Legislative Assembly of Ontario

PAY EQUITY AMENDMENT ACT, 1993 / LOI DE 1993 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉQUITÉ SALARIALE PUBLIC SERVICE STATUTE LAW AMENDMENT ACT, 1993 / LOI DE 1993 MODIFIANT DES LOIS EN CE QUI CONCERNE LA FONCTION PUBLIQUE

AFTERNOON SITTING

EQUAL PAY COALITION

ONTARIO COALITION FOR BETTER CHILD CARE

MCMURRICH SPROUTS DAY CARE
GIZHAADAAWGAMIK

COOK'S SCHOOL DAY CARE INC

REGISTERED NURSES' ASSOCIATION OF ONTARIO

CONTENTS

Monday 18 January 1993

Pay Equity Amendment Act, 1992, Bill 102

Public Service Statute Law Amendment Act, 1993, Bill 169

Hon Bob Mackenzie, Minister of Labour

Wayne Lessard, parliamentary assistant to chair of Management Board of Cabinet

Jim Thomas, deputy minister, Ministry of Labour

Kathy Bouey, assistant deputy minister, broader public sector labour relations secretariat, Management Board of Cabinet

Barbara Sulzenko, policy adviser, broader public sector labour relations secretariat, Management Board of Cabinet

Equal Pay Coalition

Daina Green, member

Maria Luja, pay equity coordinator, Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation

Muriel Collins, national chair, CUPE Women's Task Force

Pat Bird, access centre coordinator, Times Chanage Women's Employment Service

Catherine Bowman, executive director, Association of Allied Health Professionals of Ontario

Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care

Kerry McCuaig, executive director

Lindsay Thompson, Southeast Grey Community Outreach

McMurrich Sprouts Day Care

Maureen Myers, representative

Jean Yarwood, program staff

Gizhaadaawgamik

Penny Smith, director

Jackie Esquimaux-Hamlin, early childhood educator

Shelley Busawa, clerical support worker

Cook's School Day Care Inc

Kim Rudd, executive director, Victoria College Square Day Care

Judi Quigley, executive director, Cook's School Day Care

Lynn Stubbings, supervisor, Victoria College Square Day Care

Linda Bevan, assistant teacher, Victoria College Square Day Care

Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario

Pam Callahan, member, board of directors

Kathleen McMillan, member, board of directors

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

*Chair / Président: Cooper, Mike (Kitchener-Wilmot ND)

*Acting Chair / Président suppléant: Ferguson, Will, (Kitchener ND)

Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Morrow, Mark (Wentworth East/-Est ND)

*Akande, Zanana L. (St Andrew-St Patrick ND)

Carter, Jenny (Peterborough ND)

Chiarelli, Robert (Ottawa West/-Ouest L)

*Curling, Alvin (Scarborough North/-Nord L)

Harnick, Charles (Willowdale PC)

Mahoney, Steven W. (Mississauga West/-Ouest L)

*Malkowski, Gary (York East/-Est ND)

Runciman, Robert W. (Leeds-Grenville PC)

Wessenger, Paul (Simcoe Centre ND)

*Winninger, David (London South/-Sud ND)

*In attendance / présents

Substitutions present / Membres remplaçants présents:

Arnott, Ted (Wellington PC) for Mr Runciman

Caplan, Elinor (Oriole L) for Mr Chiarelli

Ferguson, Will, (Kitchener ND) for Ms Carter

Lessard, Wayne (Windsor-Walkerville ND) for Mr Morrow

Murdock, Sharon (Sudbury ND) for Mr Wessenger

Poole, Dianne (Eglinton L) for Mr Mahoney

Tilson, David (Dufferin-Peel PC) for Mr Harnick

Clerk / Greffière: Freedman, Lisa

Clerk pro tem / Greffière par intérim: Deller, Deborah

Staff / Personnel: Campbell, Elaine, research officer, Legislative Research Service

The committee met at 0941 in room 228.

PAY EQUITY AMENDMENT ACT, 1993 / LOI DE 1993 MODIFIANT LA LOI SUR L'ÉQUITÉ SALARIALE PUBLIC SERVICE STATUTE LAW AMENDMENT ACT, 1993 / LOI DE 1993 MODIFIANT DES LOIS EN CE QUI CONCERNE LA FONCTION PUBLIQUE

Consideration of Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act / Loi modifiant la Loi sur l'équité salariale, and Bill 169, An Act to amend the Public Service Act and the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act / Loi modifiant la Loi sur la fonction publique et la Loi sur la négociation collective des employés de la Couronne.

The Chair (Mr Mike Cooper): I'd like to call this committee to order. Good morning, everybody. I hope you all got a few days' rest over the new year break. I'd like to welcome all the committee members back and all the staff members on the committee.

This morning we'll be starting the first round of public hearings on Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act, and Bill 169, An Act to amend the Public Service Act.

It's my understanding that we'll be proceeding with the briefing from the Honourable Bob Mackenzie, the Minister of Labour, and then Mr Wayne Lessard, the parliamentary assistant for Management Board, and then we'll be proceeding to the technical briefing, at which time we'll proceed to questions and comments from each of the caucuses, if that's in agreement with the committee members.

Good morning, Mr Mackenzie. Could you please identify yourself for the record, and then proceed.

Hon Bob Mackenzie (Minister of Labour): Bob Mackenzie, Minister of Labour. Good morning. It's a pleasure for me to open this period of deliberation and public review concerning Bill 102, the Pay Equity Amendment Act.

To set the stage for the important work of the next few days, I want to recall briefly the origins of this bill, the need for it, and outline the historic impact it will have on the Ontario workforce.

Bill 102 ensures that wage discrimination against women will continue to be fought until it is eliminated in this province. The bill guarantees that our efforts for working women will not stop under financial pressure facing the province.

Ontario's legal provisions against wage discrimination will be strengthened by this bill. Working women will soon have new tools to achieve pay equity through proportional value and proxy comparisons.

The historic and systemic undervaluation of women's work shall not continue, but Bill 102 does take into account the difficult economic constraints of our time. Thus, the time lines for implementing some sections of Bill 102 have been extended. However, the government's annual payout of millions of dollars for pay equity in the broader public sector will continue, only at a slower pace than we had hoped.

This extended time line is in keeping with the Treasurer's statement in November that Ontario cannot continue business as usual at this time of financial crisis, for the crisis personally affects all of us in this room and throughout the province. Financial constraint was the driving force behind our decision to replace Bill 168 with Bill 102.

In spite of current constraints, I am happy that the Pay Equity Act, which I've championed from the start, has changed Ontario's workplace culture. It has provided a means to eliminate the wage inequities that working women have endured for so long.

As I have said on previous occasions, I believe history will record the achievement of pay equity legislation in Ontario as a landmark accomplishment of our times. Obviously, we are not here to rest on our laurels. Even today, the average earnings of working males exceeds the female average by more than 30 cents on the dollar, as Statistics Canada reported last week.

In asking you to support the measures of Bill l02, I want you to recall and revive the spirit of consensus that was present among Ontario's legislators when the Pay Equity Act was passed in 1987. I think that was a happy occasion, and it was remarkable the extent to which we did achieve some unanimity on this issue.

That consensus for justice for working women helped change the face of the workforce in Ontario. In this province, as of September 1992, there were 2,145,000 working women, more than 45% of the workforce. That's a figure, as most of you are aware, that has been increasing. At least 600,000 working women have achieved or have begun the process of achieving pay equity, of receiving wages that represent the real value of their work.

During the next five years, hundreds of thousands more will also attain equitable wages. As of this past New Year's Day, and with final approval of Bill 102, at least 340,000 more working women will have gained an effective pay equity method through the proportional value amendment that is in front of you. Another 80,000 working women in the broader public sector will be able to benefit starting 12 months later, on January 1, 1994, when the proxy comparison amendment takes effect.

The need for this package of amendments can be traced back to the original Pay Equity Act of 1987. This act presented one basic method for achieving pay equity: job-to-job comparisons. Those original measures were welcomed as a good start for pay equity, which was uncharted territory at that time. However, there was also consensus that future modifications would be needed to deal with workplaces where pay equity comparisons could not be made because of a lack of male jobs for comparison.

By responding to those situations, Bill 102 will have enormous positive impact on succeeding generations of working women in this province. It will help ensure that as many as possible will benefit from pay equity legislation. Because of its ground-breaking nature, the proxy comparison method took time to develop. In 1991, a preliminary proxy comparison model was developed and tested in consultation with stakeholders. That first model was found in need of revision.

Our policymakers and stakeholders continued trailblazing. By working out various revisions, a second, more workable proxy model was created in 1992. That model is in front of you now. The additional working time made it possible for the revised proxy model to be written into the legislative provisions of Bill 102, reducing the need for regulations which were anticipated under the precursor Bill 168. The changeover to Bill 102 has yielded positive results by enhancing the legislative wording.

Bill 102 also contains ground-breaking administrative provisions. For example, when companies and businesses are sold, transferred or restructured, pay equity plans remain protected and in place for the employees covered. Women will not see their pay equity rights vanish or diminish because of workplace transformations over which they have no control.

Another new measure aims at encouraging parties to settle pay equity disputes before lengthy litigation by permitting the use of pre-hearing conferences and providing for pre-hearing settlements.

I feel it is important to correct a misunderstanding that appeared in some quarters after Bill 102 went to first reading in November. At that time, some observers suggested the government had put its commitment to pay equity on hold for three years. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather the new measures on proportional value and proxy comparisons will come into effect, as I mentioned, one year later than originally expected. Also, the completion date for pay equity in the public sector will now be 1998 instead of 1995.

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Public sector employers must still continue to make pay equity payments at the 1% of payroll annual rate required by law, and the government will continue to provide funding every year to assist them to do so.

Public sector employers will have an extra three years to close the male-female wage gap completely. Government funding for pay equity will continue throughout those years. The bottom line is that the level of pay equity implementation we expected to reach in 1995 will be reached in 1998.

Also, I am happy to confirm that the government is proceeding immediately with an interim program to provide a pay equity down payment to thousands of workers in the lower-paid areas of the broader public sector. The government is committed to having those down payment cheques mailed during the spring months.

The down payments will begin the movement towards pay equity for many low-paid working women who have been unable to use the existing Pay Equity Act to achieve equitable wages.

The pay equity down payment program will be similar to the 1991 wage enhancement that the Ministry of Community and Social Services paid to child care workers. That program provided payments of $2,000 towards pay equity for almost 14,000 child care workers.

To speed the pay equity down payment program, officials of the Ministry of Labour have recently surveyed about 1,800 agencies employing more than 63,000 workers in the broader public sector.

Those agencies included home support workers and homemaker services, women's shelters, immigrant services, community mental health programs, and developmental services such as associations for community living.

Almost 80% of the agencies surveyed have already returned the questionnaires to officials of my ministry. The replies are being analysed to establish the proper criteria for eligibility and to determine the number of workers who qualify for the down payment. This analysis will also establish the amount each eligible worker will receive.

Beneficiaries of the down payment program will include workers who are funded through five ministries: Community and Social Services, Health, Citizenship, Correctional Services and Culture and Communications.

Within a matter of weeks, our analysis will yield all the relevant figures and I look forward to announcing the amounts of the pay equity down payment as soon as possible.

In closing, I want to remind you that in the mid-1980s, while in opposition, we rallied support among the dominant parties of the day and pioneered the Pay Equity Act of 1987.

Pay equity legislation has made this province a trendsetter among other jurisdictions, national and international.

In 1993 our proportional value and proxy comparison methods of Bill 102 are drawing, I can tell you, just as much notice from other jurisdictions seeking to achieve pay equity.

In the hope that this committee will soon move Bill 102 closer to reality, let me appeal once more to the spirit of consensus that launched the pay equity program in Ontario in 1987.

Our quest for justice for working women is not an optional extra that we add on during good economic times. Justice is an essential condition that compels us to act now in conscience and in law.

Therefore, I am confident in asking the members of this committee to report favourably on Bill 102 so it can proceed to third reading.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to make this opening statement.

Mr Wayne Lessard (Windsor-Walkerville): It's a pleasure to be here this morning to speak to Bill 169, An Act to amend the Public Service Act and the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act and its accompanying regulations. This is companion legislation to Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act.

Ms Dianne Poole (Eglinton): On a point of order, Mr Chair: I just wondered if we could have a copy of Mr Lessard's speech or if it is contained in any of the materials distributed.

The Chair: Do we have a copy?

Mr Lessard: I thought copies had been distributed. We'll get those as soon as possible.

Mrs Elinor Caplan (Oriole): It's general procedure that all members of committee receive copies, not just the government caucus.

The Chair: Agreed. I believe they're being handed out right at this moment. If all committee members have a copy, you may proceed, Mr Lessard.

Mr Lessard: As I was indicating, this is companion legislation to Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act. It supports that bill by clarifying the status of crown employees and crown employment. This bill complements those changes to the Pay Equity Act and will ensure that the government cannot be named the employer for pay equity purposes or for any other reasons.

The improvements to the Pay Equity Act will assist hundreds of thousands of Ontario women, those whose work is undervalued and underpaid, to achieve pay equity. At the same time, we recognize our responsibility to manage the size and cost of the public service.

Mrs Caplan: On a point of order, Mr Chairman: I don't have a copy of his statement. It's not what he's saying. I'm looking at the notes that are here and they --

Ms Poole: We have every second page, actually.

Mrs Caplan: I have pages 1, 3, 5 and 7. Who has 2, 4 and 6? I'm prepared to wait till this government can get its act together and provide us with a proper --

Ms Poole: I'm not; that would take years.

The Chair: Perhaps we could call for a 10-minute recess until we get a proper copy for all the committee members. This committee stands recessed for 10 minutes.

The committee recessed at 0956 and resumed at 1007.

The Chair: I'd like to call this committee back to order. I believe everybody has a copy now. Mr Lessard, you may proceed.

Mr Lessard: Mr Chair, for the benefit of my opposition colleagues who had difficulty following my remarks without the printed word, I think I'll start from the beginning.

As I indicated, it's a pleasure for me to be here. As I was saying, Bill 169 is companion legislation to Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act. It supports that bill by clarifying the status of crown employees and crown employment. This bill complements those changes to the Pay Equity Act and will ensure the government cannot be named the employer for pay equity purposes or for any other reasons.

The improvements to the Pay Equity Act will assist hundreds of thousands of Ontario women whose work is undervalued and underpaid to achieve pay equity. At the same time, we recognize our responsibility to manage the size and cost of the public service.

Bill 169 clearly defines the boundary between government employees and those of independent broader public sector agencies. It places an important responsibility, that being the ability to determine the size and cost of the public service, solely in the hands of the government. The amendments will allow us to manage the size and therefore the cost of the public service.

This government is meeting two strong commitments: to correct the historic and systemic undervaluation of women's work and to fulfil its broad compensation duties effectively and fairly. At the same time, we are fulfilling our fiscal responsibilities by controlling the size of the public service.

The amendments in Bill 169 make the government solely responsible for assigning employee status. To this end, Bill 169 amends the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act and the Public Service Act so that only the crown may expressly grant status as a crown employee and an Ontario public servant.

This is needed because certain features of the original Pay Equity Act left a loophole through which pay equity office review officers and the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal could name the province as the employer for pay equity purposes of workers in various broader public sector organizations.

This happened mostly in cases where there were no male comparators in an establishment, so that pay equity could only happen if the provincial government could be deemed the pay equity employer. If the government becomes the pay equity employer, it must negotiate a pay equity plan with the named employees based on wages in the public service. With the new methods for reaching pay equity, that is, proxy and proportional value methods slated in Bill 102, employees will no longer have to prove the government is the pay equity employer to achieve pay equity.

Bill 169 deals with another possible way of naming the province as employer through the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act, or CECBA for short. Currently this act allows the Ontario Public Service Labour Relations Tribunal to decide if certain agencies are crown agencies or if individuals are crown employees, allowing them to bargain collectively with the crown. CECBA also gives the tribunal the power to decide that employees of agencies that receive money from the government or fall under government regulation are public servants. They then become members of the public service bargaining unit and are paid Ontario public service rates. Bill 169 amends the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act and the Public Service Act to allow the crown, as employer, to set out once and for all its right to define and determine who is a government employee.

At this time I'd also like to table draft regulations to Bill 169. I believe the clerk has those available to be distributed as well. These regulations designate crown agencies in order to define "crown employee" as set out in the bill.

I also have with me Kathy Bouey, the assistant deputy minister of the broader public sector labour relations secretariat, who's prepared to address the specifics of the bill at an appropriate time. That concludes my remarks.

The Chair: Thank you very much. Who will be proceeding next?

Mr James R. Thomas: I think I am.

The Chair: Mr Thomas?

Mr Thomas: Yes.

The Chair: Will you please identify yourself for the record and then proceed.

Mr Thomas: My name is Jim Thomas. I'm the Deputy Minister of Labour. I have with me Catherine Evans, who is from the pay equity policy group within the Ministry of Labour. I think there are two documents to be handed out. One is a text of my comments and the second is a series of tables I'd like to use for my technical briefing.

There are three parts to this presentation. I will begin by providing you with an overview of the current Pay Equity Act, telling you to whom it applies, describing the job-to-job method of comparison and outlining the existing administrative and enforcement provisions. In the second part of my presentation I will discuss the purpose of Bill 102 and the two new methodologies of making pay equity comparisons that are contained in the bill. Third and last, I will lead you through a detailed examination of the major features of Bill 102.

Let me start with an overview of the current act.

The Pay Equity Act was passed in 1987 and came into effect on January 1, 1988. It applies to all employers in Ontario except for those employers in the private sector who have nine or fewer employees. It also applies to employees and to bargaining agents.

The stated purpose of the Pay Equity Act as found in part I is to "redress systemic gender discrimination in compensation for work performed by employees in female job classes." The act requires employers and bargaining agents, where there is a bargaining agent, to examine whether there is gender discrimination in an establishment by making comparisons between female job classes and male job classes. The comparisons are made between the compensation received by employees in male and female job classes and the value of the work they perform, the general idea being that jobs of a similar value should be paid a similar amount.

The act describes value as a composite of four criteria, "skill, effort, the responsibility normally required in the performance of the work and the conditions under which the work is normally performed." These criteria provide the common denominators for determining the value of all jobs and make comparisons possible between jobs that on the surface appear quite different.

Because the act requires comparisons between male and female job classes, an employer and bargaining agent must first determine which job classes are female job classes and which are male. A female job class is described by the act as being a class in which 60% or more of the members are female. A male job class, by comparison, is a class in which 70% or more of the members of the class are male. Some jobs, of course, will be neither 60% female nor 70% male. These job classes are gender-neutral job classes and are not involved in the pay equity process.

The system of making comparisons I am about to describe to you is known as the job-to-job comparison method. It is currently the only method of comparison provided for in the Pay Equity Act.

Let me turn first to table 1, which is in the other document that has been handed out. If I could just make a few comments about the four tables I'm going to take you through, they are an attempt to describe visually what pay equity is about now and the changes that will occur as a result of the two new methodologies.

Table 1 shows you a graph of wage, going up the vertical axis, against value, going across the horizontal axis. What we've tried to give you a picture of here is, let's say, a typical establishment and the bargaining unit broken down into male and female job classes, being Ms and Fs. Generally speaking, jobs that are lower in value receive a lower wage rate. For that reason, you have a graph that tends to go from the bottom left to the top right. That's typical of most organizations. It is also typical of most organizations that the Ms tend to be higher wage rates than the Fs. You can see that for the most part that is the case on table 1.

Once the male and female job classes are identified and the determination of the value of each job class is made, female and male job classes that are of equal or comparable value are then compared in terms of compensation. For instance, M1 and F1 are two job classes, a male and female job class, that are of similar value. They both have a value of one. Normally, the way you get that is by doing a survey of the establishment, asking questions about skill, effort, responsibility and conditions of work for the various jobs throughout the organization. By doing that, you can ascribe points to the various job classes.

In the case I've just outlined, M1 and F1 have the same value, but M1 is making more money than F1. So the pay equity adjustment would be the vertical line that's required to bring F1 up to M1. Similarly, F5-M5 would be a case where there is a pay equity adjustment available to F5 to bring that class up to M5.

If a male job class of equal or comparable value cannot be found for a female job class, a male job class that is of lower value but that receives higher compensation can be used. That, for example, shows up with F7 and M5. F7 is a female job class that is of higher value than M5. M5 gets a higher wage rate, so F7 is entitled to an adjustment to bring that class up to M5.

The one additional rule that is applied in making comparisons is that female job classes in a bargaining unit must be compared to male job classes in the same bargaining unit. Only if there isn't a comparable male class can they look to a male job class in a different bargaining unit and then to any male job class in the establishment. The same is substantially true for non-bargaining-unit job classes.

Obviously, there will be occasions where there is more than one male job class that can be used as a comparison for a female job class. In this case, the current act requires only that the lowest paid of the eligible male job classes be chosen as the basis of the job-to-job comparison. F4 is an example of that. In F4, you have two male job classes that are of similar or comparable value to F4 but are earning more money than F4. The law requires that you bring F4 up to the lower of the two M4s to achieve pay equity.

There will also be situations where there are no male job classes that can be used for making a comparison; F3 and F6 are two examples in table 1 of female job classes for which there are no male job classes. You have a hunch, looking at F3 for sure, that if there was an M, that M might be higher than F3 and F3 might be entitled to a pay equity adjustment, but there is no M to compare F3 to, so that female job class does not get a pay equity increase. This problem is addressed by one of the two new methods which I will talk about shortly.

The objective of making the comparisons is to determine if there is any difference in the compensation received by the male and female job classes that have similar value. This difference, as I've said, becomes the amount by which the compensation for the female job class must be adjusted in order to achieve pay equity. In pay equity parlance, this is known as the pay equity adjustment. In any one year, the minimum amount which an employer is obliged to spend on making pay equity adjustments is 1% of the previous year's payroll or the amount required to achieve pay equity, whichever is less.

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In the private sector, this obligation continues until pay equity is achieved, with no final deadline. In the public sector, there is a deadline, currently January 1, 1995. Thus, in order to achieve pay equity by the deadline, a public sector employer might be required to spend more than 1% of the previous year's payroll in the final year, if more than 1% is needed in that year to achieve pay equity.

Part II of the act governs the process for achieving pay equity for all public sector employers and employees and private sector employers with 100 or more employees. "The public sector" is defined in the Pay Equity Act according to a schedule that you can find at the end of the act. It includes the Ontario public service as well as provincial agencies, boards, commissions and corporations. The public sector in pay equity also includes municipalities, schools, hospitals, colleges and universities as well as a significant number of smaller transfer payment agencies. Examples of these include child care centres, social welfare agencies, community corrections agencies, public libraries and public health agencies such as ambulance services and detox centres.

These public sector employers, along with private sector employers with 100 or more employees, must achieve pay equity through posting a pay equity plan. The plan sets out the comparisons made, the basis on which jobs were valued and the adjustments required. Smaller private sector employers can opt into the system of posting a pay equity plan or they can choose not to post a plan and come under the rules of part III.

A basic principle of the Pay Equity Act is to make the achievement of pay equity a process which the workplace parties are able to manage on their own. The extensive detail on when and how to make comparisons contained in parts I and II of the act is designed to allow employers and their employees and bargaining agents to do the work themselves, without the intervention of government. To a very great degree, this is what happens. Employers prepare plans for non-unionized employees and negotiate pay equity plans with bargaining agents. Non-unionized employees have an opportunity to review and provide comments to their employer on a plan that affects them. The plans are not filed with any administrative agency, and no one in government monitors their implementation.

The expression "deemed approved by the commission" is used in the act to describe settled plans agreed to by the workplace parties. Occasionally, however, problems do come up and the assistance of the Pay Equity Commission is required.

Parts IV and V of the act contain the enforcement and administrative provisions of pay equity. As I mentioned at the start, the Pay Equity Commission has two components: the pay equity office and the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. The pay equity office has a number of functions. It does research to assist employers and employees in achieving pay equity, and it also provides educational and informational materials and seminars.

