Pay Equity committee  I guess I would say so. I think we have to recognize that there is a lot of constitutional and legislative framework in Canada that suggests that discrimination is against the law. I think the federal government has, as one of the tools at its disposal, the ability either to ent

Pay Equity committee  I think the most obvious one is the reporting requirements. That is, the pay equity plan needs to be reported. That was one of our recommendations. There need to be periodic reports from an employer on the picture under the plan as they've implemented it, and then some kind of mo

Pay Equity committee  I think that our recommendations actually have quite a lot of capacity for flexibility, partly because one of the characteristics of the system we were proposing involved a lot of participation by employees and employers together to work out the plan that they wanted to put in pl

Pay Equity committee  Yes, I think that's right. One of the reasons for setting up administrative bodies and administrative tribunals to work under statutory mandates has to do with their specialized expertise. The pay equity litigation that took place under the Canadian Human Rights Act followed th

Pay Equity committee  They are fairly similar. Certainly the framework is very similar. That's not surprising, because I think the Quebec legislation really borrowed heavily from the Ontario legislation when it was passed. There are some differences in the Quebec legislation that are worth drawing at

Pay Equity committee  I have to say that I haven't really monitored either Ontario or Quebec recently. Since our report was done, I haven't really paid close attention to how those two systems are operating, but I think the difference in Quebec is something worth looking at, because there is still a l

Pay Equity committee  I don't really want to detain you long with a presentation, since I did have a chance to talk to you some weeks ago. There are just a couple of things that I want to point out. One has to do with the complexity of determining pay equity. One of the things that has bogged down sy

Pay Equity committee  As your colleague just intimated, that's a rather large topic. I think our conclusion was that it's important that what's essentially a human rights value, which is the value of treating employees equally, not be part of a collective bargaining deal. I think collective bargaini

Pay Equity committee  No, I agree. I think that the term “equitable compensation” was used in the federal legislation, which was never proclaimed. I am not sure that it was intended to deviate sharply from the concept of pay equity. It is different terminology, but as Marie-Thérèse suggested, it depen

Pay Equity committee  Well, it is very complicated. There is a whole industry of people who look at what constitutes equal value. I think it is very hard to come up with a snappy definition, because there is so much difference among different kinds of jobs, pay practices, compensation systems, and tha

Pay Equity committee  I'm not sure if I exactly understand your question, but certainly our research has demonstrated that the wage gap tends to be greater in non-unionized places of employment, that it tends to be greater for part-time employees, and that it tends to be greater at the lower levels of

Pay Equity committee  With respect to what has happened in the years since our report, I would say that I've been involved with women's issues long enough that I am slightly distressed but not surprised that things have not moved very fast. I would say the situation that was reflected in our report is

Pay Equity committee  Another thing that I think was really significant—and this is something that the last government departed from when it passed the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act—is that we recommended that this legislation apply to the whole federally regulated sector; that is, public,

Pay Equity committee  Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to appear. I wasn't sure what would be most useful to you. I thought I would talk briefly about the background of the task force I was a member of, which reported in 2004, then talk a bit about the recommendations our task force made