat MP for Saskatoon West, was our representative on that committee. Her recommendation was that there be pay equity legislation tabled this December. That would be six months from the time of the report and it is what witnesses had said.
The committee itself recommended that it be June 2017, but, sadly, the government has just let us know that it will not be until 2018 that it tables that legislation. There is no rationale for that.
We just heard a report from the Canadian Bar Association that says:
So to recap: a 1956 federal law requiring equal pay didn’t close the gender wage gap. Neither did the 1977 law establishing a complaint-based system for equal pay for work of equal value. In 2016 a special committee suggests the government get around to drafting proactive legislation based on a report tabled 12 years ago that said it was time for women to be paid the same as men for work of equal value.
It is time to act, indeed.
Fiona Keith of the Canadian Human Rights Commission has argued that, compared to alternative options, “the task force's recommendations will likely lead to the most robust and most effective right to pay equity, both in terms of implementation and cost.”
So, we have the right models. I want to know why the government is asking us to wait until the end of 2018. Even the President of the Treasury Board has said that “equal pay for work of equal value is a human right”. Why is his government still denying women their human right?