Another major role it serves is in the first handling of complaints about the implementation and maintenance of pay equity. The review services branch of the pay equity office receives roughly 700 cases yearly. Review officers are able to facilitate settlements in about 85% of those cases. The nature of the complaints vary widely, but many address the issue of whether or not a male or female job class has been properly valued and compared.

Complaints that are not settled are generally dealt with by a review officer issuing an order. If one of the parties is not satisfied with the order, it can be referred to the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal for a full hearing. The Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal receives approximately 130 cases yearly. The tribunal has developed settlement proceedings of its own, which will be given statutory approval with the Bill 102 amendments, and is successful in settling a further 40% of cases. The remaining cases are heard by a tripartite panel of members who exercise a quasi-judicial function. Some of the exact rules of proceedings will be clarified by the Bill 102 amendments. Tribunal orders are binding on the parties.

This concludes my remarks on the current Pay Equity Act. I now propose to move on to part II, which is to talk about the general purpose of Bill 102.

As I mentioned in my remarks on the current Pay Equity Act, the job-to-job method of comparison does not ensure that all female job classes are able to be compared to male job classes and so fails to achieve a fundamental purpose of the Pay Equity Act. This fact was recognized at the time the act was passed, and to remedy this problem the pay equity office was directed to conduct a study of alternative ways of achieving pay equity.

In October 1989 the pay equity office finished this task and gave to the then Minister of Labour, Gerry Phillips, a well-researched and comprehensive study entitled Report on the Achievement of Pay Equity in Sectors of the Economy which are Predominantly Female.

Included in the report were recommendations for amendments to the act to provide for both proportional value and proxy comparisons. Proportional value comparisons provide means of achieving pay equity by making comparisons possible between male and female job classes of different values within the same establishment. It was recommended that both private sector and public sector employers be able to use proportional value. Proxy comparisons are comparisons across different establishments. Thus an establishment which has no male job classes compares its female job classes to job classes from another establishment that does have male job classes. Only public sector employers were recommended to be proxy users.

The Ministry of Labour consulted extensively on these recommendations before the minister introduced the bill before you. The recommendations to provide for proportional value comparisons were almost instantly accepted by government, business and labour. In fact I have heard many say that, in retrospect, it would have been better to have had proportional value comparisons from the start of pay equity.

Consultations on proportional value comparisons held in March 1990 and again in March 1991 served to confirm the widespread acceptance of proportional value as an appropriate and useful pay equity method for both public and private sector establishments. Indeed, it is already widely in use, even without legislative direction.

The recommendation to enact proxy comparisons for use in the public sector also found widespread support. Proxy was a fairly novel idea, however, and there were some questions about how it would work. The great need for proxy comparisons or something like them was not in dispute. The workers who will benefit from proxy are among the most underpaid of society's workers. They include child care workers, home care providers, child welfare workers and many others in small social service and health care agencies in the public sector.

The Ministry of Labour consulted widely on various approaches to implementing proxy comparisons. Consultations in the spring of 1992 produced the mode of proxy comparisons that you have before you in Bill 102.

While proportional value and proxy comparisons are the most important features of Bill 102 and the primary policy reason for the existence of Bill 102, there are a number of other matters that the bill deals with. One that I mentioned to you just a moment ago is the procedural changes that will allow the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal to conducts its hearings in a more efficient manner, with less argument over what rules apply.

Other provisions contained in the bill deal with a variety of administrative and definitional issues that have come up over the course of our five-year experience with the act. One of these is the definition of "employer" as it relates to the crown in right of Ontario. Another is dealing with a pay equity plan when there is a sale of all or part of a business, or when there is a major change in the organization or structure of a business such that the plan is no longer appropriate. Another important issue concerns the maintenance of pay equity and what standard should be set for maintaining pay equity. While we have not proposed a specific amendment on this issue, there is provision for a regulation.

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Finally, there are a number of very small matters that were overlooked or dealt with inadequately when the act was first passed. Ensuring the anonymity of complainants is one of these, as is providing a notice to be posted in workplaces advising employees of their pay equity rights, similar to the way employees are advised of their right under the Occupational Health and Safety Act or the Human Rights Code.

Of course Bill 102, unlike Bill 168, also deals with the deadline for achieving pay equity in the public sector. Economic conditions, plus the passage of time leading to the commencement of proportional value comparisons, have made the 1995 deadline for achieving pay equity in the public sector unrealistic. A new deadline of January 1, 1998, has therefore been proposed.

This new deadline will allow public sector employers a full five years, starting in 1993 at a minimum rate of 1% a year, to fully implement proportional value comparisons. It will also allow those public sector employers who face adjustments of more than 1% in 1995 in order to meet the 1995 deadline a further three years to complete their adjustments. The deadline does not affect public sector employers who will use proxy comparisons because these employers, like all private sector employers, do not have a deadline.

These, then, are the main areas addressed by Bill 102, and I will now turn to the specific provisions of the bill. Let me just indicate that in your own review of the act, using the clause-by-clause book that Ministry of Labour staff have prepared for you, you will know that there are a fair number of incidental amendments. These are mainly in there to permit the rules that apply to job-to-job to be extended, where appropriate, to the other two methods of achieving pay equity.

Let me start then with proportional value. Section 12 of your bill, beginning on page 6, is where the main part of the proportional value comparison method is set out. Proportional value will add 10 new sections to the Pay Equity Act. Both public and private sector employers can use proportional value comparisons. An employer must use proportional value comparisons if there is a female job class in the employer's establishment that cannot be compared using the job-to-job method. For example, the employer I showed you on table 1 has a problem with F3 and F6. That employer would be required to see if anything can be done to achieve pay equity for those female job classes using proportional value.

Employers can also use proportional value comparisons in place of job-to-job comparisons if the adjustment is not lower. An employer and bargaining agent, if any, who are still unable to make a comparison for a female job using proportional value comparisons must notify the pay equity office, and if that establishment is in the public sector, then proxy comparisons may be required.

Proportional value comparisons are a way of making indirect comparisons between a female job class and a representative group of male job classes. The critical difference from job-to-job comparisons is that proportional value comparisons can be made between male and female job classes of different values. The key concept for being able to do proportional value comparisons is the selection and existence of a representative group of male job classes. While the bill does not say precisely what that is, as it will be different things depending on the context, the intention is that the job classes selected should be representative of the way in which male job classes are valued and compensated by the employer. Ideally, therefore, it would include male job classes that span the range of values for jobs in the employer's establishment.

I ask you now to turn to table 2. Table 2 is essentially that same establishment that I talked to you about in table 1 that was able to do some job-to-job comparisons and therefore some pay equity adjustments for some of the female classes, and you have before you in table 2 an example of the wage-line method of defining a representative group of male classes.

What in fact has been done in the wage-line method is, an attempt has been made to draw the best line possible, the best fit, if you will, through the male job classes. That becomes, therefore, the representative male wage rate at any particular value. Therefore, you can see that if there were a male job class that had a value of three -- there isn't -- that wage line suggests that male job class would probably be paid somewhere on that line, hence the notion of the adjustment being from the female job class, that dotted vertical line up to the wage line. That's how proportional value is able to fill in the gaps for those female job classes in establishments that did not have male job classes of similar value.

In table 3, you have an example of a wage line being used in an establishment where no job-to-job comparisons were possible. If you look at table 3, imagine that line isn't there. If the line isn't there, you can see that you have an establishment where there are no pay equity adjustment obligations because all the female job classes are without male comparators; there are no male job classes that are of comparable value to any of the female job classes. It is not an all-female establishment because there are male job classes; they happen to be male job classes that do not line up with any of the female job class values. Again, by drawing a line through or by trying to establish a representative group of male job classes, you can see that you are now able to make pay equity payouts for those female job classes that fall below the line.

Proportional value can be used in two cases. One is where you've got an establishment that already tried to do a job-to-job plan and found that there were some gaps. The other is in an establishment that didn't do any pay equity because there were no male job classes that lined up with any of the female job classes. The wage line is only one among several methods of making proportional value comparisons. It is, however, the most widely used and it's not difficult to understand.

There are other ways of doing it. Mathematical formulations and other ways have been used quite successfully. The choice of method will depend a great deal on the size of the establishment and whether or not job-to-job comparisons for some female job classes are already in place. If they are, proportional value need only be used to fill in the gaps left by the job-to-job method. The obligation to use proportional value and start making adjustments under a plan comes into effect for public sector employers and private sector employers with 50 or more employees, retroactive to January 1, 1993.

Because proportional value is such a widely accepted approach to pay equity, however, many establishments already have pay equity plans that use proportional value. These plans are recognized by the act as being valid from the time they were posted. Employers and bargaining agents who wait for proclamation before proceeding with required proportional value comparisons will have six months after the amendments come into effect to post their plans. The first payment of adjustments will be retroactive to January 1, 1993, but they do not need to be paid out until six months after proclamation. The first adjustment date for small private sector employers -- those between 10 and 49 employees -- is later, January 1, 1994, the same date as under the job-to-job method.

There are a number of provisions of the bill that deal with the requirements around posting and the content of a pay equity plan containing proportional value comparisons. These provisions fairly closely parallel those of the current act for job to job. I don't propose to go into them as they are fairly straightforward.

I forgot to mention one thing. The employer in table 1 who had posted a job-to-job plan now realizes that with proportional value it doesn't have a finished plan. They had a finished plan from the point of view of job to job; they don't have a finished plan any more. They have a partially completed plan and it will therefore require them to sit down with the bargaining agent, if there is one, and if not, to sit down and figure out what effect proportional value will have in terms of filling in the gaps. The amendments provide for opening up the plans to insert the female job classes that were missed because there were no male job class comparators.

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Let me turn now to proxy. The method of making proxy comparisons is set out in section 13 of the bill, beginning at page 10. As I've stated several times, it will be used only in the public sector and only by those employers and bargaining agents who are unable to use either job-to-job or proportional value comparisons for the reason that they have too few male job classes in their establishments.

Unlike job-to-job and proportional value comparisons, proxy is a complete system. You opt into it because you weren't able to do pay equity using job-to-job, PV or a combination of the two. It is also different in that it is not completely self-administered. Employers and bargaining agents will be required to obtain an order from the pay equity office to use proxy comparisons. They will not simply be able to choose to use proxy comparisons. The pay equity office will issue the order exclusively on the grounds that there are too few male job classes within the establishment for the employer and the bargaining agent to use either job-to-job or proportional value comparisons.

Proxy comparisons begin the same way that job-to-job and proportional value comparisons begin. The employer and the bargaining agent, where there is one, identify the male and female job classes and evaluate them on the basis of a gender-neutral comparison system, using the components of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions.

Then they select from among the female job classes those that are defined as key female job classes. There are two types of key female job classes. One type is the female job class with the greatest number of employees. The other type is any female job class that is essential to the delivery of the services provided by the employer.

In a child care agency, for instance, the child care worker job class would likely be the largest female job class as well as the job class essential to the delivery of the service. Another essential job class, and therefore a key female job class, might be a cook, but a part-time bookkeeper or cleaner might not be essential and therefore would not be a key female job class.

Once the selection of the key female job classes is made and it's apparent that there are no male job class comparators within the establishment, an order is sought from the pay equity office that the establishment is a seeking establishment. It is seeking proxy comparisons and, if obtained, the next step is to select an establishment to provide the proxy comparisons. As I said earlier, the essential and unique feature of proxy comparisons is that they depend on comparisons provided from outside the employer's establishment.

You have before you -- and if I could just turn you past table 4; I'll come back to table 4 in a few minutes -- a schedule and this schedule will be contained in a regulation to the act. It will direct particular types of seeking establishments to particular types of proxy establishments. For example, a child care centre, as a seeking establishment, is directed by the schedule to a municipality which operates a child care centre, which would be the proxy establishment.

Seeking establishments will be geographically limited in their search for proxy establishments, usually to their own municipality or county. Once the seeking establishment identifies an appropriate potential proxy establishment, it submits a request for information to the proxy. Included in the request is information about the job content of the seeker's key female job classes, a copy of the pay equity office order identifying the seeker as a proxy user and other information that shows up on page 15 of the bill.

When the proxy establishment receives the request, it must respond within 60 days and provide job content information back to the seeker about the female job classes it has that are similar in function to those of the seeker. In addition, it provides information as to the pay equity job rate of those female job classes. The seeker's job classes thus receive the benefit of the comparisons made in the proxy's pay equity plan between female job classes that are similar to their own and male job classes.

In consultation with employers and bargaining agents, it was generally agreed that this information already exists in usable form within the proxy establishments, as it would have been collected during the development of the proxy's pay equity plan. As a result, this process should not impose a burden on the proxy establishment to gather new information.

Once the proxy has provided the information, its work is completed and it has no further obligation to the seeker. The seeker, now having the information it can use to prepare a pay equity plan, proceeds to do so.

Could I ask you to turn to table 4. Imagine the line isn't there. Imagine the Ps aren't there. If the line isn't there and the Ps aren't there, you have before you an establishment that has five female job classes. It is an all-female establishment. It cannot use proportional value, because there are no male job classes it can use to draw a wage line through. It is in the public sector. If it's in the private sector, it's not obliged to use proxy. So it's a public sector organization, five female job classes.

It has determined that it has three key female job classes. One of those will obviously be the one with the largest number of females in it. The other two are job classes that are viewed by that organization as essential to the delivery of that organization's services.

It sends the information about the three key female job classes over to a proxy establishment, having obtained an order from the pay equity office and having looked up on the schedule what the acceptable proxy organizations are for that particular seeking organization. The proxy organization sends back information about the duties and content of jobs that are similar in function. For the key female job that's at about value 2, the proxy organization was able to identify three jobs that were similar in function. For key female job 4 there was one job that was similar in function, and for key female job value 6 the proxy organization found two jobs that were similar in function.

They sent over information that allowed the establishment, the seeking organization, to determine what the adjusted wage rates would be for those adjusted female job classes that the information was sent over on. These Ps are female job classes from the proxy organization that have been adjusted up by the pay equity adjustment in that proxy organization. They're already topped up. Then you can do proportional value. Then you can draw your line through the Ps, and the pay equity adjustments are the vertical dotted lines that are required to take the female job classes up to that line.

That's about as simply as I'm able to attempt to explain proxy, but I think it gives you a sense of the role of the seeking organization and the proxy organization.

By the way, if comparing female to female doesn't sound to you like pay equity, remember that the female job classes provided by the proxy have already been compared to male job classes and been adjusted. It was found that attempting to use a male job class directly would be overly difficult. The first challenge would be deciding which one, remembering that the seeker and the proxy will likely have evaluated their jobs using different gender-neutral comparison systems. With the similar female job class providing the connection, the problem of selecting the appropriate male job class comparison is resolved.

Proxy comparisons will come into effect and employers will be required to post plans on January 1, 1994 or six months after the amendments come into force, whichever is later. The rules concerning separate plans for each bargaining unit and for when plans are to be deemed approved are the same as for job-to-job and proportional value comparisons. The requirements for what must be included in a proxy pay equity plan are somewhat different.

There is still a bit that I'd like to cover. I've covered the two methodologies. It would take me about 10 to 15 minutes to finish going through the other amendments. Mr Chair, I'm in your hands as to whether you'd like me to proceed and go through the others. I think it's important that at least I have taken you through the methodologies, but I'm happy to finish off if you wish.

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The Chair: We still have some briefings left to go, and I'd like to allow as much time for the committee members to ask questions and make comments, so possibly we could skip by these and let them read them at their own leisure.

Mr Thomas: If I might then --

The Chair: Maybe some highlights.

Mr Thomas: -- members of the committee, just go through some highlights. You've all got my text, so page 21 -- Mr Lessard has already talked about the crown as employer and Kathy Bouey will talk to you more about it.

Under (b) is that there be a --

Ms Poole: Sorry, page 21 of the legislation?

Mr Thomas: Of my text. I'm sorry.

Ms Poole: My briefing notes only go to page 14 for your text, so I wondered if --

Mr Thomas: Sorry, page 11. I apologize. I've been going through double-spaced. Page 11.

Ms Poole: Thanks.

Mr Thomas: (a) is the crown as employer; (b) is a requirement for small employers, private sector ones, to post; (c) enables the government to potentially define and limit the maintenance obligations; (d) changes the deadline for achieving pay equity; (e) is the provisions for sale of a business to make sure the purchaser takes the pay equity plan, as well, that was with the vendor company; (f) is a procedure for revising the pay equity plan in the case of a changed circumstance; (g) is minor, and I'll just skip over it.

At the bottom of page 12: Currently, the authority of a review officer to issue orders dealing with contraventions of the act that are not directly related to pay equity plans is confined to contravention of the obligation to achieve pay equity. The review officers don't, for example, have the authority to deal with the reprisal complaints; those go directly to the tribunal. The amendments will broaden the scope of the review officer authority and potentially reduce the number of cases that must be dealt with.

Paragraph (k) gives statutory foundation to the tribunal's current practice of holding a pre-hearing conference.

If I can assume that the rest of my comments are on the record by virtue of being part of the text, I'd like to end by showing you one last chart. The last page of your table handout following the schedule that shows the proxy organizations is a chart called pay equity dates. I think you may find this chart of assistance to you as the week goes on in terms of looking at what the various dates are.

The first column describes the type and size of the employer. There is, of course, the public sector and then there are varying sizes of private sector employers. They are set out differently because they have different timing obligations. The public sector has three methods of pay equity. The private sector has two methods and they are set out there. They're set out because they have different posting and adjustment dates. Down the third column are the posting dates for the public sector and the private sector, depending on what type of pay equity the organization has chosen to use.

The next column shows the first adjustment dates, depending on whether the organization is public or private sector, whether it's using job-to-job, PV, or proxy.

The last two columns indicate the completion date for pay equity and, as you can see, the only organizations set out to have a completion date are those in the public sector and only those in the public sector who use job-to-job and PV. If they use job-to-job and PV, they are required to complete pay equity by 1998. If the public sector is using proxy, it is in no different position from a completion date point of view than the private sector. It is open-ended, provided they spend at least 1% a year on pay equity. That concludes my comments.

Ms Kathy Bouey: I'm Kathy Bouey, assistant deputy minister, broader public sector labour relations secretariat.

Bill 169 serves two purposes. First, it gives effect to the new prohibition proposed in Bill 102 against the government being declared the employer of people working in independent agencies in the broader public sector. Second, the bill will stop the confusion, and the potentially high cost, of deeming broader public sector workers as employees of the province. It ensures that the provincial government will still be able to manage the growth and cost of the public service responsibly.

This bill contains only five sections, which I will review briefly before we take your questions.

The first section amends the definition of crown employee and gives the government the express right to decide who is and who is not employed by the government as a crown employee, public servant or civil servant. The new definition does not affect people who work directly for the crown, either in ministries or on appointment by the Lieutenant Governor in Council; they are still crown employees.

But for people working in crown agencies, the definition means they can only be crown employees if their agencies are designated in the regulations. That is, just working for an agency that is funded or largely funded by the provincial government will not automatically mean you are a crown employee. As a result of this provision, a tribunal won't be able to make a finding of crown employee status based on the financial or operating relationship between an organization and the crown.

This section also amends section 8.1 of the Public Service Act so that civil servant, public servant and crown employee status hinges on being expressly appointed by people and bodies authorized to do so; for example, deputy ministers.

It also provides that the government may further restrict the application of civil servant, public servant or crown employee status by regulating a form of appointment as a requirement for status. This will give the government a course of action if the courts or tribunals interpret the term "expressly appointed" so broadly that it includes people the crown did not intend. If circumstances warrant, this will be proceeded with under the regulatory power described in the bill.

The second section of the bill amends the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act to ensure that the Ontario Public Service Labour Relations Tribunal is bound by this legislation and its regulations.

Under sections 3 and 4, Bill 169 will take effect retroactively to December 18, 1991, the day it was introduced in the Legislature. The existing Public Service Act will apply to applications for crown employee status that were before the public service labour relations tribunal as of that date, but it will not apply to those that come after. This provision has been included to provide a clear signal of the government's intent to assert control over the determination of crown employee status immediately from the date of introduction of this bill.

The fifth section sets out the title of the bill.

Now let me make a brief comment about the draft regulations Wayne Lessard tabled today. This list was drawn up after four months of consultations with legal and human resource directors in all ministries. It sets out the identity of all agencies that will be considered crown agencies for the purposes of defining crown employee status.

You should also note that the regulations don't include Ontario Hydro and the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission. This preserves the current position of their workers. Under current legislation, they're exempt from crown employee status. Now we would be happy to take your questions.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We have an hour left this morning, so what I'd like to do is offer 15 minutes for each of the caucuses for questions and comments and then go back for one final round of five minutes.

Ms Poole: Mr Chair, just to begin with a question for you, when the schedule was originally sent out, three hours were allocated for ministry staff and the minister on Monday and Tuesday. Now that's been cut back to two and a half hours. Quite frankly, 15 minutes won't begin to touch the time we need for questions, so I'm wondering if we can perhaps extend till 12:30 or else bring them back.

The Chair: I'm in the hands of the committee -- understanding that there are certain scheduling factors here from the committee -- as to whether we should extend till 12:30.

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Mr David Winninger (London South): I'd prefer not. In my own case, for example, we already have some meetings scheduled at 12. I thought that was the understanding. So I'd prefer that it not go till 12:30.

Mr Alvin Curling (Scarborough North): Bring them back.

Ms Poole: The first time I received notification that the agenda had changed was at 9:15 today, and I am the critic for women's issues for our party.

The Chair: That was the same time I found out, too.

Ms Poole: I really just don't think 15 minutes is adequate.

Ms Sharon Murdock (Sudbury): If it might help, we could defer our time and allow the opposition to utilize it.

The Chair: Would that be agreeable, a half-hour for each of the two opposition caucuses?

Ms Poole: Okay, fine.

The Chair: Okay. Ms Poole.

Ms Poole: In view of the time constraint, I think we'll delay any comments. Normally, the official opposition and the third party have an opportunity to respond to the minister's comments, but I think we'll delay those till clause-by-clause.

I'd like to start with some questions for the Minister of Labour. I am actually quite astounded by the gall of the minister. If a third party were to come in and look at his comments, he would think that the NDP caucus and the NDP government created pay equity and put in the pay equity legislation in 1987, and that the first mention of extending pay equity came with this government. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

It was the Liberal government that brought in the Pay Equity Act, 1987. In fact, it was the Liberal government that had the sole responsibility for policy development that brought in the pay equity legislation, without input from the NDP. In fact, all the NDP did was carp. So I wanted to state that.

Mrs Caplan: And criticize.

Ms Poole: I wanted to state that very clearly for the record.

Secondly, I was actually quite surprised. Mr Thomas gave us a very good in-depth briefing and mentioned the fact that the Pay Equity Commission had come forward with a very comprehensive proposal for extending pay equity. But through sheer oversight, I'm sure, he didn't mention that in March 1990, the Minister of Labour at the time, a Liberal Minister of Labour, announced that the Liberal government would be proceeding with extending pay equity to approximately 350,000 women through the proportional method. I'm sure that was just an oversight.

I want to talk to the minister about the delay. He has made this statement on page 5, and I'll read from the written text: "At that time, some casual observers," whoever they are, "suggested the government had put its commitment to pay equity on hold for three years. Nothing could be further from the truth."

Mr Minister, I think we could actually extend that -- maybe you're right -- because your commitment to pay equity supposedly began in the fall of 1990 in the throne speech, and yet we saw nothing happen for a full year.

Mrs Caplan: Nothing.

Ms Poole: Absolutely nothing happened.

Finally, in December 1991, you introduced pay equity legislation, but then it just kind of died on the order paper. It was not brought forward. There were no public consultations announced. In fact, when I read your comments about having several models of proxy comparison and how the first model was developed and tested in consultation with stakeholders, we heard nothing of that, absolutely nothing. When we demanded from the minister his comments about why this government was delaying and why you were not coming forward with pay equity, it wasn't even mentioned that you were doing this in secrecy, complete secrecy. Now, apparently, you have a second, more workable proxy model which was created in 1992. We've heard nothing of that either.

