Madam Speaker, I rise today on an issue that has long been near and dear to my heart, that being equity.
As the proud daughter of a hard-working mother and hard-working grandmothers, and as the proud mother of three daughters who are entirely capable, I burn with righteous indignation when I think of the value of the work they have done and have the potential of doing and realize that we have allowed ourselves to be skewered and talked into a legislated environment that today makes it acceptable to pay a woman less for equal work. That is why I am honoured to be part of the New Democrat caucus and to speak on behalf of our opposition day motion.
The motion calls on the government to recognize pay equity as a right; to finally implement the recommendations of the 2004 pay equity task force report; to restore the right to pay equity in the public service, which was eliminated in 2009; to appoint a special committee to conduct hearings on pay equity and and to propose proactive pay equity legislation, which is the icing on the cake for me to expedite such an important issue.
It blows my mind that in the year 2016 we are actually talking about it. I wish it were a decade ago and I could be sharing in anticipation with my younger daughters the kind of future held out for them as they entered their era of political activism as young women.
Why pay equity? To paraphrase the Prime Minister, which we have done often here today, it is 2016 and women make nearly a quarter less than men on the dollar. Put simply, pay equity is a fundamental human right, the principle of equal pay for equal work.
In her 2012 paper, “A Living Wage As a Human Right”, Mary Cornish points out that by failing to achieve pay equity, Canada is in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related United Nations conventions, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The goal of pay equity is to stop discrimination related to the historic under-valuation of work traditionally performed by women, or “women's work” as they say. Let us be clear that pay inequity is a form of discrimination and the gender wage gap is usually greater for aboriginal women, women with disabilities, racialized, and immigrant women. The more categories a women occupies, the greater her financial disparity.
A good example of this can be taken from the area where I live in Windsor Essex County, where my riding, Windsor—Tecumseh, is located. Forty-one point eight per cent of female-led, lone parent families live in poverty, according to Pathway to Potential, Windsor's poverty reduction strategy. Here, pay equity is but a symptom of larger structural inequities, with women being hit the hardest, be they from a minority community, or aboriginal, or a person with disabilities, or merely single.
How did we get here? How did it happen that women came to earn 77¢ on the dollar of what a man makes? Lower rates of pay do not just emerge ex nihilo out of nothing. There are broad historical and cultural factors at play.
An interesting report from Status of Women Canada last year detailed some of these factors. These include a stubbornly consistent rate of violence against women in Canada despite dropping rates of violence against men; a greater vulnerability of aboriginal women to violence than non-aboriginal women; increasing poverty rates of single moms and senior women; and following from the above, a 20% income gap between men and women. This is two percentage points higher than the gap that exists in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, countries. While this report notes that Canadian women are better educated and are entering the workforce in greater numbers than men, the latter are still paid over 20% more than their female colleagues. This pay gap puts Canada fourth from the bottom of 34 OECD countries, with only South Korea, Japan, and Germany scoring worse.
What can we do? How can we fix the problem? According to a recent OECD report, “Achieving stronger growth by promoting a more gender-balanced economy”, there are certain enabling conditions that are needed to create an environment where gender equality and then pay equity are possible. These enabling conditions turn out to be concerns that New Democrats have been fighting for for generations. These conditions are maternal health measures such as prenatal, childbirth, post-natal, and reproductive health services.
In Canada, women on average do 1.5 hours more unpaid work a day than men do, and the affordability and quality of child care overall in Canada is still an issue forcing many women to drop out of the labour market or reduce their working hours during their child-rearing years.
Gender equality in future labour force participation crucially involves policies enhancing gender equality in education, such as ensuring that boys and girls have equal access to good-quality education, ensuring equal rights and opportunities for them to successfully complete schooling, and helping students make informed choices about their field of study and career path.
I want to salute Unifor and Windsor's Women's Enterprise Skills Training for promoting awareness and mentorship. Members might check out the independent video Because It's 2016 and see why this video is getting well-deserved accolades for the awareness and mentorship of young women in skilled trades.
To this I would add that it is about having legislation, laws with real teeth that set out more that mere voluntary goals that feel and look good and that explode well in public attention during campaigns. Those kinds of fireworks disappoint and frustrate us when we are here in the House of Commons and hear the rhetoric first. Let us get some legislation with teeth, and having an independent committee is the most expeditious way for us to take that dedication seriously and do the work that really needs to be done.
Last, pay equity is not just about being the right and moral thing to do, although this alone should be cause enough to desire it. I look across the aisle at our other parties and I know that each and every member has a sister, a mother, or a daughter, and finds it unacceptable that females should be paid less than males for doing equal-value work.