Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege this morning to rise to speak to Bill C-64. I will be speaking against the bill.
Bill C-64 extends and supersedes the 1986 Employment Equity Act, which covered crown corporations and federally regulated private sector employees. It covers banks, airlines, railways, and telecommunications, which employ about five per cent of Canada's workforce.
According to the government, the purpose is to "achieve equality in the workplace so that no person shall be denied employment opportunities or benefits for reasons unrelated to ability and, in the fulfilment of that goal, to correct the conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by women, aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities by giving effect to the principle that employment equity means more than treating persons in the same way but also requires special measures and accommodation of differences". It is to be reflective of Canada's population as a whole.
While it does not bear directly on the federal scene, it certainly impacts on the bill at hand. I would like to quote from Friday's editorial page of the Globe and Mail . It is entitled ``Why merit matters'', and reads as follows:
Ontario's new Conservative government has introduced legislation to repeal the one-year-old Employment Equity Act. All Canadians, whatever their status or background, should be glad.
Despite the denials of its supporters, Bill 79 was unquestionably a "quota law". Employers were expected to set targets for creating a workforce that reflected the racial and gender make-up of the community at large. The bill was also clearly discriminatory. By requiring employers to favour members of the designated groups, it effectively required them to discriminate against members of the undesignated group: that is, able-bodied white men.
But these are not the worst aspects of Bill 79. The main evil of the law is its implicit attack on the principle of merit.
Appeals for the importance of merit tend to have an elitist sound to modern ears. In fact, merit has always been cherished most dearly by the disadvantaged, who regard it as a ladder to better things. For generations, even centuries, disadvantaged people have pleaded to be released from the pigeon holes in which others place them and evaluated on their ability as individuals. "See me for who I am, not what I am. Judge me on what I can do, not what I look like".
The supporters of employment equity would throw all this out the window. The merit principle, they will say in their honest moments simply hasn't worked. The disadvantaged are still disadvantaged. The colour blind, gender blind world is an impossible dream. We need to try something else. So instead of disregarding the group identity of people in hiring and promotion, we will fixate on it. Instead of encouraging employers to hire the best person for the job, we will require them to tot up their workers like so many jelly beans. Instead of encouraging new immigrants to become part of the wider society, we will tell them to define themselves by race.
In a diverse society with high levels of immigration, this is a terribly dangerous thing. Designed by well meaning people to encourage integration, employment equity in fact works against it, encouraging Canadians to huddle together in groups and feeding the unhealthy obsession with race and gender that has seized Canadian society in the 1990s. This obsession has already infected universities, museums, writers' organizations and women's groups. Bill 79 would have made it a law. Every Canadian should give it a hearty, "Good riddance".
This does not directly bear on Bill C-64 but I think the same arguments apply against the imposition of Bill C-64. In our case new equity laws will immediately cover approximately 230,000 Treasury Board employees. They will affect all federally regulated businesses and businesses with over 100 employees undertaking federal contracts.
Due to the increased cost this law will cause, it will hold off implementation indefinitely on certain agencies such as CSIS, the RCMP and the armed forces. In practice Bill C-64 means enforcing racial and sex based numerical goals to correct perceived past discrimination. The numerical goals are quotas in disguise. If numerical goals are enforceable they serve exactly the same function as quotas.
For years employment equity has been at work within the public service. It will be difficult or impossible to introduce it at the moment because the government is cutting jobs and has a hiring freeze in place. Public service employees declared surplus have ironclad job security which guarantees them another reasonable job offer within the public service.
Admittedly men still account for more than 50 per cent of public servants and this is also reflected in the executive ranks. Most of the top managers within the bureaucracy were hired 25 years ago when government was growing. The bureaucracy still reflects a nation of a quarter century ago. For those same 25 years women have been entering the workplace with roughly the same educational credentials and the same job aspirations as men.
In the private sector women have successfully moved into every profession: medicine, law, accounting, advertising, banking. Progress has been impressive. Why? The world has changed for women. Gender alone is no longer a very big influence on opportunity and life. Education and ability count for far more. Unquestionably racism and sexism do exist but discrimination alone does not explain the vastly unequal outcomes in life for different groups of people.
Government and Canadians have an obligation to open doors for the disadvantaged but they are not always who we think they are. This matter is more complex than simply passing laws or imposing quotas. Current data and statistics are not enough. With the reduction in the public service the new laws will not radically affect or change the face of the current bureaucracy. Most of the data and conclusions are taken from self-identification surveys which are to identify women, disabled, aboriginal peoples and visible minorities, but the accuracy of these data is at best questionable.
Many individuals do not perceive themselves to be disadvantaged or do not wish to admit it. Employer specific surveys do not reflect information accurately. In many cases people do not view themselves as disadvantaged unless specifically required to address the issue but are protected with anonymity such as in national surveys.
The 1992-93 report on employment equity in the public service states the number of visible minority employees may be underidentified by one and a half times. The number of disabled may be underidentified by two and a half times.
With distorted data, conclusions based on the underidentification of designated groups means there may be already higher numbers of disadvantaged people in the workforce. Alternately there is an incentive to falsify self-identification surveys based on perceived advantages of being considered disadvantaged. For example, a 1994 annual report on the Employment Equity Act noted that as of 1991 nearly 2.3 million Canadians reported having a disability, an increase of 30 per cent over 1986 surveys.
Due to fiscal constraints the government will be using employment equity figures from the 1991 census until the year 2003. How reliable are these figures? Statistics Canada acknowledges that in 1991, 10 per cent of the aboriginal population was not even enumerated. Only 3 per cent of Canadians reported their ethnic/cultural origin as Canadian.