I'd like to know from the minister: If in fact you have delayed from 1995 to 1998 the completion date for pay equity in the public sector, how can you possibly say that you have not put pay equity on hold for three years? How can you defend that?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: Number one, I don't think that we've put it on hold for three years.

Mrs Caplan: You can't add.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: We've extended the time frame to which it will apply over that period of time. We have extended the additional proportional and proxy by one year, and that is due, I can tell the honourable member, whether she accepts it or not, to the financial constraints that we find ourselves in in the province of Ontario.

I can also tell her that I'm sorry if she's a little bit peeved about the comments, but we acknowledge that the original act came in in 1987, and it was under, I believe, her government. I could also remind her, of course, that it was part of the accord that we worked so hard on as one of the conditions that we would support them.

Ms Poole: There were two parties to the accord, weren't there?

Mr Thomas: Could I just make a point of information, Ms Poole? I think there were a fair number of public consultations on proxy that occurred over the last couple of years involving a number of organizations, as many as 40 organizations, and I think that part of the problem, quite frankly, has been trying to find a workable model of proxy, for proxy took some time.

Ms Poole: Minister, just to follow up on that, is it not true that if you had brought in Bill 168 when you said you were going to, you wouldn't even have needed to make the sections regarding proportional retroactive? You've put it retroactive to January 1, 1993, and yet at this stage we're still in committee after second reading of the legislation. It has to go through third reading and proclamation. Then employers have six months in which to work with this legislation before they're compelled to comply. So you're basically, for all intents and purposes, going to say to employers that the legislation will be retroactive a full year, that they have to come up with that money, and yet there's been no preparation.

I have heard the deputy minister mention the consultation and I accept his word that it has taken place, but I can tell you, it was certainly not very public, nor very visible. I would like to know what their consultation was with the private sector, because a vast number of those employees affected are in the private sector. You are legislating that retroactive to January 1, 1993, the private sector will have to pay these moneys out, and yet you've told us nothing about how you've prepared anybody for what you're doing. Minister, could you address that, please?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: Yes. I can tell you that as the deputy indicated earlier, there has been extensive consultation, with one or two exceptions that I won't go into here today, probably more consultation on this than on most items that we deal with.

The proportionate value will cover both private and public sector, and the proxy is entirely in the public sector. I'm just simply telling you that there has been extensive consultation on this, and most of the stakeholders and parties know that because they've been involved in it.

Mr Thomas: I think it's also reasonable to presume that most private sector organizations that have been thinking about proportional value and wondering about it have known that something was coming, certainly since Bill 168.

Ms Poole: I have one more question, then I'd like to turn over the questioning to Ms Caplan and Mr Curling, who I'm sure have a number of questions.

According to the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, the first payouts they'll see from this government's pay equity will be 1995. Lo and behold, Mr Minister, 1995 is an election year. Isn't that a surprise? The payouts will come in an election year, and yet the payment for those payouts will be borne by any successive government, and all indications are that it will not be an NDP government that will have to take the deficit burden. Would you like to discuss that portion of your exquisite timing?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I think it's a coincidence, not an exception --

Ms Poole: Oh, a remarkable coincidence.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: -- and I must say that I don't agree with the member's comment on who will have the responsibility following the election, because I think it'll be back in the hands of this government.

Ms Poole: I think the minister lives in some sort of dream world, but I guess he's entitled to his fantasies.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: At least it's based on 18 years here, I can say to the honourable member.

Ms Poole: And two very deadly years in government.

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Mr Thomas: Could I just follow on to the minister's answer? I believe there was a wage enhancement to that sector in 1991 of $2,000 a person, and if I recall correctly, the proportional value, or PV payouts will be six months after the proclamation date, which could well put them in 1994, and they are retroactive. When the payout does happen, it is retroactive to January 1, 1993.

Mrs Caplan: I would like to ask a couple of questions as they relate first on Bill 169. I found parts of that actually quite interesting. As you know, I spoke at some length in the Legislature on the provisions of this legislation, and I think it should be pointed out and the question I would ask is for clarification that this has implications far beyond pay equity. This piece of legislation not only amends for the purposes of pay equity but the quote is "and any other reason." I'd like to pursue that a little bit as well. Is that correct?

Ms Bouey: I believe it does affect determinations that might be made by the public service labour relations tribunal as to who is the employer for, for example, collective bargaining purposes.

Mrs Caplan: There are three cases that come to mind that I'd like you to discuss with me, if you would. On the first page of your regulations made under the Public Service Act, I found it quite interesting that you have as number 18 McKechnie Ambulance Service. That reminds me of a determination that was made by the tribunal which I believe in fact is the rationale for this whole amendment, but I find it interesting.

I know the previous government declared all ambulance workers who worked for private agencies providing this service as technically crown employees for the purposes of collective bargaining. The previous government did that. I believe this regulation made under the Public Service Act designating agencies puts in place by regulation that which was announced by policy. Is that correct, or does this go further?

Ms Barbara Sulzenko: There are 31 ambulance services that have been declared by the public service labour relations tribunal to be crown agencies, and those agencies are mentioned in this draft regulation. Any other ambulance services that have not been found to be crown agencies under CECBA are not included at this point in the regulation.

Mrs Caplan: And what is your intention?

Ms Sulzenko: There has been an examination of governments in the ambulance sector by a labour relations expert, Mr Swimmer, under the directive of the Minister of Health. That report is now in. It's under review by the government and no decisions have been taken.

Mrs Caplan: By the way, McKechnie had nothing to do with pay equity. Is that correct?

Ms Sulzenko: That's right, as far as I understand it, yes.

Mrs Caplan: If this legislation had been in place, what effect would that have had on the McKechnie Ambulance decision as made by the labour relations tribunal?

Ms Sulzenko: It would have prevented the declaration of McKechnie as a crown agency and its employees as crown employees.

Mrs Caplan: And I'd repeat again, that had nothing to do with pay equity.

Ms Sulzenko: That's correct.

Mrs Caplan: It has also been the position of OPSEU in its negotiations with the government to expand the definitions of what are crown agencies. Was it not their stated intention to proceed with other crown agencies; having had the McKechnie decision, to attempt to use that as a precedent?

Ms Sulzenko: McKechnie did give rise to another 30 ambulance services being declared to be crown agencies.

Mrs Caplan: Just to clarify once again, this legislation which is before us today under the guise of pay equity has much broader-reaching implications than simply pay equity and would have nullified the McKechnie decision if it had been in place at that time?

Ms Bouey: If I could just clarify, if McKechnie had not been listed as a crown agency, it would have nullified it, yes.

Mrs Caplan: The second question I have is the case of Kingston-Frontenac. I think that was a children's aid society.

Ms Sulzenko: Yes.

Mrs Caplan: Could you tell us the status of that case?

Ms Bouey: The government has indicated its intention to judicially review that case. A decision in favour of the government being the employer for pay equity purposes was made by the pay equity tribunal.

Mrs Caplan: What will be the effect when this legislation's passed retroactive to December 1991 on that case?

Ms Sulzenko: It will have no impact on that case because this legislation exempts from the application of this bill those situations that were in front of the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal as of the introduction of the bill in December 1991.

Mrs Caplan: If this legislation had been in place at that time, what would have been the effect on that case?

Ms Sulzenko: Kingston-Frontenac could not have been declared a crown agency and its employees crown employees for the purposes of pay equity.

Mrs Caplan: The third case is the Haldimand-Norfolk case. Could you review the status of that case, please?

Ms Sulzenko: I have reviewed your remarks during second reading and I'm not sure exactly what you referred to in the case of Haldimand-Norfolk. As I understand in the case of Haldimand-Norfolk, the police were declared to be employees of the municipality and would not be affected by this legislation.

Mrs Caplan: Could you clarify that again? It permitted the nurses to be compared with police?

Ms Sulzenko: That's right, but only by virtue of the police being declared to be employees of the municipality as opposed to being employees of the police commission.

Mrs Caplan: I think it went a step further actually. I think that the nurses were declared employees of the municipality as opposed to being employees of the health unit. Under the Health Protection and Promotion Act, the nurses are technically employees of the public health unit and the challenge by the nurses' union was that the nurses should be able to be declared municipal employees.

I ask that you check that so we could have some discussion about what the implications of this legislation will be on those kinds of situations and, again, what it would have been on that case and as a precedent for other female-dominated categories.

Ms Sulzenko: We'll do so.

Mrs Caplan: Good. Thank you. How much time is remaining, Mr Chair?

The Chair: About 12 minutes.

Mrs Caplan: I'd like some clarification. On page 4, you refer to a loophole through which pay equity review officers and the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal could name the province as the employer. Could you define what that loophole was?

Ms Sulzenko: The existing legislation does not define "the employer" for the purposes of pay equity and, as a result of the absence of that definition, it has been impossible for the pay equity office and the hearings tribunal to make a declaration as to who is the pay equity employer. This is one of the objectives of the government in seeking to ascertain the right of only the government to determine who is a crown employee or a government employee for the purposes of pay equity.

Mrs Caplan: I guess the question that I have is -- you defined it as a loophole.

Ms Sulzenko: I think the word "loophole" is really referring to the fact that it wasn't the intention of the legislation at the time to result in numerous employees of independent agencies in the broader public sector becoming public servants; it was the purpose of that legislation simply to ensure that people are able to achieve pay equity. In so far as if left unremedied it could lead to many employees being added to the ranks of the public service, it is in fact a loophole because it was not intended by the legislators at the time.

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Mrs Caplan: How is that different from what exists today in CECBA for those such as the ambulance workers and so forth who had been pressing and making their case under the existing legislation to have themselves declared crown employees as in the McKechnie Ambulance decision? Would you have called that a loophole as well?

Ms Sulzenko: I think the parallel is an apt one because certainly it was not an intention of this or previous governments that numerous employees of broader public sector agencies would become public servants.

Mrs Caplan: The next question I have has to do with the initial phase-in and so forth. My question I guess would be to the minister or the parliamentary assistant. Would you say that this legislation, which removes the obligation of the broader public sector, ie, the government as the payor, to complete the pay equity adjustments within a time frame -- it removes that time frame -- is therefore weakened by removing that time frame for the completion of pay equity? Would you say the previous legislation that was in place was more onerous on the government?

Mr Thomas: If you were referring to me, I'm the Deputy Minister of Labour, not the parliamentary assistant.

Secondly, I don't think it substantially changes the concept. It simply makes it more fiscally affordable by extending it out over three years. I don't think it changes the commitment level to pay equity, because there still is a completion date. The completion date has been moved back from 1995 to 1998. The only part of the public sector pay equity that does not have a completion date is the proxy methodology, which is the same as the private sector and goes on for ever.

Mrs Caplan: Could you table any of the analyses and studies of the proxy model that you studied so that we could have some indication, since you've raised the issue, of affordability and fiscal responsibility as it relates to the use of the proxy comparator? I'm assuming that you have extensive studies on what the effect of that will be on the broader public sector. Could I ask that it be tabled today, if you have it?

Mr Thomas: I'd like to look into that. I know that we have a consultation document, which was shared with people, as to what is the most appropriate proxy organization and why and why don't we look at what we can do there.

Mrs Caplan: Let me put my concern out so that you can hopefully address it. It's my understanding and assumption, given the knowledge I have of the proxy method, that it could prove to be very costly. What we have seen has been limited transfer payments by this government and in fact a lessening of the support for pay equity adjustments by the government due to the economic mess it's created by its economic policies.

The problem I have is that we have seen layoffs. Nurses are losing their jobs, child care workers are losing their jobs, women are losing their jobs because of the inadequate transfer payments of this government. Unless there's a commitment that the transfer payments will be adequate and the pay equity adjustments will be adequate, your proxy comparator could just result in job loss in the province, particularly among those who are most vulnerable and at the lowest end of the wage scale in those very agencies that are going to be affected by this legislation because of the inadequate support from the provincial government.

I'd like to see the analyses to satisfy myself that this will not occur and that the government will be able to afford to support what I think would be potentially expensive in the area of proxy comparison. That's the purpose. I would ask that those studies be tabled because I don't think that we can consider this proposal without seeing the economic studies and the impact and cost analyses.

My colleague would like to use the time remaining. How much time is left, Mr Chair?

The Chair: There are six minutes left.

Ms Bouey: May I just respond to a couple of the points there? First of all, the proxy provisions in the bill require an expenditure of a minimum of 1% of payroll, but they do not oblige the employer to make more than 1% of payroll per year. Secondly, the government has indicated its intention of funding 100% of proxy costs subject to some guidelines which will be released in time for agencies to be able to figure out what is included in that plan.

Mrs Caplan: I guess the concern I have is that this NDP government has not funded 100% of the pay equity expenditures that have been experienced to date. I know there's a lot of mistrust, because on the one hand the transfer payments are not even sufficient to cover existing costs and the effect in the broader public sector has been devastating as services have been cut, so the promises of -- in 1995 and 1996 and 1997 and 1998 when, who knows, most of us suspect this NDP government will not be there, commits future governments in a way which I think is fiscally irresponsible, unless we see the analyses that show that it's affordable.

Ms Bouey: I think the situation is that because the pay equity plans are being done on such a decentralized basis -- there's just no sort of central filing of it, if you like -- we don't really know exactly what the pay equity costs to be incurred in a specific year will be. An allocation is determined and then distribution is done on the basis of that allocation for job-to-job and proportional value. It bears in mind the historical rate of support that these agencies have received. But for proxy the commitment has been made: It will be 100%, subject to guidelines, of what's included.

Mrs Caplan: I find the statement is unbelievable, that the government doesn't know what the cost is going to be from year to year.

Ms Bouey: The government knows the costs of maturity, but the exact pace of the plans will depend on agreements that are reached between employees and their employers and so on, and there's no way of predicting that.

Mrs Caplan: Thank you. With the four minutes remaining --

Ms Poole: I had two final questions. The first refers to the exemption under both the Pay Equity Act, 1987, and under Bill 102, which doesn't change that, the exemption of businesses that have fewer than 10 employees.

At the time that pay equity legislation was passed, the NDP opposition was extremely critical of this. In fact, both Brian Charlton and Evelyn Gigantes, who are ministers under this current government, ridiculed and lambasted the Liberal government of the time for not including them. The Liberal government had said it would put an onerous burden on small businesses. Secondly, in small businesses, quite often they didn't have specific job roles and many of the people did all the jobs and it would be extremely difficult and extremely onerous on small business.

I would like to know, Mr Mackenzie, since your caucus has been officially on the record for a number of years as including businesses with fewer than 10 employees, why is it not in Bill 102 and why was it not in Bill 168?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I can tell you first that the issue of businesses with nine or fewer employees will be assessed again in 1995.

Mrs Caplan: Another election promise.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I can tell you that in the interim, with the legislation that's before us here today, we have added 420,000 women who were not covered under the bill that came in in 1987, and I think that's an indication of process and progress. Also, I can simply say that we have had to deal with a financial problem in the province of Ontario and there's no question that's part of the reason for some of the changes in timing.

Ms Poole: It's nice to hear that the minister was wrong in his initial assessment of whether small business should be included. Just for the minister's information, as I'm sure he has forgotten, a Liberal Minister of Labour announced in March 1990 that the Liberal government would be proceeding with bringing an additional 350,000 women under the act, so I don't think you can take the credit that you are.

Relating to the remaining women --

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The Acting Chair (Mr Will Ferguson): Thank you very much, Ms Poole. Your time is up. It's 11:30; you started at 11 o'clock. Over to the Conservative caucus, Mr Tilson.

Mr David Tilson (Dufferin-Peel): I don't want to get into a debate on this subject as to whether this was a Liberal idea or whether this is an NDP idea. I'll let the two of you decide that.

Mr Mackenzie, through you, Mr Chair, you commented -- at least I believe it was you who commented -- in your remarks on the recent statistics that were put forward by Statistics Canada on women's pay coming closer to men's. There was a news clipping which I have before me of the Toronto Star, January 15, which refers to nationally women earning about 69.6% of what men earned in 1991, which is up from 67.6% in 1990. It indicates that the wage gap has diminished gradually. In fact, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women says that this is at a snail's pace, that equal pay for work of equal value would take for ever, the way things seem to be moving.

The statistics were given for the province of Ontario in this same report of Statistics Canada. It states that in 1991 women earned 69.8 cents for every dollar made by a male counterpart, but that Ontario men and women recorded the highest average earnings, and then it lists what that is.

Mr Minister, this legislation, the existing legislation which we have in the province of Ontario, which has been pay equity legislation, is unlike any other Canadian jurisdiction. I guess my question is, why is the increase so gradual? Comparing it to other jurisdictions across this country, with this legislation, why aren't things moving any faster -- that's not quite true, but marginally faster -- than they are in jurisdictions which do not have the legislation Ontario has?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I presume from your question that like myself, you'd very much like to see it move much faster, and I'd have no difficulty with that if we were in a financial position to do it. I think what we're dealing with are the realities of the current economic situation.

Mr Tilson: My question is, what's wrong with our legislation? Why is it only moving, to use Ms Maureen Leyland of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women -- she's referring to it on a national level, but I'm sure her comments would refer to it on a provincial level as well. Why, with this legislation that we have in the province of Ontario, is it moving at only a snail's pace, to compare it to provinces that don't have our legislation?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I can't verify your figures. You may or may not be right.

Mr Tilson: Statistics Canada is what I'm referring to.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: It's moving and it's moving in the right direction and I think that's important. But we're also dealing with a province, as you know, that's been harder hit than other province in terms of a number of factors that we deal with financially. What we are trying to do is to meet the goals of the Pay Equity Act in as responsible and quick a manner as we can. What we have come up with at the moment is a direction that keeps us going in the right direction.

Mr Thomas: Could I just follow on that, Mr Tilson, for a minute? First of all, it's important to recognize that even if one achieves pay equity at maturity, one does not necessarily eliminate the gap. The 30% figure or the 30-cent figure you're talking about does not disappear completely, because there are other factors that contribute to the gap besides the kind of systemic problems that the Pay Equity Act is aimed at solving; for example, the length of service in the workforce, the kind of training etc that are available to women. Those are the kinds of factors that would say that even if you achieve complete pay equity, you would not end up having wiped out the total gap that we're talking about here.

My second point would be that the Pay Equity Act has, in effect, set up a regime of payouts that has put the heaviest obligation on the public sector and then decreasing obligations on the private sector, decreasing in terms of the size of the company. I gather those were done for purposes that were related to the economic viability of business, giving the smaller businesses more of a chance to get ready for, prepare for and fund pay equity.

Mr Tilson: I guess my question is just simply an obvious one and that is that considering the increases have been marginal compared to the rest of the country -- really, provinces that do not have this legislation -- is the legislation working? You're now expanding on this legislation. You're expanding on legislation that, maybe suggested particularly by some of the women's groups, isn't working the way it should.

Mr Thomas: I think it is working the way it should. There have been --

Mr Tilson: No. Statistics Canada, sir, says it's not, that it's no different from provinces that don't even have this legislation.

Mr Thomas: I think the provinces are different too, Mr Tilson. I don't think even those who think we may be moving too slowly would tell you that they don't want to proceed with the legislation.

Ms Bouey: Can I just clarify that you're talking about 1991 data, I believe. I think it's important to remember that even for the public sector, the first payments didn't have to go out till 1990 and that the obligation was a bit later for the private sector.

Mr Tilson: I'm talking about 1987 legislation and I'm talking about the most recent --

Ms Bouey: But the 1987 legislation required pay equity plans to be posted by 1990, but the payouts were actually not required to begin till 1990.

Mr Thomas: And only posted in the public sector and the larger private sector. There are still employers in the private sector who do not have an obligation to post. I think January 1, 1994, is the last posting date for the smaller employers, who may in fact have a large percentage of the workforce.

Mr Tilson: I listened to you, I listened to your presentation and I'm watching these charts you've been preparing, these tables, and I appreciate your comments that you have tried to make this as simple as possible for us to understand. I say to you that this process is very difficult to understand. Maybe I'm alone. Maybe other members of the committee find it very easy to understand this process and what you're saying. Maybe we're alone.

I guess my question to you is, if I am right that this process is very difficult to understand philosophically and to interpret, I am sure there are going to be women across this province who, like me, will find it difficult to understand. How are these women, and I, going to better understand what in the world you're talking about?

Mr Thomas: I think the tables probably become more complicated as you move from table 1 to table 4. I would hazard a guess that table 1 was complicated and difficult to understand when the legislation was introduced in 1987. I would think that most employers out there are now fairly comfortable with the job-to-job system that's set out in table 1, and that's because they've learned to live with it.

The commission has done a lot of work in terms of education and outreach and training, and I would expect that a similar situation will unfold with respect to proportional value and proxy, that there will be a requirement for and a capacity by the office to do a lot of education and training to make sure that people do understand how the other two methods work.

Mr Tilson: I say to you that this is very heavy on a bureaucracy and that it's going to cost someone -- business, the employer -- a lot to understand this. They have an obligation, according to the legislation being put forward, to make sure the employees, the women of this province understand it. Someone's got to pay for this. Someone's going to be paying high-priced consultants to explain this to us. It may well be that I'm wrong because this is easy to understand. I don't think I am; I think I'm right that it's very difficult to understand. So on that assumption, my question to you is: What educational program does the government have to put forward so that the employers, the employees, the women of this province can understand what in the world you're talking about?

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Mr Thomas: The first point is that I think the private sector employer never has to learn about proxy; we start with that. So the private sector employer doesn't need to learn table 4. The private sector employer needs to learn what the principles are behind tables 2 and 3. I come back to what I said before: The pay equity office has done an excellent job over the past few years in putting out guidelines, directives and information circulars. I believe they're going to be talking to you later this week and you'll have an opportunity perhaps to ask them what they've done, because they've done a very excellent job of educating the province on job-to-job and I'm sure they will do the same thing with respect to proportional value.

Mr Tilson: Can you provide this committee with the cost to the government of pay equity, to implement the pay equity from 1987 to now?

Mr Thomas: Yes, and perhaps Kathy can help me, but my recollection is that the Ontario Public Service's pay equity plan, which I'm familiar with, cost the government about $120 million. That was about 3.5% or 3.6% of payroll. In 1991-92 the government paid about $47 million in pay equity costs to the broader public sector against a target of $75 million and I believe this year the government has allocated up to $240 million for pay equity going into the broader public sector. Until the surveys are in and the cheques are cut we won't know exactly how much of that $240 million will actually be spent.

Mr Tilson: I'm going to ask the question again. I know it was asked, but it seems logical; you're getting us into something and you must have some idea what it will cost. What is it going to cost the taxpayer of this province to implement these pieces of legislation?

Mr Thomas: The cost really over time hasn't -- the end rate hasn't changed. The government committed to spending $1 billion at maturity for pay equity in the public service and the broader public sector. The government remains committed to spending that $1 billion. It will be extended out, though, over three more years.

Mr Tilson: What's it going to cost next year?

Mr Thomas: I don't know.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I don't think you can come up with that figure hard until we know what the information is that we get back from the survey and what some of the payments are going to cost us.

Mr Tilson: Are you telling me that you have no cost analysis, that you're getting us into something with no cost analysis? Is that what you're telling us?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: No. What I'm telling you is that right from the beginning of this, the figure of $1 billion to maturity was used. That's still the general outline of what we're involved in, and of course we can measure that against whether or not we should be proceeding with pay equity. I'd be interested in knowing if that's your position, Mr Tilson.

Mr Tilson: You're answering the questions, Mr Minister. You're the one who's putting these pieces of legislation forward, and we're entitled to know -- you're getting us into something -- what your information is, if you have any, as to what it's going to cost the taxpayer of this province. If you have no idea, that's fine. You've told us that.

Mr Thomas: Mr Tilson, if I can just respond further, the costing that went into Bill 168 suggested that for 1993 and 1994 the expenditures would be something in the $650-million range, leaving out the Ontario Public Service, which has already been completed. The delays that have been put in through Bill 102 would substantially reduce that commitment.

