Turning Back the Clock: Why pay equity is in jeopardy in Canada

I felt better today than I have in a few weeks. I've been so exhausted since my father died. I had forgotten how physically draining dealing with death can be. It also doesn't help that I'm away from all my close friends and family. SmallUniversity in SmallTown can be a very lonely place, and the present circumstances only highlight this isolation.

What really helped was a return to some sort of routine both socially and professionally. I'm actually making progress on the monkey revisions (yeah!) and HippieHusband and I went to play games at MrEnthusiam's house last week. We talked about the insanity that defines our families. And sadly, knowing that the dysfunctional family was so common made me feel better.

So it came then as no surprise that back in Canada another dysfunctional familywas working to create the demise of my happy socialist home. The Canadian government's recent policies have me highly concerned and fearful over the future of Canada.

In addition to devaluing science in Canada, Harper is working to erode the fundamental rights of women. The Budget Implementation Act called Bill C-10 is Harper's way of quietly turning back the clock on pay equity. And he can do this because his budget tabled in February, a 551 page document, focuses on a $40-billion stimulus package. According to the Conservative government, this bill will only be effective if implemented within 120 days, by May 27. But this 551 page document also makes fundamental changes to pay equity, weakens environmental protection, and will make the sale of Crown assets easy.

It's a slippery way for Harper to convert his social conservatism and neocon moral values into legislation under the guise of an economic crisis.

Harper's bill C10 is an attack on pay equity, because it forces pay equity to be dealt with at the bargaining table. It removes the right of federal civil servants to file pay equity complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Instead of pay equity being a fundamental right, such an issue would now be dealt with as part of the normal bargaining process between union and management.

Since when is a woman's constitutional right to be paid fairly something that should be bargained away?

As a fundamental right, it should be entrenched into law. But only two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, have pro-active pay equity laws requiring public and private sector employers to examine their pay structures for systemic discrimination in wages.

Secondly, the bill uses the term "equitable compensation" instead of the well-known and well-defined term pay equity, thus obfuscating the fact that there exists a systematic wage disparity. According to Behind the Pay Gap, put out by the National Committe on Pay equity one year out of college, full-time working women earn only 80% of the salary of their male colleagues. And 1o years later they have fallen farther behind, earning only 69% as much as men earn. Even in female-dominated areas like education, women still earn only 95% of their male counterparts (in Biological Sciences it is 75%). This study controlled for hours, occupation, parenthood and other factors associated with pay.

Thirdly, bill C-10 suggests that an arbitrator in determining whether wage rates were fair would have to take "market forces" into account. Market forces. Are you fucking kidding me? Are these the same fucking market forces that have led to the collapse of the economies worldwide. And in Antonia Zerbisias column Toronto lawyer, Mary Cornish states that "pay equity was designed specifically to rectify a failure in the market that permitted systemic wage discrimination against women. To turn around and subordinate equity to this same market is to negate the entire exercise."

Lastly, in order to determine "equitable compensation" the bill adds a new evaluation criteria that makes it difficult to establish pay discrimination. If a woman held a job in the RCMP, say radio dispatcher, and she felt there was a pay equity issue, then this bill would require an arbitror to evaluate by making the comparison to similar jobs only within the RCMP. There could be no comparison to similar jobs in the rest of the public sector.

After the Ontario Pay Equity Act was introduced in 1987, the victories that led to salary adjustments all used comparisons outside the specific public sector department in which pay discrimination had taken place.

• secondary school secretaries received an annual increase of $7,680 based on their comparison with a male job class of audio-visual technicians.
• female health technicians were compared to male transportation workers, leading to an increase of $2.79 an hour.
• female-dominated mental health workers were compared to the male personnel officer's job, resulting in a pay equity raise of $2.20 per hour.
• female-dominated police dispatchers were compared to the radio technical supervisors and received an increase of $7,179.00 annually

Wait we have an opposition, with a leader right?

Here is just an excerpt from how our opposition dealt with this. In the House of Commons , Hon. John McKay (Scarborough - Guildwood, Liberal) said before the bill was passed,

Canadians can thank the Liberal Party for C-10. We are very aware that it is an imperfect document. It is full of political provocations. It lacks coherence. It has within it many items of no relevance to a budgetary document such as navigable waters, pay equity and jamming certain public sector employees. It is an obnoxious document. There is no doubt about it.

Many of these items deserve far greater scrutiny than the finance committee was able to provide in the context of trying to get this budget moved along. However, it seems to be in the DNA of the Prime Minister to load up every obnoxious element he can think of in a bill and try to jam the opposition.

In an era when Canadians crave leadership, they get a partisan bully. However, in the judgment of the official opposition, the potential good of an early stimulus package, as amended with the built-in review periods, outweighs the obnoxious elements of C-10. Therefore, we will be supporting it.

Economy before morality. It seems to be in the DNA of all of the liberals to follow their partisan bully, Michael Ignatieff and act like sheep. Canadians, do indeed crave leadership and moral responsibility from those that they have elected to represent them.

I urge you to go here and sign this petition so that we can stop the incremental conversion of our Canadian democracy into a neocon autocracy.