I love being heckled on this because I do not have a whole lot to say on this, so the more heckling the better.
Mr. Speaker, another peculiar thing in the bill is that they have shoved in something that I actually kind of like, and that is the ministers of economic development agencies. I do not know what that is doing in the bill, but I guess the Liberals had to have some more to fluff it up and make it look more substantial.
Unfortunately, now the bill would eliminate the ministers of Western Economic Diversification, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, the Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario, the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, and the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency. All of those have important work to do.
I just do not understand the logic, but somehow we are going to eliminate those so we can bump up these others. I guess that must be why these points got into the same bill. Again, it does not make a whole lot of sense to me tonight, but it could be because we are at 7:30 and I have been speaking on various things since 10 o'clock this morning.
I guess the real question I have to ask the government tonight is, why are we not here debating legislation to implement real pay equity for Canadian women workers across the country? We had a committee that worked on this issue, did some very good work, reported back to the House, and recommended we have such legislation. Then somebody, somewhere, seems to have said, “That is hard. We cannot do that before 18 months. It has to wait.” Instead we are debating this bill instead of a bill that would help some of the lowest-paid women workers in the country who have some of the more difficult jobs.
We have a tradition in this country when it comes to wages. We look at jobs and ask if they are dirty and done by men, and then we say that such jobs require a lot of money. However, if they are hard and require high levels of education but are done by women, such as nurses and caregivers, then they do not require a lot of money. We have things out of whack.
Why are we not standing here debating real pay equity legislation for those jobs in federal jurisdiction? That is what I would like to be working on tonight. That would interest my constituents. I would have had dozens and dozens of people talking to me about the best way to make pay equity a reality for women in this country, and not the silence I have had from my constituents on this bill.
I only have a couple more things I want to say. I am looking forward to the warning that my time is almost up.