Mr Tilson: I have one more question, Mr Chairman, and then I think Mr Arnott has a few questions. This delay, or whatever terminology you want to use -- I guess this may be a question to the minister or whoever wishes to field it, but it's a policy question so perhaps it would be more appropriate to the minister. The delay -- and the Treasurer has said we have to delay it because of the financial problems this province is in. I understand that; we all understand that. The difficulty is business and industry, and you have taken great pride in talking about the partnership you were forging with business and industry. You've taken great pride in boasting about that. I don't agree with you, but that's what you've said. Business and industry in this province, Mr Minister, as you know, have been devastated by this recession we're in, but there have been no changes by you to their obligations -- none. Do you not feel that business and industry are having the same problems as government?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I would point out that we've extended the period of time. We haven't decided that we're not proceeding. I think the difference is that we've made the decision that this is a fundamental issue that's important to the people. There is an issue of fairness here. I think we'd have a hell of a time, for example, saying that we're going to pay women members of this provincial Parliament 70 cents on the dollar as to what the men are getting, and I'm not sure that doesn't apply to almost every other occupation.

Mr Tilson: Mr Arnott will have some questions on that topic which I think you'll find interesting.

I guess my question is that in effect you're creating an inequity. You've got one group of women in the public sector and one group of women in the private sector, and there's an inequity there. Whatever you're doing -- I don't want to play with the words you're saying -- the fact is that one piece of legislation is taking effect now and one piece of legislation has been delayed, adjourned, put on hold, whatever wording you want to use. The fact of the matter is that you are creating an inequity between groups of women in this province. Would you comment on that?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I don't agree with you. We've decided that in the public sector we've extended the time period over three years. There is still a requirement in the private sector as well as the broader public that there's 1% a year going into it. Whatever they're going to be able to achieve, there has not been a time frame set on the private sector.

Mr Tilson: I'm afraid the women in the business and industry sectors do not agree with you, Mr Minister.

Mrs Caplan: They feel betrayed.

Mr Tilson: Mr Arnott has a few questions.

The Chair: You have about 12 minutes left.

Mr Ted Arnott (Wellington): Minister, we welcome you to this committee today. I'm very privileged to be here on behalf of the people of Wellington to represent their views today.

When I speak to people about pay equity in the riding of Wellington, I find that many people's understanding of pay equity is that pay equity means, for all intents and purposes, equal pay for equal work. What you're talking about here with your definition of pay equity is something very, very different: equal pay for work of equal value. Of course, what it means is the government taking the initiative to step into the relationship between employers and employees to make a value judgement on the pay packets that employers have been giving out, assessing them and indicating what they should be changed to. It's a very, very different concept than equal pay for equal work.

I'm interested in the cost projections you have put forward for the cost of pay equity implementation. In doing a bit of research on this prior to coming to the committee, I find that in the Agenda for People, the campaign document you ran on -- I believe you were the critic for the Ministry of Labour immediately prior to becoming minister when the NDP was elected -- there was a cost attached to the full implementation of pay equity so that all women in Ontario would be within pay equity legislation. The cost figure that was put in that document was $60 million. I think you were the critic at the time. How was that figure established?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: Somebody's going to have to go back to the figures of the document. I can't remember using the cost of $60 million at any time in the pay equity legislation. To achieve pay equity -- I think that's the goal -- it's going to cost a heck of a lot more than that. I don't think anybody has ever argued that you're going to do it for $60 million.

Mr Arnott: It certainly is. I also know that the Premier, almost a year ago to the day, was quoted in the Globe and Mail on January 17. The headline was, "Restraint Won't Affect Pay Equity, Rae Says." His quote is, "I think it's important to send a clear signal that even in the toughest of circumstances, we're not going to forget the social justice agenda." A year later, you're arguing that it is simply being delayed, that the government's commitment is still there, but in fact there is a strong possibility that the New Democrats will not be in power by 1998 and you're not going to be able to continue to see this commitment through which you say you've made for yourself.

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Given the Premier's, I would think, considerable embarrassment at this statement that was made about a year ago, I would think that before proceeding any further, it would be sensible politically for you to undertake a full-cost assessment of pay equity so that you can put that out in the public domain to explain to people what it's going to cost.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I think the only point I would make, once again, is that we've made it clear that there is an extension of the period of time but that we have not abandoned the pay equity campaign or program. I guess you're entitled to your own views when it comes to who's going to have the responsibility to see whether this is able to continue or whether it will get cancelled down the road.

Mr Thomas: If I may just correct one point I think you made, Mr Arnott, just to be clear, the government doesn't normally get involved in the pay equity dealings between the parties.

Mr Arnott: Don't you set up the plans they generate?

Mr Thomas: No, the parties are free to negotiate whatever agreement they can reach on pay equity, provided that they live within a certain framework that's set out by the act; for example, that the schedule of payments is at least 1% a year. Beyond that, as long as the parties can agree with each other on the pay equity plan, including who gets payouts, who gets how much and when they get them, the government is not involved, the pay equity office is not involved, just to be clear on that.

Mr Arnott: However, if the annualized payout were less than 1% per year, you would step in and tell the employer and the employee who had come to that agreement that their pay equity plan was unacceptable.

Mr Thomas: It tends to be complaint-driven. It tends to be one of the parties coming out and saying there's a problem.

Mr Arnott: Are you saying you've not rejected any pay equity plan?

Mr Thomas: No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that, by and large, I think the figures show that the vast majority of pay equity situations that have occurred in the province of Ontario have been dealt with by the workplace parties themselves, the employers and the bargaining agents.

Mr Arnott: But the government maintains the right to intervene if a plan is unacceptable.

Mr Thomas: Yes.

Mr Arnott: I'm wondering why we need proxy comparisons in the public service to increase salaries and wages of employees. I'm wondering why, if you felt that was a desirable objective, Minister, you would not simply increase the salary component of transfer grants to the broader public service, an increase which would allow it to bring up the pay levels to the level that you feel is desirable for specific employees. Is there any fundamental reason why you could not do that without bringing in a pay equity bill such as this one?

Mr Thomas: I think the problem you face, Mr Arnott, is that you used the words "a level that you think is desirable." That's a fairly subjective level established by government, in effect, for potentially hundreds and hundreds of broader public sector workplaces where in fact the workplaces themselves ought to be given a methodology to determine what ought to be the appropriate level. Proxy does that.

Mr Arnott: Had they not already done that to some degree by isolating specific groups? You mentioned specific groups -- child care workers and nurses, for example -- which will be helped through pay equity changes. Are you not specifically isolating certain groups of employees in that instance?

Mr Thomas: What we're doing with the proxy schedule, essentially, is trying to identify those kinds of organizations that probably will have a difficult time achieving pay equity through job-to-job and proportional value and making sure they have a proxy organization they can move to.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: In other words, if they have no male comparatives to use in their existing operation, they can go outside of their existing operation to look for a comparator. They're the seeker and there are others who have achieved pay equity and they make the application to the commission and see that they have an avenue to achieve pay equity. There are 80,000 women in that category who are not covered under the proportional value.

Mr Arnott: There's no statutory or regulatory impediment to the government doing that, though, being, as you say, subjective in picking out certain groups for increases. That's what I was asking, and I gather that's not the case.

Changing gears, I suppose, to the issue of the difference between the private sector employers and the public sector employers, you concede, Minister, that you have extended the time frame for which public sector pay equity will come into effect. That has not been the case for the private sector. There has been no change for the time of implementation.

You suggest that the economic difficulties that the province is facing, and I assume the revenue situation that you're facing, the high deficit, the high debt that's being added on each year, is reason enough to delay it.

Do you not understand that there are thousands of businesses and small firms out there that are struggling for their very survival at the present time in this difficult economy? They are facing the same economy that you're facing. Do you not understand that a company with 12, 13 or 14 employees -- I mean, you suggested that you've given them plenty of information. Many of them, in their very struggle for survival, are finding it difficult to keep their revenues high enough to pay their bills. In a complex matter such as this that is being asked of them, demanded of them, by government, many of them don't have time to read the information that the government is sending them on a regular basis.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I think one of the things that either you're forgetting or we haven't explained well enough is that the private sector never did have a time frame. It was 1% of payroll a year until they had achieved it. That hasn't changed.

Mr Arnott: There has to be an adjustment for certain companies by January 1, 1994.

Mr Thomas: Yes, but the fact of the matter is, Mr Arnott, the Pay Equity Act was set up in a way that put a higher burden on the public sector, including reaching pay equity by a specific date, which was 1995 in the current act, and the bill moved that to 1998.

There was no end date for the private sector, so I would argue that the private sector, for the last three or four years, has been able to budget its 1% a year and plan for that, and it keeps doing that until it reaches pay equity. All we've done for the private sector in the bill in fact is to extend proportional value's start date to January 1, 1993, from January 1, 1992.

To Mr Tilson's question about what we have done for business, business has a one-year delay in when it has to start proportional value, compared to what was in Bill 168. It's important to distinguish between when you have to start doing something and when you have to finish it. Private sector employers have no finishing dates.

Mr Arnott: Yes, but the initiation date is a starting point where money is going to be coming out of the business.

Mr Thomas: For proportional value, that's been moved from 1992 to 1993, and I think that's the change that would impact on employers.

Mr Arnott: Your argument is that that's acceptable to business, and I don't agree.

The Chair: Two more minutes.

Mr Arnott: An interesting thought came to my mind when we were doing the briefing. In the hierarchy of the Ministry of Labour, a deputy minister reports to the parliamentary assistant to the minister. Does the deputy minister report to the parliamentary assistant to the minister directly in terms of the organizational hierarchy of the ministry?

Mr Thomas: I hadn't thought that through. I think it's a joint relationship. What do you think?

Mr Arnott: But when you're talking about pay equity, equal pay for work of equal value, and you say you're going to make that determination based on skill, effort, experience --

Mr Thomas: Skill, effort, responsibility, working conditions and so on.

Mr Arnott: -- it's interesting to me that the ministers in this place are paid less generally than the deputy ministers.

Ms Murdock: Yes.

Mr Arnott: When you look at pay equity, I'm just curious as to how that comes into play.

Mr Tilson: Trying to get some more money for you, Sharon.

Mr Arnott: Now, they may be men or women -- the deputy minister might be female. There's no specific --

Mr Thomas: The simplistic answer is that pay equity deals with systemic discrimination.

Interjections.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Arnott.

Mr Thomas: A good point to end.

The Chair: Mr Minister Bob Mackenzie, parliamentary assistant Wayne Lessard, James Thomas, Ms Evans, Ms Bouey and Ms Sulzenko, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules this morning and giving us your presentation. Mr Tilson?

Mr Tilson: I'd just carry on with an issue that was raised by Ms Poole. We too have a number of questions. These are all policy questions, administrative questions. Who are we going to ask them of? I don't want to talk between 12 and 12:30. Is there another time being set aside by this committee to enable us to ask questions of, if not the minister, at the very least some of the staff?

Mrs Caplan: Could I suggest, Mr Chair, that the subcommittee might meet to set aside some additional time for the committee members to have an opportunity to discuss this perhaps with the minister or parliamentary assistant but certainly with the staff prior to the beginning of clause-by-clause?

The Chair: Or we could meet at 1:15 today and talk this over at the subcommittee meeting. Would that be agreeable, one person from each caucus?

Interjections.

The Chair: It could be anybody. Would that be possible?

I would advise the committee that there are usually technical people around during the public hearings to answer any technical questions that come up also. Ms Poole.

Ms Poole: Yes, Mr Chair. I'd just like to make a motion that we commence at the beginning of scheduled hearing time regardless of whether all caucuses are represented or all members are present.

The Chair: Agreed. Being as we have a fairly tight schedule, that's exactly what the Chair was going to use his discretion and do. Thank you very much. We'll have a 1:15 meeting with the subcommittee. This committee stands recessed until 1:30 this afternoon.

The committee recessed at 1201.

AFTERNOON SITTING

The committee resumed at 1332.

The Chair: I'd like to call this committee back to order.

Your subcommittee met on January 18, 1993, and agreed to the following: first, that the ministry staff will be invited to appear before the committee on Monday, February 1, 1993; second, that clause-by-clause will commence on Tuesday, February 2, 1993; and, third, that each party shall have an opportunity to make a statement at the commencement of clause-by-clause.

Any questions or comments? All those in favour? Opposed? Carried.

EQUAL PAY COALITION

The Chair: I will proceed now by calling forward our first presenters, from the Equal Pay Coalition. Would you please come forward. Good afternoon. As just a reminder, you'll be allowed up to an hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you'd leave some time at the end for some questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could each of you please identify yourself for Hansard and then proceed.

Ms Daina Green: I'm Daina Green, with the Equal Pay Coalition.

Ms Maria Luja: I'm Maria Luja. I'm the pay equity coordinator for the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation.

Ms Muriel Collins: I'm Muriel Collins. I am the national chair of CUPE's women's task force.

Ms Pat Bird: Pat Bird, representative of Times Change Women's Employment Service to the Equal Pay Coalition.

Ms Catherine Bowman: Catherine Bowman, the executive director of the Association of Allied Health Professionals of Ontario.

The Chair: Thank you. Please proceed.

Ms Green: Thank you and good afternoon to all the committee members. We hope to be presenting for about half an hour and to leave about half an hour for questions this afternoon.

We're very pleased for the opportunity to appear before the committee as well as submit a brief, because our brief is very complete and also in a way very technical. What we hope to do in our presentation today is to give you more of a sense of the themes that the Equal Pay Coalition has been concerned about in regard to Bill 102.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the Equal Pay Coalition's role in pay equity in the development of legislation. We are a very broad-based group that started in 1976. We continue to have a very active and broad base. On page 1 of your brief you'll see a list of the organizations that are members of the coalition. Today we have with us members primarily from trade union organizations, and also from Times Change Women's Employment Service.

We have a history of lobbying. We've been before almost every committee that's ever been dreamed up to discuss pay equity in the governmental arena, and we have been pushing very hard for effective legislation and for amendments to that legislation to continue to make the legislation stronger and more like equal pay for work of equal value.

We of course are not really sure what you were briefed about this morning, but we're sure that you know quite a bit about the way pay equity legislation works in principle and also in this province. But we just would like to remind you of the basics. One thing is that there have always been a lot of women left out of this legislation.

In the actual legislation there is a requirement that the government study and come forward with recommendations about proportional value. That promise was made five years ago and now we are finally looking at the implementation of that. We have been pushing for this and we sometimes feel that if we hadn't been pushing and organizing other groups to keep pushing, we might not be here today. So we do recognize that we are definitely making some progress, but we have some real concerns about the way the methodology is being proposed at this point.

We also lobbied for the Pay Equity Advocacy and Legal Services clinic to help non-unionized women in particular gain pay equity, and we have held off in large measure on public criticism while we've been lobbying for these needed extensions. So now we really have to get down to brass tacks and talk about how we're going to make pay equity a truly universal right for women in this province who continue to be underpaid.

Despite the recent media coverage, there's still an immense wage gap and there's a need for pay equity as part of an employment equity strategy. Actually, in the paper last week it was reported that women's wages have reached 70% of men's wages. First of all, this was trumpeted as a great achievement. I wasn't that excited about it myself, but less so when I reflected that in the private sector, where there are fewer unionized women, the wage gap actually may approach 50%. So the fact that some of the strongest public sector unionized workers have been able to push through a variety of ways to reduce the wage gap, partly through pay equity and partly through other measures and internal pushing for more employment equity type measures, doesn't mean that what we have in place will allow all the women in this province to make wages that are like what their male counterparts make when they work.

The extension of pay equity will especially benefit many racial minority and immigrant women. Many of these women were left out of pay equity before and, as I said, we see pay equity as part of an employment equity strategy.

Many of the women this Bill 102 should cover are women who are likely to be left out of the employment equity process because they're in small workplaces. Here we'd like to emphasize that we believe there is a way and certainly a legal opening for Bill 102 to be expanded to include workplaces with fewer than 10 employees or establishments of fewer than 10 for pay equity through a complaint mechanism which is already, in theory, part of our Ontario Human Rights Code, that any woman could complain about discrimination in employment because of sex. We believe it should be codified and brought together under the auspices of pay equity.

We would also point out that since the idea about proportional value has been bandied about for some time, a number of bargaining agents have been able to bargain agreements that include proportional value. Now there's a bit of a breach that is quite embarrassing, because instead of having proportional value come in in a smooth way, continuous with the rest of pay equity, we see this gap now where the government intends to delay the implementation of proportional value.

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At the bargaining table many bargaining agents told their employers they were going to have to do it anyway. Now there's a very unfortunate situation where employers are saying, "Well, it looks like I didn't really have to do it now and you made me go back to 1990," or "You said I had to do it now and it doesn't even start for another couple of years." We see that as a real problem.

There is a large amount of confusion among women and men about how pay equity works. We see Bill 102 as an opportunity to help make the actual language of the legislation clearer. I believe that one of the reasons you haven't been overwhelmed by requests to present is that the whole area of pay equity legislation has become so technical and so jargonized that although many people are affected, there have been problems for women and men in the province to really understand what they already have rights to, whether they in fact have those rights and how to get them and what the amendments could bring them. But we, as members of a variety of organizations, are very clear that there are a large number of women who would be able to take advantage of the kinds of new methodologies that are proposed in Bill 102.

We also know that women have been promised that they were going to get covered. We've certainly been telling women that the government has said at various times that it's committed to eliminating many of these exclusions. But there's a real breach and there's a real gap between what people are expecting and the fact that people believe that market value is going to change for women's work and that all people would be included and the reality, which has been that many women have not got justice and they are not likely to unless every succeeding piece of refinement, up to and including the review of the entire act, moves towards something that's easier to understand and easier to implement.

We don't really find that the amendments as they're laid out in Bill 102 really improve the clarity of the new ideas. We're known for having very punctual meetings; we usually start at 4:30 and we end at 6, but when we tried to understand the bill we found that we ran overtime because we couldn't even really understand the language that talked about the methodology for what the government is calling proxy comparisons, which we call cross-establishment comparisons. The language is not clear and could use a lot of tightening up.

We know also that there have been gaps in coverage. Within a sector of employment, there have been types of organizations that are left out, for instance nursing homes, where they didn't have men to use as male comparators; there were no male jobs, or not enough. Also, in certain workplaces very frequently there were individual job classes that didn't find matches. This is throughout both the public and the private sector. This is what this bill is supposed to fix and we certainly commend the government for moving to do that.

We also believe that the act shouldn't be defining only one method of doing things. There have been a number of ways different organizations have found to reach the same end. We believe that choice should be up to the parties which are developing their pay equity plans.

I'd like to turn the mike over to Maria, as we talk about the priorities that the Equal Pay Coalition has with respect to amending the act. Maria Luja will speak a little bit about the proportional value methodologies and provisions.

Ms Luja: Thanks, Daina. I would also like to thank the committee for allowing us to make this presentation. The OSSTF will be submitting a written brief on its own behalf. Today I would like to focus, on behalf of the Equal Pay Coalition, on the proportional value method of comparison.

It is of grave concern to us that this system should not be an alternative to job-to-job comparisons. The way the act reads now, it appears as though an employer who has not achieved a pay equity plan under the job-to-job method, where that employer could achieve a pay equity plan using that method, will not have to do that and will be able to shortchange its female employees and force them into proportional value. We urge you to make sure the language is clear that this is not allowed.

Further, we believe that the amendments to the act should not remove liability for failing to achieve pay equity under the present act. We also believe that is a possibility in this legislation.

The delay in the beginning of payouts must be eliminated. Employers have known that 1992 was the year. It is our belief that women who could not use job-to-job comparisons should have the right to have their pay adjustments to 1990, the same year as their sisters. In some instances, we have workplaces where there were comparators for one group of employees and not for other groups of employees. Those women now have to wait until 1993, another three years, to achieve parity. We think this is patently unfair.

We also believe that the need for the term "representative groups of jobs" should be eliminated. In my personal experience, I know there are some boards of education where representative groups of jobs will not be possible, but there is one male job class. If an employer is able to say, "Sorry, you have to have representative groups of jobs," then all the women workers in that workplace will be denied their right to pay equity under the act.

Lastly, we believe that there is no need to specify an acceptable method for PV comparison. It is our opinion that in this case, in our case, the employees and the employer can best work out the system that is most conducive to achieving pay equity in our workplace.

Ms Bird: My name is Pat Bird and I'm going to be speaking to the section of Bill 102 that deals with women in all-female organizations and the way in which they are now to be brought under the Pay Equity Act.

Back in 1986, when the original Pay Equity Act was being debated, the government seemed at a loss about what to do with women who were in all-female organizations. The fact that there weren't any men in the organizations seemed to be a complete block to figuring out how to properly value the work that was done in those organizations. Through strenuous lobbying, primarily by the members of the Equal Pay Coalition, the OFL and others, we succeeded in getting into the bill the requirement that the government of the day would study how to do it and would report back and take action within a year. We're now in 1993, five years after the act was enacted. This is quite a long delay for the women in the all-female organizations.

I'd like to point out that the women doing work in all-female organizations are primarily doing work that has traditionally been done by women, often in the home without pay. The undervaluing of that work has been substantial and severe. It is urgent for the government to remedy that and to make sure that discrimination on the basis of gender no longer exists in this sector. It's a small sector relatively, according to government figures in the range of 80,000 workers.

The organization I represent, Times Change, a women's employment service which is counselling women who are seeking employment, feels that the recession has taken its toll in this sector and that it may well be fewer than 80,000. In any case, given the whole range of more than two million women in the province, it's a small group. But symbolically, it's very important. It includes the day care workers whose work has been acknowledged universally to be undervalued. It really is high time that this be remedied.

We commend the government for taking leadership. It is the first jurisdiction in the world, we believe, to recognize the gender discrimination in this sector and to take action, and because the government is taking a leadership role here, we are concerned that the government really act as a leader and put in place methodology that really works. Therefore, our comments are to try and assist the government to do it right.

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Part of the way of doing it right is to make the language of Bill 102 plainer and to make clearer the kinds of terms that are being used, not to obfuscate. For example, the term "proxy" has been introduced, and the term "proxy" has the unfortunate legal connotation of having the authority to act for another. In the case of Bill 102, this would give the organization to whom the all-female organization compares the power to take control of the process. We think it's really important that instead of "proxy" the term "comparator organization" be used.

We think that the use of the term "seeking" for the all-female organization gives a kind of seeking or without resources character to the all-female organizations, and we prefer that the gender of the organization be solidly in there. So to call it "all-female" is to clarify what we're about, that the all-female organization has to go across establishment, has to find a comparator organization in order to borrow males to do the comparison, the methodology. But it's important. These are organizations without a lot of resources, and the plainer the language, the easier it is for those organizations to do the necessary work.

We think it's also very important that the basic principle of pay equity -- that females compare their work to males and get the equivalent amount that is found to be discriminatory, the suppression of their wages -- be recognized when we're doing all-female pay equity. Bill 102 has females comparing to females and rising to the rate those females in the comparator organization got. We think that's an unnecessarily complicated method and that it is as easy for all-female organizations to identify pertinent male comparators as it would be to get female comparators in those comparator organizations.

As with the rest of establishments already covered by pay equity and as is foreseen for the proportional, we think that to as much extent as possible pay equity ought to be a self-managed process. Therefore, the locus of control, the people who know the work of the all-female organizations, are the people who work in them, and you've got to leave as much control as possible in that organization and allow them to make the choices, which the current Bill 102 does not give.

In Bill 102, there is a right for comparator organizations, if a single comparator male or female job is not to be found, to use a group-of-jobs approach. In the current act, that group-of-jobs approach is only used with the agreement of the parties. We feel that a unilateral right shouldn't be given to comparator employers to go to that methodology, that it's more likely that the females will be able to find comparable jobs. It should be the agreement of the parties if the group-of-jobs approach is to be used, as it is in the current act. We don't want to set up unnecessary differences between what the current act already allows and the extensions.

