Pay Equity committee  I would echo a suggestion one of my colleagues made earlier this evening, and that was to look closely at the two Canadian provinces that have gone along this path, and to ask them what worked, what didn't work, why they made certain decisions, and whether they're still happy wit

Pay Equity committee  We haven't had the kind of conversation that you're referring to and the reason is that with the process that has been created with the appointment of this committee, our work since the motion came up in the House and since the committee was created has been, (a) to start to gath

Pay Equity committee  I don't know the answer to that. Has any previous federal contractor stopped bidding on federal contracts because of the obligations in the federal contractors program? I don't know. I could check back with our department and come back with an answer.

Pay Equity committee  I was wondering that very same thing myself, so I can actually answer it. I'm not sure where the original idea of empowering labour inspectors to report cases to the commission came from and there were a few in the early years, but what was determined and experienced is that the

Pay Equity committee  I'm sorry. I don't know.

Pay Equity committee  No. These are just straight calculations based on Statistics Canada data. To understand why that change is happening, you would have to do far more detailed research and analysis to unpick the problem and figure out what's at work there.

Pay Equity committee  Yes, the underlying data comes from Statistics Canada. As for the way we figure out what's going on in the federal jurisdiction, because Statistics Canada doesn't divide its data by federal and provincial, we take the predominant sectors in the federal jurisdiction and apply that

Pay Equity committee  Does anyone want to take that?

Pay Equity committee  Yes, I'd agree with that. I think that because of the nature of the problem it naturally involves a number of different departments, and then the choice is, do you create something separate as was recommended by the pay equity task force or do you find some way to share responsib

Pay Equity committee  I'm not sure about pay equity in the narrow sense, but I think international statistics generally demonstrate that the Scandinavian countries are world leaders in reducing gender inequalities. If I were interested in looking at models to see what they have accomplished and what t

Pay Equity committee  I can answer partly. The number of cases is low. I'll just give you, for example, that over the last four years the total number of complaints, private sector or otherwise, were only 10. That jumped up and down over the years. In terms of the process, I think the Canadian Human

Pay Equity committee  Just on your question about enforcement, I should say that in one of my other jobs I'm the head of the federal mediation and conciliation service, which spends all its time trying to help the parties get to a solution. Within the labour program, our minds generally don't go to en

Pay Equity committee  Just to add to that, the problem of the contentious nature, or frequently contentious nature of the process isn't limited to pay equity comparisons. It happens in most kinds of job evaluations whether they're done for pay equity purposes or whether they're done to design a sensib

Pay Equity committee  It's because the gender wage gap is a measure of the difference not between men and women doing the same job, in which case you'd be perfectly right. In the case of equal pay for equal work, that could be addressed as soon as it's identified. The wider gender wage gap, however, s

Pay Equity committee  I'm not aware of a single one. I'm not aware—I don't have a complete list—but I'd be surprised.