Status of Women committee  Generally around the world in ministries such as that, there is a minister responsible and a department that are in fact the institutional mechanism by which a gender and equality strategy is implemented. That's the first part of it. They are supposed to be in charge of implementing it.

Status of Women committee  Exactly.

Status of Women committee  I'd be glad to.

Status of Women committee  If you look at page 7 of the brief, it sets out some of the things that the European Union has done. Some of them include just making an employee write to request the information. If they request the information, they have to be given it. And it breaks it down, explaining within a workplace what the ranges of pay are with respect to various jobs.

Status of Women committee  I think the first one is to develop a plan, to commit as a government to analyzing the situation and to developing a plan similar to how the EU embeds, in its economic strategies and in its women's equality strategies, pay equity. Other countries have done this. They have planning.

Status of Women committee  I have set them out under 10 different steps in the actual brief, but the first one is that there needs to be an overall national plan for closing the gender pay gap. On page 6 of the brief I talk about how the federal government and other governments have system-wide and national strategies they develop for key matters, particularly those that cross governmental, municipal, provincial, and national boundaries.

Status of Women committee  It's time? Okay.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I chair Ontario's Equal Pay Coalition, which has worked for 40 years toward trying to close Ontario's gender pay-gap. When I was asked to participate here, I attempted to convert some of the work we had done at the Ontario level to the national level. What was disturbing about the process was to find that the patterns are all the same.

Status of Women committee  I think the issue of the structural and systemic discrimination that women face in their role in reproduction is something that's being dealt with the entire world wide. Certainly in my experience the fact that working women have children is one of the major pieces of discrimination that they face.

Status of Women committee  No, I was talking about the employment equity legislation, which was eliminated in 1995. It had a proactive mechanism for looking at the kinds of barriers you're talking about. The Pay Equity Act remains in place.

Status of Women committee  I think some of the reasons the gap hasn't closed is that there wasn't an effective mechanism in place under CHRA, because even in complaint-based, unions are better able to use it. Certainly in Ontario, even using the proactive law, unionization still remains one of the most effective ways to close the pay gap, just by itself, because generally when women are unionized their wages rise and the pay gap closes, and it doesn't require them to file a complaint.

Status of Women committee  I think it undermines and perpetuates systemic discrimination pay in the federal public service. I think the failure to keep the CHRA in place also means that the people covered by it, the private sector federally regulated women, are also going to have their pay inequities perpetuated.

Status of Women committee  It's one of the reasons that international standards actually require the government to set the example. They're to be the leaders. They're not to be the people following behind. They're to be leaders. What's most upsetting, actually, is that PSECA is a budget bill. PSECA was there to control the budget.

Status of Women committee  If I can give this as an example, the CHRA was a complaint-based system in which federal employers, like the ones represented by Mr. Farrell, were essentially pulled, kicking and screaming, to the tribunal. They weren't out there actually sorting out and being in favour of pay equity and doing their thing by themselves.

Status of Women committee  Certainly. When the UN was started way back.... There's a treaty of nations back in 1917 that actually referred to equal pay at that point. That's why we say it's one of the first standards. The ILO Convention 100, which Canada ratified in 1972, is the main “equal pay for work of equal value” standard.