There also is in Bill 102 a fairly punitive set of penalties to be lodged against the all-female workplaces if they unduly disclose information from comparator organizations. It is our view that these are overly protective of the comparator organizations. These comparator organizations are all in the public sector; they're funded by public funds, the same as the all-female organizations. No other group has these kinds of fines being assigned to them and these simply should be deleted.

Finally, the payouts ought to be in the same five-year period that other workers in the public sector are faced with. It's a small group of workers and there should be an end date of 1998 by which the payouts would be made in the all-female establishments.

Ms Bowman: My name is Catherine Bowman and I've been asked to address the other changes in Bill 102 that are of importance to the coalition.

One of the most important things is that Bill 102 fails to extend pay equity to all women, and most notably those in workplaces with fewer than 10 employees. The principle of universality is one that has been very important for many years for the coalition and we think a new section should be added to the Pay Equity Act that would provide a complaint-based mechanism as opposed to a proactive mechanism. Where women believe their compensation is affected by discrimination because of gender, they should have the right to complain to the Pay Equity Commission and file a complaint under the appropriate sections of the bill.

As has already been mentioned, the coalition also has grave concerns about the decision of the government to extend the full completion of full implementation of pay equity in the public sector from 1995 to 1998. Women should not have to trade their legislative right that is already contained in the Pay Equity Act to achieve pay equity for women who have not been covered already. We believe that tradeoff is not appropriate and Muriel Collins would like to speak in some detail regarding that.

Ms Collins: I would like to allow you to have a look at the women I represent in CUPE. I have worked for 25 years in the health care sector. When I started my work in the health care sector, my pay was very low. At that time, we didn't have the recessions we have now. After working with women in the health care sector, sitting at the negotiating table to negotiate the pay equity adjustments, collecting information, revising job descriptions, we have found inequities against women very, very -- not surprising, but disappointing, that all the years of discrimination against women in the workplace, no one took notice.

On behalf of the women I work with, we too commend the government for putting the bill forward. We have just ratified the tribunal's settlement. As an example, for the years when we were ratifying collective agreements at a bargaining table, the percentage of workers who came out to vote for the settlement was 100% and it was gratifying. That alone tells the story of how important it is for women in that sector to be given the pay they rightfully deserve.

We are urging you to maintain the payout dates in the current act. We are asking that there be no delays or no takeaways, because it's very important in the health care sector, also to women in the private sector, who have been denied the right for equal pay. We would like you to consider the proportional value methods and that there be no deletions of the establishments from the schedule.

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Ms Bowman: I'd like to just continue with some of the other amendments that the coalition has concerns about in the form of takeaways. Bill 102 introduces language dealing with changed circumstances in a workplace, and it provides protection against reduced adjustments for amended pay equity plans as a result of changed circumstances, but only for employees who work in a unionized setting. The coalition believes that there has been an oversight in dealing with amended plans in a non-unionized setting, and there should be the same protection afforded to those employees.

There is also a new provision being proposed on allowing parties to settle following an order by a review officer. We don't believe that it is necessary to deal with that, as has been proposed under Bill 102. We think that amendments can be made to the section of the bill dealing with review officers and putting in very clear language that an order cannot be revoked unless it's by the result of an agreement between the parties or a decision of the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. We do believe that it's very important, however, to ensure that no party is entitled to waive any obligations or rights under the act in settling any disagreement.

There are also concerns the coalition has regarding the administrative changes proposing that any person could be a party to proceedings before the hearings tribunal as long as they were entitled by law. The current act describes who is entitled to be a party before the hearings tribunal, and the coalition favours that approach. We have some serious concerns that the language as it is proposed would be an invitation to litigation, and we already see enough of that. We do believe that the pay equity office should be added, however, and should be entitled to have standing if it is trying to enforce the act.

We have concerns about the language that disallows the crown to be named as the employer for the purposes of pay equity. There are already tests that have been developed by the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal in the Haldimand-Norfolk case, and those tests are quite sufficient. It should be left to the hearings tribunal to determine that.

There are language proposals that there would be a weakening of the obligations to maintain pay equity, and that comes up in a couple of places in Bill 102. The coalition believes that those are unnecessary and should not be added, that again any concerns dealing with maintenance should be dealt with by the Pay Equity Commission or by the hearings tribunal. In any event, we believe that is going to be one of the important issues that will be dealt with in the review of the act when it comes up in 1995 and shouldn't be dealt with at this time.

The final point here is that there is an amendment dealing with amending establishments in this schedule. The present act says that establishments can be added to the schedule. Opening that up and just saying that the schedule can be amended with respect to who is or is not a public sector employer we believe would open the door to have establishments removed from the schedule. We have very serious concerns and believe that is inappropriate and should not be allowed to happen.

Ms Green: I'd like to sum up our points, our most important priorities, in conclusion. As a coalition that's very broad-based, we speak for unionized and non-unionized workers. We also refer to women who work both in the public sector and the private sector. We are very concerned that this bill is based on a kind of tradeoff. Coverage of new workers who were previously excluded is being traded off against delayed payouts and weakening of maintenance.

I just ask you to think about what would happen if a woman retired any time between 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 who had not been covered under job-to-job comparisons in either the public or the private sector. She simply would not get any adjustment. She would leave and her pensionable earnings would be based on that low salary that was never adjusted.

We want this bill to work administratively and politically. That's why we're urging more simplified language and a general reduction. If you go through our brief carefully, you'll see that we've suggested the deletion of a number of sections which we don't feel add anything except a lot of bureaucratic red tape.

We would like to reiterate that we see pay equity as part of an employment equity strategy which is very much needed in this province. Even if pay equity worked perfectly, it would probably only reduce the wage gap by about one quarter. That leaves a lot of salary disparity between men's wages and women's wages in this province that needs a much more global approach to remedy, and we don't think it's fair to make the women who have waited the longest wait longer for their money.

Finally, one principle we think cannot be emphasized enough, especially with respect to the cross-establishment comparisons, is that the women who are going to be affected have to be the ones who have control over the methodology. They don't need to be dictated to about which method they must use, exactly how they must do it; they don't need to be under the control of the larger comparator organization, which under the scheme of the government would select the jobs it could use as a comparators, filter and supply whatever information it deemed useful and tell them: "Okay, here's your new salary. Here's your new rate."

We don't think that's an appropriate way to treat adult women in the workplace and we would urge you to go over our presentation, which took us quite a lot of study to come up with, if you would like some concrete and positive suggestions about alternative ways to achieve the same ends the government is proposing in Bill 102. We have left time for you to ask questions and we certainly hope we can address them at this point.

The Chair: Each caucus will have about seven minutes for questions and comments.

Mrs Caplan: I'm assuming that you were part of the consultation the government had in the drafting of this legislation, and I'm surprised that you have so many recommendations that have not been incorporated in the legislation that is before us. Can you confirm, were you part of that consultation and were you surprised that you weren't listened to?

Ms Green: It's been a long and very difficult process, I would say. I think a large part of the issue has been convincing people throughout the government, in both the civil service and on the political side, that these methodologies are feasible and workable. There's been a lot of back and forth.

Certainly there were some surprises in what we see, but we do see that the government has listened to us in some of our concerns and failed to listen in the other ones, and we're just like a broken record. We keep coming forward again and again with the ones we think the government should really listen to us about.

Mrs Caplan: My colleague earlier this morning, when questioning Minister Mackenzie, the Labour minister, pointed out, and in fact he himself acknowledged, that he'd been in the House for some 18 years. Several of the government ministers were very vocal in opposition in their criticism of the Liberal pay equity bill in 1987.

One area where they had been particularly critical was in the fact that the under-10 establishment was left out, and the Agenda for People was very clear that their pay equity bill was going to cover all women. During your consultation, was that not an expectation you had, that the NDP government would be moving in that way?

Ms Green: I find this, frankly, a question that's really just intended to embarrass the government.

Mr Winninger: Hear, hear.

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Ms Green: It's been an ongoing question about how to include the under-10s and what is the best legal mechanism to do that, and we haven't achieved consensus. We have suggested a number of things and the government has listened to us.

There's been a definite question, if you can get only a certain number of amendments also approved by the opposition parties, which are the ones to push on and is this one that the opposition will support. If this is one that you are prepared to support, I'm sure that will be a point in favour of getting coverage for those women in the under-10 establishment.

Mrs Caplan: The last question I have, and this might be embarrassing for the government also but the opposition sometimes asks embarrassing questions of the government --

Ms Green: Fair enough.

Mr Curling: Don't apologize for that.

Mrs Caplan: -- is the fact that the transfer payments particularly, and I was struck by what you had to say about those in the health sector. I'm particularly knowledgeable about that and I was pleased to hear you say how well the existing law had worked to assist women in that sector. One of the concerns I have is that because of the government's funding priorities and general mismanagement of the economy, the shortfall in funding of pay equity in particular and transfer payment specifically has resulted in women losing their jobs, and job loss particularly in the transfer payment environment.

You talked about tradeoffs and losses. I guess the question I would have to ask you is, because you've seen this government not funding pay equity in the way that we had contemplated that it would be supported, are you concerned about job loss as a result of government underfunding of pay equity settlements?

Ms Bird: I think job losses are a concern to every worker in this province.

Mrs Caplan: Absolutely.

Ms Bird: It's not only those who are faced with pay equity who are feeling insecure. There are many reasons why jobs are being lost. The spectre of job losses was one of the things that was always an argument against pay equity in the early days, when we were lobbying for the first act.

Certainly the restrictions on revenue that the government is faced with are serious and it's looking to restrain wherever it can. We hope it won't lead to job losses and we sincerely hope that it won't lead to job losses in the health care sector, which is 87% female; that is a concern.

But we retain the position that the issue we're talking about is the fair compensation of women and that discrimination can never be bartered off for larger employment and discriminatory wages. It's important that the principle of pay equity be extended, and we certainly are making our voices clear, I think, about extension and about holding to the current deadlines.

Mrs Caplan: The fact that the time lines have been extended and delayed by an additional three years and that an unfairness and a discrimination have resulted because of that are concerns that you have.

Ms Bowman: Yes. The bill as it's proposed allows employers to reopen plans that have been negotiated in good faith between the parties and where there are no unions to unilaterally extend the payouts. We believe that that's inappropriate.

Mr Tilson: I'm interested in your brief and I thank you for coming and presenting it to us. Many of the amendments I know our party will consider in making presentations to the committee, and obviously I would like time to digest some of your thoughts. They're excellent thoughts.

My question is a question of a general nature which almost all of you have referred to and which has been referred to in the press; some of you have been quoted in the press. That theory is, is now the time? The government of course says this is not the time, that we should delay things and that because of the recession we can't afford to do it. Then of course there's the argument with business, "Well, we'd like to be delayed too," and of course you're saying in your submissions, "No, everything should go ahead now." They're all excellent arguments, both sides.

My position has always been that in effect the government is creating further inequity by this legislation.

I'm going to read you a passage from a newspaper clipping which I'm sure some of you have referred to or seen. It was in the Toronto Star in December 1992. The headline is, "Time Not Ripe to Seek Pay Equity." I'm sure you've all got it in your files and are ready to respond, and I'd like you to do that because this is quite contrary to what you have been saying, not only here but elsewhere.

The passage I would like to refer to is in the middle of the passage. It talks about the assumption, rightly or wrongly, that because of pay equity being implemented at this time, at a time of recession, a time when companies and industries are having difficult times -- that first assumption you may or may not challenge, but that's what they're saying. I'll read it:

"With limited dollars available, there's a good chance that organizations compelled to institute pay equity at this time will have to lay off some employees."

Then they list three reasons, which I'd like to read, and I'd like your comments:

"First, many of these laid-off workers would be forced to apply for unemployment insurance, a social program already under severe strain.

"Second, since those with the least seniority tend to be laid off first, there's a good chance that visible minorities would be overrepresented among the casualties. In other words, in the name of enforcing pay equity, we might be undermining much of the progress that has recently been achieved through affirmative action programs.

"Third, young people, some of whom have large student loans looming over their future, would also be extremely vulnerable to layoffs. Since there are already grave concerns about the high level of unemployment among our youth and the despair this is engendering within that generation, do we really want to contribute further to this problem?"

I know you're all familiar with this article, because it goes against what you've been saying, but I'd like you to comment on this article. The person who wrote the article -- I hope I can pronounce her name correctly -- is Donna Laframboise.

Ms Bird: Just as one comment, I would like to quote another woman, a member of a racial minority in the United States in 1867, which you will agree is a good deal back -- 125 years ago. We've been through many recessions, we've been through many boom periods. Sojourner Truth was an ex-slave, an abolitionist, a feminist, and she said this: "We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much." I think that sums up in very precise and clear terms what women have been asking for for 125 years, and that's when we have a recording of that sentiment.

Mr Tilson: I don't necessarily think this author would oppose what you've just read. She is saying this is not the time because of this recession, which is really the area I'd like you to address your thoughts.

Ms Bird: The point I'm attempting to make is that for over a century women have been saying: "It's time to pay women fairly. It's time to really bring economic equality and not have discrimination in wages embedded in the wage system." Over the years when the current act was being envisaged, there was no recession and still these women were being left out. So we think it's really an unfair argument to use the recession against inclusion of these women now.

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Mr Tilson: I guess what she is saying, of course, is that there's only so much money available to operate a business or something has to happen. Obviously, opposition parties are going to attack government for tax laws, labour laws etc, and that has been going on with this current government. Business has been most annoyed with the government -- not annoyed; almost desperate for fear of survival and the threat of moving to vast layoffs. We've never in this province had so much unemployment as we've had during this current session, and not all of it is the fault of this government; part of it is the recession, and some of it is because of government policies. But business is saying that because of the recession, because there's only so much money in the pot, we are going to have to downsize what we're doing. They're doing it anyway because of other reasons that this government has put into it.

I guess my question is again -- unless you dispute that, that there is money available -- that perhaps the priorities should be different. But that's what they're telling us in articles like this, that they will simply have to change the direction they're going, which could mean more layoffs, and that troubles all of us. That's why I read those three examples. The very people who will be affected by those layoffs are the very people you and your organization are trying to protect, which would be a tragedy.

Ms Bird: The underlying assumption is that women have to continue sacrificing for the good of the organizations. I think what women in the province are saying clearly, and have been saying for some time, is that they're no longer willing to sacrifice, that they have the same right as men to equal wages.

Mr Tilson: This woman, Mr Chairman, is sympathetic to what you've just said, as am I. In her concluding paragraph, I believe, is something that I've looked at: Has the government looked at all of the alternatives? It says that being the guardian of all of society, our provincial government is expected to make difficult choices and to strike delicate balances.

When it comes right down to it, I'm not sure the NDP had many alternatives to its recent pay equity decision. I'm not going to stand up for them; they'll probably do that right now. The difficulty is that we are in a recession, and I think it would be tragic if there was more unemployment; that's my point.

Mr Gary Malkowski (York East): Thank you for your presentation; I was very impressed with its comprehensive nature and the way you've expressed your concerns about the legislation. Do you mind if I ask you two specific questions? First, does your coalition include representatives from disabled women's organizations, for example, DAWN? Are they members of your coalition?

Second, from your coalition's experience in terms of the Pay Equity Act that was introduced in 1987 by the previous government and this that is being introduced now, do you think there have been improvements from the act that was introduced in 1987?

Ms Green: Our coalition doesn't have specific representation from any groups representing people with disabilities. As with many other issues, we find that organizations can only really participate in the coalitions that are meeting their primary needs. Therefore, while our coalition is very broad, it leaves out significant sectors. Certainly, many people with disabilities can't even get into the workplace; they are less concerned about pay and equity. Sometimes they'll even work for less than they ought to just to get into the paid workforce. So we understand that this has not necessarily been a priority for some of the groups representing people with disabilities.

However, we are aware of our responsibility as a broad-base group to bring forward the concern of all women who are engaged in working for pay. So I can't excuse ourselves or them; it's not a question of blame. But that is the current situation for the coalition.

In the area of whether there have been some gains, I would like to take this opportunity, on behalf of the coalition, to recommend to the government in the strongest possible way that the government undertake a review of the entire act so that it will be completed for 1995 and not wait until 1995 to do it.

We do see that there has been some progress. We see that Bill 102 contains a number of improvements over the Pay Equity Act of 1987. There's still quite a way to go. Some of the things we are discussing with you today are not even in the scope of what the government is planning to do. We believe that we need to get as much money as possible into the hands of women today so that women don't continue to subsidize the services they provide, but we believe that many of these things will have to be looked at with more perspective in the review of the entire act that is due to be completed in 1995.

Mr Malkowski: Just as a supplementary, if I could make a quick comment, I just wanted to say the vision of Agnes Macphail was one of pay equity and I'm sure she would appreciate the work you are doing now.

Ms Murdock: It's good to see you again; we meet at these occasions. Just on page 21 of your submission, am I reading that correctly to understand that you would want the cross-establishment organization, as you call it, to notify and therefore all salaries would be changed if there was an increase in the cross-establishment organization?

Ms Green: There's actually something missing in our brief. I'm very happy you raised that point. Let's say that you're in an organization right now that has two bargaining units and the women who are in a clerical bargaining unit find comparators in a plant bargaining unit. They're not necessarily aware of when each other's wages go up. Currently, what happens is that if that male job goes up because of a new collective agreement, they find out. They're in the same organization. The employer has a responsibility also to raise the level of the female classification which was compared to that male job. Once we get into cross-establishment comparisons, how will anyone know when the male comparator rate goes up, or if it's done through the female, when that rate has gone up?

What we would like to see is that when the cross-establishment process is finished and the pay equity plan is written up, the all-female bargaining unit would notify the Pay Equity Commission of any male job classes that it found in another organization, so that they could be monitored. Therefore, when in the other organization the male jobs go up, the female jobs which are linked to male jobs go up; there's a progression.

Let me see if I can go back here. We had our women back in the office who were compared to these plant workers. Now the women clerical workers in another kind of an organization, in a library, are compared, in the government submission, to those women and through those women to those guys in the plant. So now those wages are tied. All three wages are now tied through a cross-establishment comparison. Now the library will say, "By the way, Pay Equity Commission, our salaries for this clerical job class are now tied to that factory." Then, when the factory raises its wages, it will notify the commission again and the commission will pass on that information to the library, so that its may also rise.

Ms Murdock: What you're saying, then, is that no settlement is ever closed.

Ms Green: The Pay Equity Act calls for maintenance of increases of the adjusted salaries so that the wages then do not diverge.

Ms Murdock: Yes, so we don't want to end up 10 years from now with a gap again.

Ms Green: We don't want the gap to reappear. It's exactly the same concept, but now, instead of being within one organization under the aegis of one employer, it's cross-establishment. There has to be a notification process.

Ms Murdock: Okay, so that's what page 21 is doing.

Ms Green: But it misses that piece that says that when they complete the plan they have to tell the Pay Equity Commission that they found male comparators in another organization and this is the list of those male comparators.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Murdock.

Ms Murdock: I'm not finished, but thank you anyway.

The Chair: Ms Bowman, Ms Bird, Ms Green, Ms Luja and Ms Collins, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this afternoon and giving us your presentations.

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ONTARIO COALITION FOR BETTER CHILD CARE

The Chair: I'd like to call forward our next presenters, the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. Would you please come forward. Good afternoon. Just a reminder that you'll be given up to an hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you'd keep your remarks a little shorter to allow time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you please identify yourselves for the record and then proceed.

Ms Kerry McCuaig: My name's Kerry McCuaig. I'm the executive director of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care.

Ms Lindsay Thompson: I'm Lindsay Thompson from the Southeast Grey Community Outreach, which is a member of the Ontario coalition network.

The Chair: Thank you. Please proceed.

Ms McCuaig: The Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care commends the government for tabling new amendments to the Pay Equity Act. We recognize that the legislation provides a commitment to extending pay equity to most workers in predominantly female workplaces in the private sector and to all-female workplaces in the broader public sector. When enacted, these changes will represent an important development in addressing the wage discrimination faced by women in the labour force.

However, there are sections of Bill 102, most specifically the effective date of the amendments, changes which will delay the payout date to workers already covered and the absence of a cap on payouts to women in workplaces where there is no male comparator, which will require changes. We will address these issues in some detail. However, as a member of the Equal Pay Coalition, we would like to take this opportunity to endorse the recommendations that were just presented to you.

The coalition was founded 10 years ago. We're dedicated to a universally accessible, high-quality, comprehensive, non-profit system of child care. Our members include all the major stakeholders in child care in the province, including child care programs and agencies, professional organizations, women's and teachers' unions and faith and community organizations. You will be hearing from many of our members during the course of these hearings.

The coalition recently completed an extensive province-wide consultation of its own. We held public meetings in 12 communities in addition to numerous forums, bilateral and round table discussions with a broad range of child care providers, consumers and advocates. Regardless of the constituency, the discussion focused on the quality and the affordability of child care. It is precisely these issues which are tied to pay equity.

The coalition supports pay equity because we maintain that the right to a fair wage is a fundamental human right in a democratic society. Women's traditional role in the workplace and the lack of social supports, including child care, has either overtly or covertly denied them this right.

Before we get into our recommendations, we think it's important that you have a snapshot picture of what the child care sector looks like so that you will see where we're coming from in making our recommendations. There are approximately 22,000 child care staff in Ontario working in a variety of settings: 18,700 work in the 2,800 centre-based programs run by municipalities, community colleges, non-profit boards of directors and commercial operators; another 2,800 work as contract employees for 102 non-profit and commercial private home agencies; another 500 work in 185 resource centres funded by the Ministry of Community and Social Services. So you have a number of staff spread out in a number of places.

Interestingly, all child care workers subject to the Day Nurseries Act are formally designated in the schedule of the existing Pay Equity Act. However, even before the act was proclaimed it was recognized that only very few child care staff, those employed by municipalities or community colleges, would actually be able to find the male comparators and consequently benefit from the legislation. For the majority of workers in the child care sector there were no male comparators; therefore no remedy, therefore no pay adjustments. At that time, we estimated that as many as 87% of the staff in this sector were ineligible to benefit from the Pay Equity Act.

From its founding, our coalition has focused considerable attention on the wages and working conditions of child care staff. This isn't only an issue of women and pay; this is an issue of providing an essential public service and ensuring that service is a quality service.

Child care staff enter the field because of their concern for children, and most likely they will leave the field because the value of the work they perform has not been recognized by society. Child care is a predominantly female occupation and the wages paid reflect this. The average hourly wage in Ontario is $11.38 across all positions, and despite the fact that child care staff are better educated than the majority of Canadian workers, their salaries fall near the bottom of industrial wage earners.

Almost eight out of 10 staff working in early childhood education in Ontario have a post-secondary certificate, diploma or degree. In the Canadian employed labour force, only four out of 10 workers have this level of education. If you want to compare the work that a child care staff does to what a warehouse worker does -- interestingly, the child care staff is a woman; the warehouse worker is predominantly a man -- the warehouse worker earns 58% more than what she does.

In fact, poverty has become associated with the wages of child care workers. Using poverty lines developed by Statistics Canada and the Canadian Council on Social Development, it was found that a child care staff supporting another person, whether it be her child or her partner, earned $3,200 below the poverty line for a two-person family. For child care staff who are sole-support parents, three out of four earn below the poverty line.

The problem is compounded by the finding that child care wages are losing ground to inflation. Between 1984 and 1992, adjusting for inflation, the average child care wage fell in real terms by 4.5%. It is not surprising, then, that 15% of full-time staff hold a second job and that when asked why, money is the major reason. Maybe that also explains why we can't wait for pay equity, and maybe that also explains why women are getting tired of continuing to hold the burden of low wages.

Wages are not only a factor for child care staff; they have a direct bearing on the quality of care offered. Stability is a major indicator in quality in child care, yet the rate of pay is a major reason cited for why one in five staff will not stay in the child care field within the next three years. This is also another public expense which I don't think we consider. The public pays to educate early childhood educators, but when you have 20% of your staff leaving the field, that is also a waste of public resources.