The existing Employment Equity Act calls for a comprehensive review every three years. The last review was in 1992, but the mandatory review for this year has not been undertaken. Basically the government is moving ahead with new legislation without having the benefit of this review.
Since Canada has a shrinking bureaucracy there will be little direct impact on government but there will be an impact on businesses with over 100 employees who wish to conduct business with the federal government. What does that mean for them? No comprehensive study has been done in Canada on that outcome.
To quote the Reform minority report on employment equity, the American magazine Forbes is the only source which has attempted to calculate the costs of affirmative action. It cited that the cost for regulation and compliance alone stood at $17 billion to $209 billion annually. It verified that U.S. affirmative action costs were $113 billion per year since 1980, or 4 per cent of the GDP.
In 1992 the Conference Board of Canada defined small, medium and large businesses and gave the annual average cost of employment equity for each category. Due to the lack of comprehensive studies in Canada, Reform took these figures, with the assistance of the Library of Parliament, to cover businesses across the nation. If all Canadian businesses were subject to equity legislation which was in place in Ontario, where firms with more than 50 employees were asked to have an employment equity plan, the total annual direct costs would be $1,035,223,000.
These direct costs exclude compliance, opportunity and other indirect costs. The Forbes study showed that total costs were six times the direct costs. Based on this, the cost to Canadian business would reach $6.5 billion per annum, nearly 1 per cent of our GDP. The Library of Parliament has confirmed in writing the reasonableness of our figures.
In essence this is another costly tax on business. The government's debt and deficit are already choking our economy. Taxpayers are unable to sustain even more expense, be it direct or indirect. The department of public works is already implementing a strategic procurement initiative which applies to all government depart-
ments and grants preference to aboriginal businesses bidding on federal contracts up to $2 million.
By giving preferential treatment to native businesses in government procurement, the government hopes to provide a sustainable economic base for native self-government. However, employment equity carries a stigma and a presumption of racial or gender inferiority. Equity programs do not remove sex and race bias from the workplace; they institutionalize them.
Brian Lee Crowley's article "Does counting bodies add up to fairness?" details findings of a 1987 study. What happens when women are promoted under a program emphasizing gender over ability is that they consistently rated their performance more negatively, took less credit for successful outcomes, were less eager to persist in their leadership roles. They also viewed themselves as more deficient in leadership skills. In other words, it diminished their worth in their own eyes.
In other areas such as education, law school, if doors are opened to individuals who are ill prepared to take on the challenge, the outcome can lead to failure and creates a dependency on government programs rather than fair competition.
This spring the supreme court sent a clear message the charter is meant to protect individual rights rather than group rights. Section 15 of the charter of rights and freedoms claims Canadians are equal before and under law. It adds governments cannot override this basic equality to enhance groups disadvantaged because of their race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
Madam Justice McLachlin in the Miron case stated the larger purpose is simply the protection of individual human dignity and freedom which are violated whenever individuals are denied opportunities based on the stereotypical application or presumed group characteristics rather than on the basis of individual merit, capacity or circumstance.
This hard hitting ruling clearly spells out that every person has the right to be judged on his or her own merits and not on the basis of group characteristics.
Reform's minority report to the standing committee's report "Employment Equity: A Commitment to Merit" has two very clear messages: employment competition based on the merit principle is key to both equality and productivity, and that employment equity legislation is the denial of basic human rights. I encourage all members of the House to read that report. It is not the status quo, but it does contain pertinent facts that tend to be glossed over.
Politically, employment equity gives the appearance of being the expedient means to achieve equity in the workplace; it is politically correct. It is hard for the government to move into new directions, to change the status quo. We grant that.
In the example I quoted earlier, on the Harris government's scrapping the employment equity law we heard screams of "unfair". For some, change becomes uncomfortable and they are unable to envisage innovative directions where there is equality of opportunity.
The government is intent on moving forward with a new law without a proper review. I stated earlier that some government agencies would be exempt, defence being one. The Department of National Defence has conducted a diversity survey which could be and probably will be a step toward affirmative action. During the defence review Liberal members pushed to have hiring quotas official defence policy. The Canadian forces anti-racism policy does exempt affirmative action programs from classification as racism.
In the 1970s promotion of thousands of francophones was distorted by going well down promotion lists to find someone with a suitable background. By this I do not mean 10, 15 or 20 names, I mean 40 or more. The same is going on at the moment for women, although to a lesser extent. Eleven per cent of the Canadian forces are women.
If all Canadians are equal before and under the law, we must not continue to support laws that patronize designated groups, in essence assume their mediocrity. Merit should be the underlying principle. Anything that detracts from the merit principle, civilian or military, is bad policy. Diversity studies clearly signal the government is moving to introduce characteristics other than merit to hiring or promotion programs.
Government's role should be to ensure equality of opportunity rather than the equality of results in the public sector. It is government's responsibility to provide a standard of secondary education which is accessible to all, local responsive post-secondary institutions, affordable student loans based on need, bursaries and scholarships based on need and excellence, sensitivity training in the public sector which supports inherent equality, dignity and worth of all.
We should ensure that laws against discrimination are enforced. Government should lead by example, by laying out objective testing regimes, by broad based advertising of all job postings and by offering facilities to accommodate disabled people wherever they may work. As Madam Justice McLachlin pointed out, the protection of individual human dignity and freedom is important for all.
We are not all equal in ability. Those who wish to pursue education or a vocation should not face discrimination barriers. Those who pursue this course deserve to reap the benefits and rewards of hard work.
Clearly, legislated equity does not achieve its goals. It is costly and it is unfair. Merit should be the sole hiring criterion in an environment free from arbitrary obstructions to hiring or promotion. Merit must be restored as the sole basis for hiring and promotion in the public service.