Wages in child care are determined largely by auspices. Qualified teachers employed in programs offered by community colleges and municipalities earn on average $29,000. With the introduction of the wage enhancement grant, teachers in non-profit programs now earn $23,000 on average. Commercial programs pay their teachers an average of $15,000.

There are two factors which account for the higher levels of pay in the publicly operated programs. The first is the additional public dollars that those programs have access to; the second is the higher rates of unionization.

In regions where municipalities offer a child care program, the wages and working conditions of municipal staff have served as the benchmark for wages in non-profit community programs. The major barrier to fair pay in this sector is its organization and funding. Programs are funded through a combination of provincial-municipal grants and subsidies for low-income families which are cost-shared at the discretion of the municipality. Child care programs have no control over this income; their only source of income is the fees which they charge their full-fee parents.

However, we still must operate as a business. Our fees are determined by the marketplace and we're in competition with other programs in what we can charge parents. We run a very labour-intensive program; in fact, 85% of our program's budget is spent on staff salaries. In the absence of effective or sufficient public funding, any efforts to improve salaries or benefits must come directly out of increased parent fees, and a centre whose fees are higher than others in the region will not be able to keep clients.

Programs strive to keep fees, and consequently staff wages, down in order to remain viable, so child care staff are left to subsidize the service through their low wages. Even so, 5,400 spaces go vacant in Ontario because parents can't afford the fees. Meanwhile, 15,000 families are on waiting lists for subsidized care.

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We're simply sharing this information to illustrate that staff and working conditions in child care can only improve through a transfusion of public funding -- one of the ways to do that is through pay equity -- and that child care is an essential public service and needs to be funded as one.

We make basically six recommendations.

Recommendation 1 is that employees in private sector workplaces with under 10 staff who believe they are victims of wage discrimination must have the right to file a complaint with the Pay Equity Commission. This is particularly important if child care staff in the private sector are going to receive any benefits from pay equity.

In recommendation 2 we're asking you to delete section 1.1, which would close off the right of workers to argue that the crown is their employer. This is a right under the current act. Cases have been won at the pay equity tribunal on this. If we actually look at how child care operates, our wages and working conditions are set by provincial and municipal funding. These authorities have the right to see our budgets, our employees' T4 information, our benefits statements. They routinely limit wages, benefits, working conditions and staffing components. In every effect, they operate as the employer. We should have the right to argue that they are.

Recommendation 3 is that we ask you to maintain the date for pay equity achievements in the public sector to 1995. This directly affects staff in our sector in municipal centres. This we find the most difficult of the amendments included in Bill 102. To go in and reopen legislation which was already passed, to go in and take away from women benefits, struggles which they have already won, is the worst form of backtracking. We believe it sacrifices equality to the balance sheet.

If you're afraid about what this is going to cost, let me give you just one example: The largest child care operator in the province is the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. It's recently reached a pay equity settlement with its staff. The adjustment will be $1.17 an hour. Why should these women have to wait an extra three years before they receive pay equity?

We also ask you to maintain the original commitment for requiring pay equity adjustments to commence on January 1, 1993. Essentially, the argument here is that these women have waited long enough. They shouldn't be asked to wait longer.

In terms of the comparison method, under the legislation that Bill 102 replaced, the comparator was to be the municipal child care worker; the comparison would be her wages adjusted to pay equity. We believe this is the simplest method of comparison and the most efficient for our sector. Therefore, we request that the pay-equity-adjusted wage rate of the municipal child care worker should serve as the comparator for wages in the non-profit sector. In areas that do not have a municipally operated program, non-profit programs should be able to go to the next-nearest municipality which offers one.

Our last and perhaps most important point is that there has to be a cap on payouts for the proxy sector. We're recommending 1998. I'll give you one example here and Lindsay, when she talks to you, will give you a very graphic example of what it will be. Just let me give you, as an example, that the average gap between the profit and non-profit sectors is between $5,000 and $6,000, the average payroll of a non-profit program is $3,350,000 and the average staff size of a program is 10. At 1% of payroll a year, staff would see their wages adjusted by about $350 per staff per year. Many of these staff and child care workers will be retiring before they bridge the pay equity gap. Therefore, we encourage you to make this a priority in your deliberations.

I'll now ask Lindsay to illustrate further what I've been talking about in general.

Ms Thompson: I'm from South East Grey Community Outreach and I was told I was here to talk about what real-life teaching out in rural Ontario was like. Our area covers the southeast portion of Grey county, which is about 2 1/2 hours northwest of Toronto. The closest large city is Owen Sound, and I believe the population is about 23,000.

We have a network of licensed child care centres. Our main resource centre-licensed child care centre is in Markdale, Ontario, and it encompasses a licensed child care centre, a toy lending library, a resource library, a theme box library, community play groups -- a great parent break -- and our administration offices. That centre has a capacity for 41 children, and that's the largest one we have in our network.

We have four other full-time child care centres and two before-and-after-school programs. The programs are in Meaford, Markdale, Walters Falls, Maxwell, Holstein -- yes, they really do have Holstein cows in Holstein -- and Flesherton. For an idea of the distance we cover, it's 150 kilometres between Meaford and Holstein, so we cover a big distance.

Our centres are very small and very community based. The capacity ranges between 16 and 24 children. Each centre really does meet the needs of its own particular community. As a very quick example, one of our centres is vegetarian, because that population believes quite strongly in that. We try to meet as many needs as we can.

We also offer a lot of flexibility around enrolment. We find because we are in rural Ontario, this is really important. Not only are people working a lot of part-time jobs, we're also dealing with the seasonal work around farmers. So our population does increase around harvesting time, hay time and planting time. Our flexible program also means that you can get care for two or three hours a day or a full day or five full days a week, whatever it is that you need.

Our staffing is very much based on enrolment. Because right now enrolment is going up and down, we're having a lot of problems trying to keep all our staff employed full-time. We're trying to give as much part-time work as we can.

Our funding comes from direct operating grants and parent fees. We're fortunate that South East Grey Community Outreach has become an approved corporation, so we do flow our own subsidy dollars and we are lucky in that. I know not everybody has that bonus. That does offer a little bit more stability than we had this time last year, that's for sure.

Because of the fluctuation of enrolment, we're now not paying our staff yearly as a salary rate. We do have to pay hourly, which has been a big change. As Kerry said, we can't raise parent fees. We'd be totally lost. People can't afford that, and we do want to leave the licensed child care option available to as many parents as need it.

To get quite specific, our ECE-trained supervisors are making $11.05 an hour. If that were a salaried rate, that would be $23,000 a year. Our program staff, ECE, are making $9.65 an hour, and that works out to be approximately $18,000 if it were a salaried rate.

I compared these rates with the closest municipality, which is Owen Sound. A qualified staff person, ECE, starts at $28,000. A supervisor in the municipality starts at $36,000 and can go up to $42,000. There's a really huge gap between $42,000 and $23,000, which is what our supervisors are making.

For non-qualified staff in the municipality, you'd begin at $12.49 an hour and can go to $14.46. In our organization, one-year ECE is $9 and hour and unqualified is $8.35. There really is an awfully big gap.

Kerry was asking me earlier if we lose a lot of people to the municipality. There aren't a lot of jobs, period, in rural Ontario. The other thing we're dealing with is distance. From anywhere in our network, Owen Sound, the municipality I'm talking about, is between a 40- and 45-minute drive, and that's not the nicest thing to have to cope with if you're in white-outs, blizzards and whatever in the winter.

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Also, people feel quite loyal to their own community and would rather stay in their community and work with the people they know. I think that's a big part of the ruralness: Keep that community feeling. But we certainly really support pay equity. I think it would certainly stabilize and support our staff members and would also add greatly to the quality of child care, which is, I think, the goal of everybody who's interested in the child care field.

The Chair: Thank you. Questions and comments? Ms Poole.

Ms Poole: Thank you very much for your presentation today. It's been very helpful to our committee.

Mr Tilson: On a point of order, Mr Chairman: Are we going to start -- I don't know, they always want to give the government the last word, quite frankly.

The Chair: It's been the tradition since I took over the committee, and the committee has never wanted to change it. The tradition started with the Liberals.

Mr Tilson: Well, I'm not going to change the tradition, Mr Chairman. It just seems fair to me, with respect, that the rotation should alternate.

The Chair: That's what I thought too, that it should alternate, but the committee's never decided to change it.

Ms Poole: I'm happy if you'd like to rotate rather than do first come, first served. It doesn't matter to me. Would you like to begin, Mr Tilson?

Mr Tilson: Sure. Mr Arnott.

The Chair: Okay. Mr Arnott.

Mr Arnott: All right. Let me compliment you on your very professional presentation. I really appreciate the fact that you could come in.

Ms Thompson: That was kind of you.

Mr Arnott: Ms Thompson, I represent the riding of Wellington, which is immediately adjacent to you. It was interesting to hear that your experiences in South Grey are very similar to the day care needs that we have in the rural parts of our riding.

We've heard over the short, I guess, day that we've commenced on these hearings that there is a concern that has been expressed. Pay equity, by definition, will increase the cost associated with salaries within any organization, public or private. There's a possibility that real jobs and future jobs, perhaps potential jobs, future job creation, might be lost or inhibited as a result of this increased cost of doing business, if you want to call it that.

Is there any point at which you would feel that your desire for increased pay equity would be somewhat limited, I suppose, if you could see that jobs were being lost, if you could quantify jobs being lost?

Ms McCuaig: I make one point: Pay equity becomes an easy excuse for why jobs would be lost. I can see a number of employers who have plans to reorganize their workplace referencing pay equity as the reason why they were in fact doing it. I think it would be difficult, although not impossible -- things aren't impossible -- to actually quantify how many jobs could or might be lost to pay equity.

But I'd like to approach this in the larger sense. I suppose that if the going rate out there was $1 an hour, we could all have jobs but we wouldn't live very well. We probably wouldn't be able to feed and clothe and maintain ourselves at a subsistent standard of living, and there has been a real downward pressure on what wages are, particularly in Ontario.

Mr Arnott: Everybody's wages and salaries.

Ms Thompson: Right. Well, no. I mean, there is a difference. If you're working and you're in an age group, you know, the 45-plus, you find yourself -- in fact if you look at the breakdown that the social planning council has put out, established people, 45-plus, who've raised their families and are established with their homes, are doing okay. Those who are not doing okay are young families, people new to the workplace.

The reason is, number one, there are no jobs. There are no jobs in general and there has been a flip from industrial jobs to jobs in the service and clerical sectors. It's quite interesting that when the federal government looks at what the big job creation places are going to be, it's not the high-tech jobs that we've been led to expect, it is the clerks and service and cooks and cleaners. In fact, it's been all of those jobs which women have traditionally filled and which women do traditionally fill.

I would argue that there is something to be said for -- in the same way that there's a reason why we have minimum wages, not just because it's not a good thing to hire people for $1 an hour but because it's not good for the economy to have people working for below-subsistence wages. Then we can take this further around pay equity and women and say that in fact -- Dianne, maybe you can help me out here. Remember, I think we used to say something like $7 billion a year is lost to the economy because women are underpaid. If we paid women what they were worth, I think we'd have a good job creation program.

Mr Arnott: I guess getting back to my question, you would say that no, it really doesn't matter if a few jobs are lost in the interests of enhanced pay equity.

Ms McCuaig: I think that in the long run pay equity is a good economic renewal program and that any short-term job losses, which I would like to qualify, I think would be very hard to quantify and would be offset by what would in fact be a better economy for all.

Mr Arnott: You very passionately made the case that child care workers are grossly underpaid relative to other occupations and you've indicated the average wage that many of them make. There are people I know who are coming out of high school, young people who have an option in terms of their future education. They might have a number of options: they might look at an early childhood education diploma at a community college; they could perhaps look at business administration at university or a community college; engineering, same thing, university or community college for different levels of achievements and accomplishment and study.

Do you think the average young person looking at these various career options has a reasonable understanding of what the salary expectation is going to be when he or she decides what career path to take?

Ms McCuaig: I can tell you that in child care they don't. I speak to enough community college classes and I'm amazed at classes that are about to graduate that don't have an idea about what the general wage rate is in that sector.

Mr Arnott: If the expectation or the knowledge were there, then I guess that wouldn't be a surprise if indeed they did come into positions in child care.

Ms McCuaig: If you're saying that if somebody chooses to be a child care worker, then that's a free choice -- they could have done a lot of things, they could have become a doctor, I suppose -- and they should be prepared to accept what they get, there's a problem with that. I think it's because -- what is the value of this job? What is the value of this work? Isn't there something wrong with it? We're prepared to pay people who look after animals more than what we're prepared to pay educated people to educate our children.

Mr Arnott: Or to hit a baseball.

Ms McCuaig: A baseball or --

Mr Arnott: They command the biggest part.

Ms McCuaig: Let's look at caring for little things that need our help: children and animals. We're prepared to pay zookeepers twice as much as what we're prepared to pay women who look after our children. To simply say, "Well, you're a woman, you went into that job and you knew what you were getting into -- "

Mr Arnott: No, there are many males go into the job, do they not?

Ms McCuaig: Interestingly, the few places where we find young men going into child care is is the municipally operated and community college programs where in fact the salaries are more reasonable. Remember the bank clerks? That used to be a nice male job and you could work your way up if you were a bank clerk. Now you don't see any male bank clerks because that's a class-ceiling job and it's low-paid.

Mr Arnott: Thank you.

Mr Tilson: Mr Chairman, do we have any more time?

The Acting Chair: Mr Tilson, you have four minutes left, sir.

Mr Tilson: Some of the comments you made, particularly on page 2 of your submission where you talked about how well qualified day care workers are and how poorly paid they are, I understand that particularly when we're trying to improve the quality of our day care system, the whole issue of encouraging people to go into day care. Perhaps it's a continuation of what Mr Arnott was getting into, that if you're going to encourage good-quality people to get into it, male or female, they have to be well paid.

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Both of you have made comments on the difficulty, particularly with this recessionary period at this particular time -- which is why I suppose the government is delaying it -- that if you raise the rates to parents, guardians or whoever cares for children, they simply won't go there. They'll find some other place to have their children cared for. If you don't do that, that leaves only one other source of revenue, and that is the government, one which is currently bankrupt. The deficit continues to rise -- for whatever reason. It may be recessionary; it may be some of their policies; maybe it's all kinds of things, but the fact is that we're in a recession and money is very tight, particularly with this government. They're saying to us in loud terms that they can't spend any more money. If this policy is put forward at this particular time and the government isn't going to increase the grants, then it seems to me that, whoever draws up these budgets, something's going to get cut.

I'm not knowledgeable, quite frankly, on the workings of day cares. I'm sure you could educate me, and that's fine, but my question to you is, if the government is correct in its restraint -- which I hope it is, because someone's got to pay this deficit back eventually; the deficit continues to climb. Whether you're male, female, minority or majority, whatever group you belong to, we're all concerned about this deficit, we're all concerned about taxes, we're all concerned about everything we're paying for. It's a serious problem. My question to you is that, given all that, there has to be a cut somewhere. If this legislation were to go through now, as you and the previous group before you say, will the quality of day care deteriorate?

Ms McCuaig: No.

Mr Tilson: I'm sorry.

Ms McCuaig: If this legislation goes through, will quality deteriorate?

Mr Tilson: If this legislation does not go through and the policies are implemented now as you are suggesting -- in other words, that the delay not take place, that it be effective now. That's a reasonable argument. I know what you're saying when you're talking about well-qualified people not being paid. How can anyone dispute that? My fear gets back to one of Mr Arnott's questions: so we lose a few jobs. That may or may not be a legitimate argument. I hope you didn't say that. If you said that, it concerns me because then I raise the question, what will happen to the quality of our day care?

Ms McCuaig: Let me go back to deficits and recessions, because I think this is important. We've had a federal government that for eight-plus years has cut social spending in an effort to bring down the deficit. What we have eight or 10 years later is fewer social programs and a deficit that's just as big and is still not under control. Who's been paying for that deficit has been the people of Canada. They've been paying by paying more taxes and they've been paying for it by having access to fewer social programs.

There are other ways of fighting deficits. One of the ways of fighting deficits is not just cutting. The other side to it is revenue enhancement. You can increase revenue by -- let's do something quite simple: Somebody who's paid more pays more taxes. If you increase women's wages through pay equity, they will pay more taxes. Again, I don't have this at my fingertips, but it is not difficult to get. Women pay back in taxes far more than what they use in social programs.

Mr Tilson: I understand what you're saying. You're trying to look at the overall big picture, and good for you, but I --

Ms McCuaig: Right, and pay equity is part of the overall big picture. You can't just hive it off in a corner and say, "If we do this, all this bad stuff is going to happen," because lots of good stuff can happen.

Mr Tilson: The difficulty is that revenue comes from two sources: fees and government. If the government doesn't have any more money or isn't prepared to put any more money into it, then something has to go. That's the concern I'm suggesting to you, that by insisting on your demands, which are legitimate -- I'm not going to challenge that; no one's going to challenge that -- will the quality of day care go down?

Ms McCuaig: I'm saying that if this government is the least bit interested in economic recovery, it has to put big money into day care. I'm not going to apologize for that.

Mr Tilson: All right.

Ms McCuaig: That's what you have to do. If you want women to work --

Mr Tilson: That's what I'm trying to get at.

Ms McCuaig: -- if you want their kids looked after, you've got to pay for day care. Day care's expensive. I don't apologize for that, because inexpensive day care is bad for kids, and you can pay for it now or you can pay for it later.

Mr Tilson: Thank you.

Ms Murdock: I want to ask something specific on page 4 and it was something that was also raised by the previous presenter: the under-10 exclusion. I wanted to ask the previous presenter as well, but I ran out of time. But I've got lots of time to ask you. In terms of doing it on a complaint-based system to the Pay Equity Commission, what criteria would you use to determine the basis upon which the complaint should be processed? I know that in both presentations, it was in the context that if you feel you're gender-discriminated, then you can put a complaint through, but it's got to be more than that. I'm wondering what criteria you would establish to be used.

Ms McCuaig: I think that in this case, the staff in private centres or in private programs would have the ability to compare what was happening to them to what was happening in programs which were covered by pay equity. In the same way that the municipal child care workers have set the trend for the rest of the child care sector through pay equity, the non-profit programs would be able to set the trend for staff in the private sector.

Ms Murdock: In other words, then, you would be using criteria whereby -- and you can correct me if I'm wrong or if I'm hearing you wrong -- if, say, it's a municipal day care that has 20 employees, or more than 10, and has a set plan, you would use them to determine that you were discriminated against?

Ms McCuaig: I think the criteria of skill, responsibility, education and working conditions -- those are the fundamentals of pay equity. Those are the fundamentals that anybody who ever has access to the act would have to establish, that hers was equal to who her comparator was. If you're saying, "How would a staff in a private centre argue that she was being underpaid," I think she would use those criteria and they would be supported by being able to point to what was happening in the rest of the child care sector to in part explain what the gap in wages were between her and other child care workers.

Ms Murdock: Okay. I know that two of my colleagues want to ask a question.

Mr Will Ferguson (Kitchener): My question will be very brief. I was somewhat struck by the statement that around $7 billion is lost to the economy as a result of the low wages that are being paid, particularly to women in the private sector. Of course, the re-emerging theme in this room, and it sounds like an echo that was left over from Bill 40, is that we can't afford to do this because there's going to be this consequence that somehow the province of Ontario's going to come to a grinding halt if you make this progressive step forward.

I want to ask you: If in fact the figure of $7 billion is correct, would you agree that $7 billion in all probability would put more disposable income into people's pockets and, as a result, give them more purchasing power, that if they had more purchasing power, they could go out and buy more goods and services that they can't acquire today, and that if they bought more goods and services, then of course they would in effect be creating employment for other individuals to produce additional goods and services?

Ms McCuaig: That's exactly the sort of spiral-up theory that we would advance. You can fight the recession, and we think that pay equity is a good recession-fighting program.

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Ms Poole: Thank you very much for coming before us today and adding, I think, considerable insight to the legislation we're looking at. I'd like to talk about page 6 of your brief, where you've talked about what the payout would actually be, on an annual basis, to the average child care worker. It comes to a grand total of $350 per year per staff member. This is primarily because of the 1% limit, if that's what's going to be put into pay equity.

What I'm trying to reconcile is something I received that the Ministry of Labour sent to the Ontario Federation of Labour. It's called Proxy Pay Equity Costing. They say "Subsector," one of which is child care, and they've estimated 16,000 female job classes that would benefit, which I think you and I agree is probably a little higher than the numbers actually are. But it says, "Full-time annual average adjustment, $10,000," and the annual total cost to the child care sector would be $160 million. I'm trying to figure out where on earth, even at a fully mature plan, they get to $10,000, because your figures make a lot more sense. That would take, like, 30 years for the person in the child care sector to reach full pay equity. Did you know of any explanation for this?

Ms McCuaig: Yes. You may know that in the early days, as part of the Equal Pay Coalition, we had a number of discussions with government about proceeding with the proxy, with extending pay equity coverage. What we found was that the civil service was basing a lot of its estimates on outdated information or information that had never been verified. In fact, this was an issue we raised when we saw these figures. This is very highly inflated. There is a substantial gap -- nobody's arguing that there isn't a substantial gap -- but $10,000 is too high. If you increase the gap for everything and then you come out with a figure which is awfully high, then it becomes easy to scare any government into saying: "This is far too expensive. We can't do it." It was through the lobbying of the Equal Pay Coalition that the government was convinced that pay equity could be done within much more reasonable cost estimates.

Ms Poole: So these are probably earlier estimates of the government before it actually had done an accurate analysis.

Ms McCuaig: That would be my guess, Dianne.

Ms Poole: Okay, that makes some sort of sense. I'd like to talk to you about the wage enhancements, because you made reference to it in your brief and you also gave details as to the average wage of child care workers in Ontario. Although I think they're still extremely low, I don't think there is any doubt that over the last decade there has been some real progress. I remember the first time I ran for election, in 1985. I think the average wage of a child care worker was something like $9,000 or $10,000. It was absolutely incredible. Now it's at least gone somewhat in a more favourable direction.

As an alternative to proxy, which does involve a bureaucracy and plans and a fairly complex system of doing things -- and now under this we'll be delayed by three more years -- would it be an acceptable alternative for the government to come out with a similar wage enhancement plan as it did for the child care sector, but that instead of making all these all-female classes go through this onerous process and wait for years to start implementing a wage enhancement program now, not only for child care, which has been in place for a number of years, but for all these underpaid sectors, whether they be homemakers or library workers or whatever?

I think the success in the wage enhancement program in the child care sector says maybe that's a far less bureaucratic way to go, where the government can set down and say: "Okay, this is our long-term goal over the next seven or eight years. This is where we want to be. This is our plan for how much we're going to pay out per year." It would go directly to the worker. There wouldn't be a necessity to file plans or to go to cross-establishment comparators. Have you given any thought to that type of alternative to the proxy method?

Ms McCuaig: In fact, we've had a great deal of debate in the coalition since I can remember on exactly that issue. We have come down in favour of still going through the pay equity process. There are a number of reasons for it. One, if I can use this term, is ideological, that there has been a great deal of public campaigning, public education done around women's right to have equal pay. That was started by the women's movement. It's one of the raisons d'être for the women's movement getting its kickstart.

I think the fact that you can now see in bus shelters, "Woman breadwinner, she has a right to equal pay," the fact that this is commonly accepted -- Dianne, it wasn't so long ago when it wasn't commonly accepted. After all, we were only working for pin money and to buy a TV and for a second car and all this sort of stuff, so did it really matter how much we were paid?

Now it's been established, somewhat like Pat was saying, 125 years ago, that we work as much, we eat as much, we want as much. Not only that, we take care, we are the breadwinners. Without our incomes, more and more families would fall below the poverty line; without our incomes, the fact that we are the sole breadwinners in so many families, so pay equity as a justice issue is important.

A wage enhancement grant, I would say -- and I congratulate the government for doing it -- but remember, when we asked for that, we asked for it as a down payment on pay equity and it's being treated as a down payment on pay equity. We're not looking to have low wages enhanced, we're looking for justice. We're looking to have our wages and the work that we do as women compared to and valued as much as the work that men do.

If somebody wrote you a cheque -- the same way the direct operating grant in effect wrote a cheque to child care programs to include staff -- nobody is going to say no to that. However, there is bureaucracy in the direct operating grant. There is bureaucracy in the wage enhancement grant. Any flow of public dollars which requires accountability -- and we totally agree with strong accountability for public dollars going to services -- nobody's going to turn that money back. We think that it should be complimented by a pay equity process.

The other thing is that every year we go through this little process. What will the direct operating grant be? Will they take it away? We watch the budgets to see if the wage enhancement grant is still there, if the DOG still there. What one gets in a grant can be taken away. Pay equity supposedly is a law which in fact guarantees women's right to equal remuneration. We think that's important.

Ms Poole: As far as that goes, I would think any type of enhancement program that I was suggesting would have as a component that this is a guarantee and that you look at these over, like I say, a lengthy period of time and say, "This is how it's going to be accomplished," that it isn't sitting there at the end of the fiscal year and wondering whether the government's going to renew its commitment, that in fact this is a set policy in place.

I have just found that the wage enhancements since I guess 1987, when New Directions for Child Care started the process -- and in Metro we were particularly fortunate because both the city of Toronto and Metro followed with their wage enhancements for child care workers -- I think that when I look at Ontario's wages as compared to other provinces, it's very clear that it had a dramatic impact.

I can see your point, in that you see it as a justice issue and you don't want to lose that flavour, but quite frankly, when pay equity was brought in and the act was passed in 1987, it was to redress gender discrimination and compensation between male and female jobs within an establishment, and the proxy doesn't really fit that particular niche. It's trying to address situations where it's an all-female establishment and there's nothing for them. It's admirable in that, but I think there are other ways you could accomplish the same thing, but much more quickly than having to wait those additional three years and without the bureaucracy.

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Ms McCuaig: We look at child care reform, at stabilizing child care. We never looked at pay equity as being a cure-all for child care, and if we have underfunded programs out there which are in the main staffed by women, then there are other ways. There's core funding. There are a number of other mechanisms which governments would have to stabilize those programs and to improve wages and working conditions in them. Pay equity was never seen, and we never looked at it, as a cure-all.

Yes, the bottom line is to raise the wages of workers in our sector, but with it goes a justice component, and when we're looking at the comparison, it's true, it is an all-female workplace, but that's what's so systemic about the inequality between men's and women's wages, that that's where the majority of us are found. We're found in workplaces where there are no male comparators. Unless we can find a way to make pay equity fit us, then it really hasn't done the job for the majority of women.

Ms Poole: The last question I had related to the three-year delay in achieving pay equity in the broader public sector. I think it's fair to say that at the press conference you held along with the Equal Pay Coalition you were extremely forthright about your disappointment in the fact that you'd waited two years for this legislation. Since it was first basically announced in the throne speech in the fall of 1990 you've waited day by day and month by month, and then when it came in, it was to delay yet again.

One of the things you said at that time, if I can remember the quote correctly -- I have it in one of these little pieces of paper here -- was that, once again, the women who were on the lowest rung of the ladder were being asked to wait, and it wasn't a matter of the economy being in such bad shape, which everybody acknowledges it is, it's a matter of this government has to have priorities and these women are the ones who really, constantly, are being asked to wait for justice.

Would you like to tell us about some of the women who are waiting right now and I guess their reaction and what they see? Do they see this as nirvana? Are they really expecting much more than, say, $350 a year out of this, which I guess by the time it's taxed would come up considerably lower than that? Are they going to have their expectations dashed when they find out how little they're going to get and how long they have to wait?

Ms McCuaig: We've had two province-wide hearings on pay equity since 1990. We were very clear with our sector what pay equity would mean to it. The response we got back was, "We wanted an opportunity to address 168, to ask for improvements in 168." We didn't expect to be here asking for improvements to a bill which was backtracking on what was in 168. Our goal was a campaign to improve the extension of pay equity to our sector.

I'm going to ask Lindsay if she'll talk about the women who have been waiting for pay equity and now are being told they have to wait some more.

Ms Thompson: Obviously there's a lot of disappointment, and I think there is more expectation of the amount it'll be when it comes out. It has been a long wait. I think it's showing a lack of support, a lack of concern, a lack of caring about children. Obviously the next generation is going to be grown up before it can be cared for with any kind of quality care and consistent quality care. It just says a lot for our profession that people are leaving every couple of years because they can't afford to stay in it, as much as they might claim that they love the profession. That's probably true, but you can't live on what's being made.

Ms Poole: There's a really high burnout rate, isn't there?

Ms Thompson: There is a very high burnout rate, yes, and not a lot of compensation. I mean, looking at our organization, just trying to keep things afloat, we've had our benefits cut. We used to get four weeks of holidays; we get three now. Things like that don't help. They don't help morale, for sure, and I think right now morale is just kind of levelling out because we really are hopeful.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Poole. Ms McCuaig, Ms Thompson, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this afternoon and giving us your presentation.

MCMURRICH SPROUTS DAY CARE
GIZHAADAAWGAMIK

The Chair: I'd like to call forward our next presenters, from McMurrich day care. Good afternoon. Just as a reminder, you'll be allowed up to a half-hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you could keep your comments a little briefer to allow time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you each identify yourselves for the record and then proceed.

Ms Maureen Myers: I'm Maureen Myers from McMurrich Sprouts Day Care, and our organization is also a network member of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care.

Ms Jean Yarwood: My name is Jean Yarwood and I'm a program staff for McMurrich Sprouts Day Care.

Ms Penny Smith: Good afternoon. My name is Penny Smith and I am a director for Gizhaadaawgamik, which is Toronto's only first nations child care centre.

Ms Jackie Esquimaux-Hamlin: I'm Jackie Esquimaux- Hamlin and I'm an early childhood educator at Gizhaadaawgamik child care centre.

Ms Shelley Busawa: My name is Shelley Busawa and I'm a clerical support worker at Gizhaadaawgamik child care centre.

The Chair: Thank you. Please proceed.

Ms Myers: We are five women working in the field of child care who do expect pay equity.

Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act, as related to child care workers, is a positive step towards pay equity by way of proportional value and proxy comparisons.

The majority of child care workers are women. Under the existing legislation, Bill 168, many child care workers are excluded from achieving pay equity because there are no male job comparators in their workplace.

At McMurrich Sprouts Day Care, our pay equity plan was posted January 1, 1990, as required by law. The plan lists all job classifications and states, "Pay equity adjustments are not required in this plan because there are no male job classes." Proxy comparisons under Bill 102 will provide the vehicle to include child care workers under the Pay Equity Act.

Our centre, McMurrich Sprouts Day Care, provides quality child care and hires qualified staff. Without pay equity, we cannot ensure quality in the future. Trained, qualified, educated workers have no incentive to remain in the field of child care. We risk losing good staff to other professions. We cannot compete in attracting and maintaining qualified staff without being able to offer pay equity.

We encourage you to implement pay equity as of January 1993, and not January 1994. In a year's time we will have lost many workers and we can no longer be expected to subsidize non-profit child care centres by working for low wages.

Over the years we have striven towards wages equal to those of our municipal counterparts. This goal has never been attained and good intentions do not compensate for good wages. With the same enthusiasm with which we congratulate the current government on the child care wage enhancement grant, which was to be the down payment on pay equity, and the intent of Bill 102, we urge you to implement pay equity as of January 1993, put a cap on the proxy payouts no later January 1, 1998, maintain the municipal child care worker as the proxy comparator and extend pay equity to workplaces with under 10 employees.

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Ms Yarwood: My name is Jean Yarwood. I am a program staff at McMurrich Sprouts Day Care. I've been in the child care field for five years. I am qualified with a college education. I am seriously concerned about the future of child care. I can no longer afford to hang in and wait for more promises. I'm discouraged, and I feel that society does not value my profession. I do not receive the recognition and the pay for the work I do. I believe that I'm helping to shape the next generation, the citizens of tomorrow. I know women who have decided to go on to other things and I too am considering moving on. Child care is going to lose its experienced, qualified staff. Who is going to want this job? Who will be caring for the children?

I want to congratulate the Ontario government for the introduction of Bill 102. Child care workers were for the most part excluded from achieving pay equity, as there was no male comparator. The proxy comparison method will permit women in all-female organizations to match job classes with an outside organization. Finally, we are moving forward. I have an incentive maybe to remain in the child care field.

I strongly urge the government to maintain the January 1993 implementation date, to place a cap on proxy payouts no later than January 1998, to keep the municipal child care worker as the proxy comparator and to extend pay equity to workplaces with under 10 employees.

I have waited long enough for the recognition of my right to pay equity. I should not have to wait indefinitely.

Ms Smith: As I said before, my name is Penny Smith, and I am the director for Gizhaadaawgamik, which is Toronto's only child care centre for first nations families. We at Gizhaadaawgamik are also members for the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. The philosophy of this centre is to strengthen the cultural identity of these children through traditional teachings and the formation of an Ojibway language immersion program. We all realize that you cannot support cultural survival without regaining the language.

This centre is in operation due to the tireless energy of the parents and Ahkinomagai Kemik Education Council, and it is funded through the child care initiatives fund. This funding enables the staff of Gizhaadaawgamik to have salaries that are in line with those at municipally operated centres. When our CCIF funding is finished, we are expected to have a purchase-of-service contract with Metro children's services.

Now you tell me the implementation date for proxy comparators is to be delayed until 1994. As a responsible person, I can see that the delay of one year only enables this to be delayed even further. If the government believes that work of equal value should receive equal pay, then why are there these delays? These delays could mean that the staff of Gizhaadaawgamik will have to take a salary cut until proxy comparators are established. I think this is unfair.

If there is an indefinite amount of time to implement the pay equity plan, if it is based on 1% per year, then there will be a decline in the quality of child care programs. I have been in this field for many years and I have seen many staff leave. The staff go to municipal centres or they go on to other professions. Once again, women who are the sole breadwinners for many families will be told that the work they do is worth less than if a man did the same job. We have waited almost three years since the introduction of pay equity was announced. The government says we are entitled to this and yet once again we are kept waiting. We strongly urge the government to use municipal child care workers as proxy comparators. This could mean a salary increase of 29% to some of our colleagues.

We at Gizhaadaawgamik are committed to providing high-quality child care to first nations families. Pay equity will enable us to attract and keep native ECE graduates. Meegwetch.

Ms Esquimaux-Hamlin: Bonjour. My name is Jackie Esquimaux-Hamlin. I am an Ojibway woman of the Sucker Creek first nations reserve. I am an early childhood educator at Gizhaadaawgamik child care centre. Presently, I am on par with the money received by the Metro centres here in Toronto, but once our funding is completed, I will more than likely be expected to take a pay decrease if pay equity is not implemented. My question is, why shouldn't my years of experience continue to be used in providing a culturally appropriate program for first nations children, rather than looking elsewhere? Meegwetch.

Ms Busawa: Hello. My name is Shelley Busawa, and I am the clerical support worker for Gizhaadaawgamik child care centre. I was recently employed with the city of Toronto, where pay equity has already been implemented. I work for Gizhaadaawgamik because I strongly agree with the native philosophy.

I am the sole-support parent of two children, and if pay equity is not amended to include child care workers, I will have to take a salary cut or leave my position. As a responsible parent, I cannot take a salary cut and I will have to leave the job I enjoy. I do not like those options and I support the immediate implementation of Bill 102.

The Chair: Thank you. Each caucus has about six minutes for questions and comments.

Ms Murdock: Under the day care program -- I'm thinking of my home town of Sudbury predominantly, because we have municipal as well as private -- either you would come under job-to-job or basically you would come under proxy, correct? You wouldn't really come under PV to any particular degree, or would you?

Ms Myers: I believe we would come under proxy comparison.

Ms Murdock: I'm glad to see that you are supporting the idea of going into the municipal base in terms of finding the proxy group you would compare yourself to, which is nice, because we have had some comment that we shouldn't do it that way. I was wondering, when you were deciding that, what criteria or what arguments did you use to choose a municipal-based group rather than not go that route?

Ms Myers: For Metro Toronto, I would say the municipal employees make a lot more money than we do in the non-profit sector. Metro also purchases our service.

Ms Murdock: You're looking at it from a Metro perspective?

Ms Myers: That's what's closest to us in care.

Ms Murdock: Particularly with native day care, Manitoulin Island -- I don't even know if they have a day care centre there; I presume they would, given the high native population -- would obviously be very different than the Metro situation.

Ms Myers: Yes, most likely. I don't know whether there is native child care on Manitoulin.

Ms Murdock: Maybe you could answer that.

Ms Esquimaux-Hamlin: They're federally funded, because they're on the reserve, the day care for native children.

Ms Murdock: All right then, let's go to Kenora. I'm just looking at a day care centre that --

Ms Myers: Most likely, if an off-reserve child care centre were not funded through the municipality, it would be what they call an approved corporation, so it would be directly funded by the province. There would be no municipal involvement.

Ms Murdock: I'm not even asking about municipal involvement; I'm asking about the reasoning you used in determining that you would support the position of going to proxy-based selection.

Ms Myers: Simply because we have no one to compare to. We're an all-female workplace. Our job classifications are all female. If we were able to seek and look outside our own workplace and could even find a male job classification we could be compared to, then we could possibly have pay equity. Otherwise, as it is now, we don't have that and we're not entitled to it.

Ms Murdock: From the previous presenters, one of the examples was that a supervisory position was $23,000 in their group, but in the municipal sector it was $36,000. So we had a $13,000 differential there in terms of the same job. That was a minimum. It was $36,000 to $42,000, as I recall. Is that differential similar in the private to the public in yours?

Ms Myers: I think you'd find a higher differential.

Ms Murdock: Higher than $13,000?

Ms Myers: Yes.

Ms Murdock: What kind of money are you making?

Ms Myers: Our municipal counterpart for doing a similar job to myself or Penny could make upwards of $55,000. I think perhaps a lot of the average salary in that area for that job would be somewhere between $30,000 or $40,000. So there's a larger wage gap there.

Ms Murdock: Greater than $10,000 then, on average?

Ms Myers: I think so, yes.

Ms Murdock: You looked like you wanted to say something.

Ms Smith: I think Maureen addressed it, thank you.

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Ms Poole: Thank you very much for your presentation today. You've been very clear about what you would like this committee to do and what you would like the government to do. Because in the final analysis there are more government members on the committee than opposition members, we recognize that they will determine the final form of this legislation.

I want to take you back to 1987 when the current pay equity legislation was passed. At that time Evelyn Gigantes was the opposition critic for women's issues. One of the things she said the NDP was committed to was bringing in pay equity legislation in a very speedy fashion. The second thing she said was one of the points you made today, that employment establishments that had fewer than 10 workers should be included in pay equity too.

That being the NDP official position, I think a lot of people and a lot of women's groups expected in 1990, when it was elected, that great things would happen with pay equity. Certainly, a lot of women have said to me that they did expect that the time frames would be speeded up and that it would be extended to more women. Instead, what's happened is that the time frame has been delayed and some of these other promises haven't been kept.

Do you feel that your expectations have been let down? What did you expect the government to do and do you feel it's done what it said it would do?

Ms Smith: Are you speaking to me?

Ms Poole: Anyone who feels up to answering that.

Ms Smith: I very much expected pay equity to have been implemented by this point. Before working in child care, I was a kindergarten teacher for many years. I took a cut in pay to work with younger children because I saw a greater need in that area. That was a choice I made. I was one of those people who was talked about before. I used to earn $9,000 a year. It was humiliating.

At one point, I received a lot of grants for the job I do. This is an issue about justice. I work very hard. I'm a very capable person. Most of my colleagues are too. Rather than have a grant for my salary, I want something to be a salary. I expected pay equity to have been implemented for women in child care a long time ago. That's one of the concerns I have. If you keep delaying this, you can delay this indefinitely. It can go on and on and on.

Ms Poole: I think Kerry McCuaig said it best when, in the press conference -- I don't like to quote people without the actual words in front of me, but she said that they're basically going to delay pay equity out of existence. I think that very real concern is there. I think you were here for the presentation by the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care just earlier. One of the things that quite astonished me, when I first learned it a couple of months ago, was the amount that child care workers will get on an annual basis for a pay equity settlement.

I think Kerry and her group have estimated that $350 would be the average annual settlement pay equity adjustment. I couldn't believe it because it'll just take decades and decades for you to reach any sort of justice or equity, given those figures. That's why I had mentioned the possibility of the wage enhancement grants, which were started in 1987, to have a really strong, guaranteed program so that that every year child care workers' salaries would be directly supplemented by this amount until such time that there was a reasonable salary. It just is not acceptable that we pay people more to look after our animals than we do our children, aside from ball players and all those other things.

Ms Smith: I guess I share Kerry's scepticism around this. A plan would have to be created in its entirety. Every year I wait to see how much my DOG will be cut by. The staff of our McMurrich Sprouts Day Care, which I am affiliated with, used to receive a very handsome city of Toronto grant. Once our parents made a commitment to the quality of care for their staff and raised salaries, they were almost cut out of the city of Toronto grant. Unfortunately, if the parents had known the areas they could play around with, they wouldn't have raised the salaries as much. It wouldn't have hurt them so badly and the staff would have come up with the same.

There are an awful lot of rules that families and boards of directors don't know everything about. If you're to say to me, "Okay, you're going to have X amount of dollars this year and you're going to have X minus one next year until you achieve pay equity," who signs that? Is it someone who's going to leave their office?

Ms Poole: What you're saying is, you need something really reliable you can count on year after year.

Ms Smith: Yes, and in the end I need to know I am going to achieve pay equity personally, that my work is of the same value as that other teacher's.

Ms Poole: Well, you may. It just may take several decades, if not centuries, to achieve it at this rate.

Mr Tilson: Carrying on that point about delaying it and just waiting for ever, there's no question that there are a number of good quality people in child care, and that's a good thing. I get the impression that many of them, like yourselves, are waiting. You're qualified, but you're not being paid perhaps what your qualifications are and you're waiting for something, whether it's pay equity, more funding from the government or something, to keep you in it.

As one of your people just said, it's getting to the stage where you may be forced to leave. It's fine to love working with children, it's fine if that's your niche and you like the job and you can perform it with the good qualifications that you have, but simply to live your life to stay out of the poverty level -- whatever all your fine arguments are, you're forced to leave.

I guess the question I have is that this government has said, "Well, we're going to delay it or hold off implementing this policy," and you're saying, "Oh, well, that can go on for ever." Have you, or any of the organizations you belong to, made a request to the government, to Mr Mackenzie, Ms Murdock or any of the other officials of this government, as to what sort of additional funding they are prepared to put in, not just for non-profit day care but for private day care, day care in general? Whatever day care or child care you're into, everyone's experiencing this problem of low pay -- at least many are. From another point of view, has this government indicated what its philosophy will be as far as generating more funds to child care?

Ms Smith: For instance, the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care has worked with the government in suggesting ways to implement child care reform. I know the document was well received and parents throughout Ontario played an extensive role in saying what they believe child care should be like for their families.

The government has just come back with its recommendations and I believe organizations will be responding to it in the near future. As to how they're going to generate the funds for this, as Kerry explained before, this is like a make-work program; if you can increase the salaries of workers, they have more money to spend.

Mr Tilson: I understand that argument. What I'm saying is, the emphasis on child care -- I mean, the money has to come from somewhere. The money has to come from fees or it has to come from the government, and if the government is --

Ms Smith: As a parent, I'm astounded that our education system begins at age five and is totally publicly funded, yet my child, if his birthday is after December, cannot enter into that. Why isn't the age limit reduced? Perhaps our society has grown out of the system of child care that is presently in place and maybe we need to look at creating a new system; break down some of those old barriers that are very archaic and get on with something new and innovative.

Mr Tilson: I think, with respect, that's the issue: What direction are we going to go in? Preschool, pre-kindergarten, pre-elementary, whatever the terminology is, where are we going to go? This government is saying it's broke, that it simply can't provide funding and that therefore it's going to delay the legislation. That's simply it. Therefore, it alarms me when I hear people like yourselves and others saying: "We can't afford to stay in it. We feel we're good-quality people, we're good, qualified people, but we can't afford to stay in it." That leads to my second question: Whether you have any estimates from your provincial organizations or any other organizations that you belong to as to, if this legislation passes and this delay is going to continue, how many people, men, women, whoever, will leave child care and get into some other line of work.

Ms Smith: I personally don't have that information. I don't know if Kerry has that.

Mr Tilson: Does it exist?

Ms Smith: I'm not quite sure it would, but I can just tell you, from speaking to colleagues who operate other child care centres, that it's very difficult to attract qualified staff without paying them a comparable salary. You have to understand that the quality of child care is directly related to the quality of people working there. My father always says, "You get what you pay for." There's another example of it.

Mr Tilson: All of you are making the position, "We must maintain the implementation date that was first suggested and this delay simply is unacceptable," and you've all given your arguments for that. A line of questioning that I'm pursuing with all the delegations is, will this timetable, the original timetable of implementation now as opposed to delaying for three years, because of the lack of commitment by this government to improve child care financially, hurt the very people you're representing, the women, the vulnerable people, the children, of all people the children? You don't have to be a wizard to know that good people are not going to stay. Economically, they simply can't afford it. They can love their job, they can do whatever they can do, but they simply can't afford to stay. Will your timetable, the timetable that you're suggesting, that all of you are suggesting, given the position of this government, affect not only the vulnerable people you represent but the children?

Ms Smith: Absolutely.

Mr Tilson: It's a dilemma, isn't it?

Ms Smith: No. I can quite honestly say it will affect the children. If you take a primary care giver away from a young child, he goes through months and months of grieving before he can create bonds with a new person. You're right; it will create a terrible situation for the young children.

The Chair: On behalf of this committee, I'd like to thank each and every one of you for coming out this afternoon and giving us your presentation.

Our 4 o'clock presenters have cancelled so I'd like to call for a 10-minute recess at this time. The committee stands recessed for 10 minutes.

The committee recessed at 1553 and resumed at 1610.

COOK'S SCHOOL DAY CARE INC

The Chair: I call this committee back to order. I'd like to call forward our next presenters, from Cook's School Day Care Inc. Could you please come forward. Good afternoon. A reminder to the committee that because of the cancellation and now that we have a group here, we'll be allowing these presenters up to a half-hour for their presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you would keep your remarks a little brief to allow time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you please identify yourselves for the record and then proceed.

Ms Kim Rudd: My name is Kim Rudd and I'm the executive director of Victoria College Square Day Care.

Ms Judi Quigley: Judi Quigley, executive director, Cook's School Day Care.

Ms Lynn Stubbings: Lynn Stubbings, supervisor, Victoria College Square Day Care.

Ms Linda Bevan: Linda Bevan, assistant teacher, Victoria College Square Day Care.

The Chair: Thank you. Please proceed.

Ms Rudd: Good afternoon. As I said, my name is Kim Rudd and I'm executive director of Cook's School Day Care Inc, which is an umbrella organization encompassing Cook's School Day Care, Victoria College Square Day Care and Cook's Home Child Care Agency. I am co-chair of the Northumberland child care forum and sit on the board of directors of the children's case coordination of Northumberland county and the Northumberland children's services committee.

Because of these involvements, I am here today to give you an overview not only of our organization but others in Northumberland county and the effects that pay equity and Bill 102 will have on child care in Northumberland county.

First, I would like to give you some sense of who we are. Northumberland county is approximately 115 kilometres east of Toronto and it is comprised of various rural communities, including a significant agricultural base, scattered over a very large geographic area. In the last decade, child care has grown significantly and become an integral part of our communities.

The Ontario government is to be congratulated for the introduction of Bill 102. The bill retains many of the positive features of the original Bill 168. It is precedent-setting in that it provides public funding to compensate women working in traditional job ghettos. It extends pay equity benefits to approximately 420,000 women previously excluded under the existing legislation through the introduction of two additional methods of achieving pay equity -- proportional value comparisons and proxy comparisons.

Bill 102 will benefit child care staff, the majority of whom are women. Workers in this sector are paid less than practically any other professional, even though our profession requires high educational qualifications and brings with it equally high levels of responsibility and stress.

The dedication in this field in Northumberland county is unparalleled. What other profession is paid for 8 hours per day but often works considerably more without compensation; has a day-to-day stress level that most can only imagine; has a responsibility for the emotional, social and educational growth of our children from birth to 12 years; always maintains a level of professionalism that never allows you to express anything but positive, constructive mannerisms; requires that once you complete your initial educational requirements, you must continually upgrade and enhance your qualifications, on your own time and often at your own expense; have several years of experience; the ability to communicate effectively with the public; be exposed to all manner of colds, flus etc; has a significant burnout rate; provides various supports to families and agencies such as the children aid society, and above all, provides a safe, nurturing environment for our children, all this and more for a base rate of $7.25 an hour?

A recent national study, Caring for a Living, funded by Health and Welfare Canada, showed that over 7,200 child care staff working in 969 different child care centres reported wages that hover close to or fall below Statistics Canada's poverty line. The same study found that the average salary in Ontario for a child care worker, excluding the municipal sector, was $22,983. In Northumberland county the figure for fully qualified staff is $19,200. For others such as assistants, cooks etc who work in the field, it is considerably less. This includes the direct operating grant but excludes the wage enhancement grant. In recognition of the low wage rates in this sector, the wage enhancement grant was introduced by the Ontario government in 1991 as a down payment on pay equity for child care staff.

Under the existing legislation, the procedure for pay equity achievement covered only those women where female jobs could be compared with male jobs of equal value in the same workplace. Child care staff in Northumberland county were excluded from achieving pay equity as there were no male comparators, the only exception being the family Y.

Under Bill 102, the introduction of the proxy comparison method will permit women in all-female organizations to match job classes with an outside organization. This is a real step forward for which the government should be congratulated. It should be noted that Northumberland county is comprised of 16 child care agencies, all of which are non-profit, governed by parent and community-based boards. We do not have any municipally operated centres within our county.

However, as much as we welcome Bill 102, there are some areas which specifically impact on the child care sector in Northumberland county, and I would like to draw your attention to these.

Pleading restricted financial circumstances, the government has delayed the implementation date for proxy comparisons by one year, from January 1, 1993, to January 1, 1994. We urge the government to maintain the 1993 implementation date. Pay equity implementation has been like a carrot dangled before our noses, only to be snatched away again. Women working in the field of child care have been living with restricted financial circumstances for years. Enough is enough.

Child Care Reform -- Setting the Stage was a clear message from this government that it recognized the need for substantial reform in this sector. I was fortunate enough to have made a presentation at those hearings as well. At what point do presentations stop and reform begin? During that process, it was abundantly clear that the low wages of child care staff subsidize this sector.

We also want to recommend the placing of a cap on proxy payouts. We suggest a January 1, 1998, date. Under Bill 102, employers implementing wage adjustments determined by the proxy method may do so at the rate of 1% of payroll per year until pay equity is achieved. With the salary levels I have just presented to you, you will forgive us for wondering if we will achieve pay equity at about the same time we retire. Worse yet, will there be anyone left in this profession? Will we be able to continue to attract dedicated, caring individuals to this profession or will the realities of supporting oneself be a determining factor? I hope this will no longer be the case. Again, women in all-female workplaces have waited long enough for the recognition of their right to pay equity and they should not have to continue to wait indefinitely, as is the case under the present bill.

There are two other issues I'd like to raise. The first has to do with the comparator. We strongly urge the government to maintain the municipal child care worker as the proxy comparator. If a municipality such as ours does not offer child care, we would be able to move to the next municipality that does. Municipal child care workers are paid an average of 29% more than their counterparts in a non-profit centre. A statistic I would like to add to that is that we in Northumberland county are paid approximately 25% less than our counterparts in Durham, which means if we go at 1% a year, it will take 60 years for us to achieve pay equity. Using the municipal child care sector as a comparator would be a step forward in redressing the historic undervaluing of the work of child care professionals.

The second point is that workplaces with under 10 employees are still excluded from pay equity. This will impact on many women working in small child care agencies such as those in our rural communities. I urge the government to address this inequity in the bill. My suggestion is that they implement the recommendation of the Equal Pay Coalition, which proposed an amendment to the act prohibiting employers from discriminating on the basis of gender in the compensation of employees employed in female job classes. This would allow employees to file a complaint with the Pay Equity Commission to achieve pay equity. This recommendation may be found in the preamble to the general amendments section of the brief presented to this committee by the Equal Pay Coalition. I thank you for your time.

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The Chair: Thank you. We have about six minutes for each caucus.

Ms Poole: Thank you very much for a very articulate presentation this afternoon. I must say that your figures about how long it'll take you to reach pay equity are even more dire than mine. I had suggested three decades, but you're up to six decades. It's not a very attractive prospect.

I have two questions. The first relates to the municipal child care workers you would like to see used as a proxy comparator. I suspect that government will not listen to that argument, because we have another piece of legislation we're looking at right now, Bill 169, which is the companion piece, where it's basically said that the government has the right to determine in which cases it's the employer, because it doesn't think pay equity should be used to reach parity.

I think what you're really saying is that the municipal child care workers are earning substantially more than other child care workers and you want parity with them. If the government sticks to the argument it's used with its other piece of legislation, it doesn't bode well for your being able to do that, but it certainly would get you up there much more quickly than if you have to use other comparators, say, in the non-profit sector.

The question I had was regarding the wage enhancement grants. You've made specific reference to this earlier in your presentation. What I consider to be wage enhancement grants have actually been happening since 1987.

Ms Rudd: The direct operating grants?

Ms Poole: Yes, the direct operating grants was what they were called, but they were for the purpose of enhancing the wages of child care workers. I've put this scenario to two of the other child care presenters this afternoon. What if, instead of reaching pay equity via this very long, tenuous proxy method, which does involve a fair amount of bureaucracy, which also involves trying to compare to someone outside your own establishment, you had a comprehensive wage enhancement program which, say over an eight-year period, said, "This is the goal of what we want you to be paid, which would value your work as child care workers, and this is what we commit to you, that we will pay you every year for those eight years, till you reach that level"?

It just seems to me a more direct way of giving you pay equity, because originally pay equity was not meant to go outside the same establishment; it was meant to reverse the gender discrimination in compensation within an establishment by looking at male and female comparators. In your cases you don't have a male comparator, so you don't fit that aspect of pay equity. The other problem is that you have to go outside the establishment.

I'm just wondering, does that kind of concept have any appeal to you, where you reach pay equity but by a different route?

Ms Rudd: It would have appeal in that there would have to be guarantees attached that at the end of eight years we aren't eight years behind again. Eight years does seem like an awful long time; 60 seems even longer. We had struck 1998 as a goal. I think we would be reasonable to some flexibility in that, but again, there would have to be a comparison. Who's going to determine that in our organization in Northumberland county, instead of making $19,000 a year I should make $24,000 after eight years? Is that reasonable? Am I still paid what I'm worth? Who's deciding what we're worth? In the municipal sector, obviously, there has been a message from various levels of government that this is what the child care professionals in the municipal sector are worth.

My other concern is that there are other sectors paying early childhood educators similar wages. Unfortunately, that's the board of education, which is also government-funded.

Ms Poole: I guess this is an ironic situation, where I'm saying you're worth more than you're saying you're worth, because I think you're worth more than they're paying municipal child care workers. I don't see why you would settle for being paid $29,000, which a municipal child care worker is paid, on average, when a teacher, for instance, who's perhaps teaching kindergarten might be paid $45,000 or $50,000 for that same type of work.

Ms Rudd: Again, my concern would be that there would be some guarantee that at the end of eight years it would reflect the current economic situation in eight years, not the one when it began. That would be my concern; but I agree. I guess when you've been in this profession for this long you just always think it may never happen, and I think we're at the point where it can happen and we don't want to lose it.

Ms Poole: Thank you.

Mr Arnott: Ms Rudd, thank you very much for coming in. You've come quite a distance, from Northumberland county, driven quite a piece, braved the highway weather that we might have.

Ms Rudd: The Don Valley Parkway.

Mr Arnott: My wife is an elementary school teacher, so I know what you're talking about when you talk about flus, colds and so on, because you get every bug that's going.

I was interested, I guess, in your final page. I think in your presentation you very eloquently demonstrated how important your work is and the pride that you take in your work. That's very commendable and I think very important for us to hear.

When you talk about the proxy comparison that you would like to have made with respect to municipal child care -- and you're talking about approximately a 29%, 30% difference in the wages between municipal and other non-profit agencies -- are you saying that to achieve true pay equity at your agency specifically, the wages should go up about 30%?

Ms Rudd: They'd have to go up even more than that. It's not just our agency; it's every agency in our county. We have a municipal government that is not committed to child care and in fact last year almost took it right out of the budget. So we have a constant struggle on that end to maintain.

Mr Arnott: The municipal governments have seen their various grants not going up to the extent that they have been, and they're faced with a number of difficult cost-cutting alternatives. That seems to be the time that we're living in. The 30% increase, where would you think that should come from -- in terms of increased fees to parents or greater grants from the provincial government, greater grants from municipal government? What would you think would be the best way to achieve the 30% increase in salaries?

Ms Rudd: I don't think the increase in parent fees is reasonable at this time. We have seen, in our area, a great change in the climate. We have a lot of people going back for retraining. We have a lot of people in single-family situations. We are in a situation where I just don't think the public could take it right now in a direct after-tax payout.

I think an increase in taxes in order to pay for pay equity for our sector would turn itself around as far as the government would be concerned and it would be getting it back. We now have more buying power, we now have the ability to go out and purchase, and hopefully it's for our economy. I don't think it's money that is just being handed out and not given back. So I think it definitely has to come from some level of government.

Mr Arnott: That's an interesting argument, and it's been put forward by a number of other presenters today. It struck me as fanciful in that if a person thinks they're getting an increase but it's all going to be taxed back or it's all going to go back into the government coffers anyway, it's not a real increase.

Ms Rudd: But it's not going back necessarily in taxes off your paycheque; it's going back in the fact that maybe now I'm going to go out and buy that new car I was going to buy, or maybe it might allow me to purchase something else I may not have been able to before. So I'm not so much saying it's a direct tax, but an indirect benefit.

Mr Arnott: All right. That's enough. Thank you very much.

Mr Ferguson: I want to thank all of you for taking the time out of your schedules, obviously, to come down and make your presentation today.

You've raised two issues, separate and apart from the main issue. Of course, it seems that the number one concern that we've been hearing today from all presenters -- you obviously are presenting in favour of the legislation -- is the question of timing. I was wondering if you could suggest to the committee just on the question of timing something that perhaps you would view as a little more reasonable, something that you could live with.

Ms Rudd: Timing in implementing pay equity, or the payout?

Mr Ferguson: Implementation, you're pretty clear on that, but the payout itself. We're looking at -- I think you suggested 1998.

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Ms Rudd: Yes, 1998, five years, and I think that's as long as it should take. As I said when I used the percentage comparisons, it would take us approximately 60 years at 1% per year.

Mr Ferguson: I was also wondering, on the question of 1% per year, obviously you're not happy with the 1% a year and that obviously doesn't sound like a very large amount to most individuals. Could you perhaps clarify your position or expand on your position as to what you think would be a little more acceptable in terms of payout?

Ms Rudd: As I said, for instance, the municipality next to us does have municipal child care, all around us actually, and the average wage is 29% higher than the non-profit sector. We in turn are somewhat less than that, lower again than they are. What I'm saying is that I think a 60% increase in our salary, although it would be wonderful, I'm not sure is realistic, over five years. But I think there has to be some commitment that it would be increased at a rate that within five years would at least bring us up to the municipal level of neighbouring centres.

I suppose we could go and compare, as the suggestion came out, to elementary school teachers, JK, SK teachers. Then we'd be talking about a 100% increase or more. So I think what we're asking for in five years is not unrealistic. We're saying 30% within five years for us personally would be something we could live with, but we couldn't live with it spread out over 1% a year.

Ms Murdock: I'm sort of caught in an unenviable position, I guess, of thinking back to the years of slavery and in reality women being mere chattels and being expected to work for nothing in the home or wherever. But then, having said that, given the financial constraint, as we're only too aware of, if I'm reading this right, and to pick up on what Mr Ferguson was asking, the 29% per year differential between you and the municipal workers would work out to about a 5.8% increase per year so that by 1998 you would be brought up to 1992 municipal salaries, right?

Ms Rudd: That's what I said earlier I don't want to happen.

Ms Murdock: Exactly, and I can understand that, but that would mean a 5.8% -- the money would have to come from somewhere. I guess I'm asking two questions here. If you don't have it, where do you get it, number one, and number two, would you apply the same kind of percentage requirement to the public sector and the private sector?

We've been listening to business with its concerns and the job losses, particularly in the manufacturing industry. At 1% a year of payroll in the previous year, they're claiming to find that as onerous as if it were, say, 6%.

I realize that basically what the private sector in day care is asking is that it receive the public sector equivalent, and I'm wondering if you're applying that to the private sector as well in other areas, because this bill applies not just to day care but to everything. Do you know what I'm saying?

Ms Rudd: I guess I'd be looking at two things. One is that primarily in child care we don't have an option. There isn't a sector I can think of personally that is strictly private that has this many women working in it that has no male comparator.

The other thing I guess I would question is that our school board, for instance, absolutely had to have pay equity implemented by January 1 of this year. That was accomplished. I guess my point is, it can be done. I'm not exactly sure where they found the money, but because it was legislated they did. My property taxes didn't go up.

I think maybe we need to look at how important this is to our society. Is this a societal issue? I think it is. For some reason, the perception is that education of children starts at 3.6 years of age when they enter the school system. It doesn't, and I really feel that the benefit to society of quality care when they are younger is something we as a society will reap the benefits of for years.

Ms Murdock: One of the points that was made earlier by one of the other presenters was in terms of the whole education system and our mentality and mindset towards it having to change too, but you can't change all things all together.

Ms Rudd: No. Believe me, we know.

Ms Murdock: Unfortunately. I wish we could, but it's just not to be.

Ms Rudd: I think the other point is that because it is a female-dominated job -- and in our county it is only female; I think once there was one male who worked in child care as a university student in Northumberland county, and that was precedent-setting -- we have tended to accept the responsibility.

Judi and I are partners in that we share the three organizations, each with our own talents, and we both take the summer off without pay in order to help the day care get through, because fortunately we're in a position where we can do that. We still do our work, we just don't get paid for it. You would not find too many professions that would expect people to do that, but that's what is basically expected. I think maybe because we are women we have a sense, or some way back this has been embedded in us, that we have a responsibility to these children and won't sacrifice the children. I think that's what it comes down to.

I don't want to see us get to the point where we say, "Enough is enough, we're going to look out for us first." I think Manitoba did that at some point a couple of years ago. They just closed the day care centres down and all walked out. I don't want to see us get to that point here.

Ms Murdock: For sure.

The Chair: Ms Rudd, Ms Quigley, Ms Stubbings and Ms Bevan, on behalf of this committee, I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this afternoon and giving us your presentation.

REGISTERED NURSES' ASSOCIATION OF ONTARIO

The Chair: I'd like to call forward our next presenters, from the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario. Please come forward. Good afternoon. Just as a reminder, you'll be allowed up to a half-hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you would keep your remarks brief so that there's time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you please identify yourselves for the record and then proceed.

Ms Pam Callahan: Good afternoon. My name's Pam Callahan. I'm a member of the board of directors of the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario. With me is Kathleen McMillan, also a member of the board of directors. Her portfolio is responsible for socioeconomic status. As well, Aruna Papp is the policy analyst at our association.

We would like to keep our comments brief today and let you know that we will be following our comments with a written submission for you.

At this time, we would like to comment that the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario has a keen interest in achieving pay equity in Ontario. Nurses have been waiting a long time to achieve pay equity. In fact, nurses have had a long-standing interest in pay equity in the province of Ontario.

Back in the early 1960s, nurses were lobbying for change with respect to pay and fair pay. We recognize that these times are recessionary, that there is fiscal restraint and that everybody is under the gun to manage their money properly. However, we believe that equal pay for work of equal value is a social justice issue. It should not be sacrificed because of recessionary times.

Bill 102 essentially delays or stalls the process of achieving pay equity in Ontario. It limits the rights of women and it attempts to exclude the rights of some women based on the size of their employment setting.

Ms Kathleen McMillan: To continue on Pam's remarks, the RNAO believes that pay equity makes economic sense, that if you improve the financial status of women, this allows them to contribute to the economy through increased purchasing power.

Pay equity is especially relevant to immigrant women, for whom entry-level jobs are often found in small workplaces which would be excluded under the proposed bill. We also believe that pay equity is a health issue. Single-parent, female-headed families are disproportionately among the poor in Ontario and poverty and ill health are inextricably linked. Most of the illnesses that the poor are experiencing are preventable. They are due to malnutrition and infection. We believe that pay equity would help to contribute to a reduction in preventable illnesses among the poor.

For too long women's work has been undervalued and underpaid. Women's work is often invisible, but it is socially essential, such as that of our colleagues the child care workers who just presented before us. Nursing work requires high levels of knowledge and skill to respond to the complexities of the human response to illness and to assist people to stay healthy. For example, nurses provide pre-natal health teaching to first-time mothers. We counsel families coping with chronic, debilitating illnesses. We help to create an environment that supports families in the crisis of bereavement.

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Registered nurses have made an enormous contribution to the health of Ontario's citizens. This cannot go unrecognized. We can and we will continue to provide excellent services. However, we may not remain silent. We plan to speak out and we plan to assist in health care reform. There is money in the system; the problem is that it's unfairly distributed. There are 10,000 physicians in this province who receive 9% of Ontario's health care budget, while 80,000 registered nurses get a mere 1.25%. We believe there's room to change.

The Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario represents approximately 14,000 registered nurses, from student to retired: nurses working in public health, nurses in acute care, nurses in clinical research, in education and administration. We believe that the time for pay equity is now. We must ensure that the reform of the health care system is not carried out at the expense of those least able to bear the burden. The RNAO is committed to achieving pay equity, and we are speaking out not only for nurses but for vulnerable women throughout this province. We are speaking out not only for nursing, we are speaking out for the health of Ontario's citizens. The time to act is now.

The Chair: Thank you. Questions or comments? Mr Tilson.

Mr Tilson: The question I have is, it does get to be a bit of a broken record, but I am concerned as to where the money's going to come from. I mean, we're all taxpayers, no matter what we're doing. We're all paying taxes, we're all looking for government to provide services, and at the same time we have to pay for these services.

I look at the emphasis of this government on the whole issue of transfer payments to hospitals and how it has reversed its promise that it made a year ago, which I'd like to hear you comment on, because that indirectly affects this subject, because where in the world are hospitals going to get the money to pay for these things?

You know, you look at the lack of emphasis on health care by this government, whether it's hospitals, universities, the various partners that we have in this province, and hospitals are one of them, and then we look at people like you coming forward with quite legitimate concerns, quite legitimate issues, the unfairness of it. Then, I guess, at the same time you put on your taxpayer's hat, which I can't believe you don't do periodically. Where in the world is the money going to come from? Are you saying, "Oh, it's only going to cost X dollars," or what are you saying? Where is the money going to come from?

Ms Callahan: What we're saying is that there's money in the system. What we're saying is that money is unfairly distributed. What we're saying is that there is opportunity and room for improvement. I would like to ask, with all due respect, of the Minister of Labour where the money is coming from. I think the question remains to be answered by the government to provide some fiscal accountability for this.

However, I think that's an issue that can be dealt with. It's an issue that if we look at health care reform and managing the money in a responsible manner, we just need to look at the figures and where the dollars are being spent. There is room for improvement. We can achieve pay equity within this province within the budget we have.

Mr Tilson: Very legitimate questions. I go then to the next question, and the next area is, are you afraid that if the timetable is met that, as has already happened with some nurses, there are layoffs, that hospitals say, "Oh, yes, well, we're going to do that, but sorry, we've only got" -- in other words, you have the minister criticism, and that's legitimate. You hear the Liberals and the Tories doing that all the time, quite legitimate criticisms. You do the same thing. But then we get down to the hospitals that have so much money to put forward on whatever programs they're putting forward, and are you afraid of layoffs? Are you afraid that certain nurses will be laid off because of the timetable insistence?

Ms McMillan: I think that is a potential problem and in fact we have seen that, but we still don't feel that the burden of paying for pay equity should fall on the people who are hoping to achieve pay equity.

The other thing too is that the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario fully supports the ministry's focus on restructuring the health care system away from an illness model to a preventive model. We really believe that doing this will cause moneys to be freed up, because we're investing our money in a very expensive end of care and treatment. We're spending a fortune on the last six months of people's lives instead of putting the money into prevention. That's why we're saying that these moneys are there but that they need to be restructured and refocused.

Mr Tilson: Thank you. Mr Arnott has some questions.

Mr Arnott: Thank you very much for coming in and presenting your concerns to us.

I think you made a very interesting comment about health care costs in your last statement, a lot of them being in the last six months of the patient's life and transferring the emphasis on prevention instead of acute illness. I know that's the government's intent.

You're a health care professional. Do you agree, or am I mistaken, that we're still going to have those costs being incurred? People are still going to age, become older, eventually becoming ill and pass away.

Ms McMillan: That's of course true. That's part of the life cycle. But with improved standards of living we have seen an improvement in the health of elders. I believe that's an important issue. We know that poor health is inextricably tied to poverty. We have lots and lots of research to support that.

For example, one of the biggest problems in our health care system is elderly, poor women who have poor health and who cost the health care system a lot of money. If pay equity had been achieved in the past so that these impoverished women had an adequate income and were able to put money into a pension so that they were living at an adequate standard of living now, then this might not be the problem we're having now.

Mr Arnott: Yes. If we're all richer, we're all much better off. There's no question about it.

Ms McMillan: No, but I think there is a mean that is achievable. What we've seen in this province in the last five years is a widening and an increasing discrepancy between the impoverished and the wealthy.

Mr Arnott: I have a second question that relates to a comparison one of you drew. It was a very striking comparison between doctors' salaries and nurses' salaries. I forgot what the percentage was. Could you give me that again?

Ms Callahan: Certainly; 9% of the health care budget goes to physician resources.

Mr Arnott: Okay. There are two ways to look at it: Either nurses are underpaid or doctors are overpaid.

Ms McMillan: Or both.

Mr Arnott: Yes, or both. Do you think doctors are overpaid?

Ms Callahan: What I think and what our association believes is that there is room for change within the system. We have had some studies. Recently the Barer-Stoddart report pointed out that we have an oversupply of physicians within the country. We know that the schools are graduating more physicians than we need. We know that nurses can provide excellent skills and care to people in communities, and certainly if we had an expanded role of a nurse in a variety of different settings, we could probably manage the health care system within the dollars we have by restructuring the ratio of care providers.

Mr Arnott: Thank you.

Ms Callahan: Thank you for your question.

The Chair: Mr Tilson, one brief question.

Mr Tilson: I have one other question, which is similar to questions I've asked other delegations, particularly the health care and day care people. If you don't feel that your salaries are being raised to the level you feel they should be at, is there a fear that -- as did happen a number of years ago where a whole slew of nurses left this jurisdiction in Ontario and went to other jurisdictions, whether it be the United States or other provinces, because of bad policies of a particular government.

Ms McMillan: I think the cyclical shortages and overproduction of nurses are far more complicated than just salary issues. This is something we have seen cyclically, in history back to the turn of the century, and I wouldn't say that money is the only issue that creates that problem.

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Ms Murdock: Actually, Mr Arnott sort of got into where I was going to head in terms of the 9% and the 1.2% for nurses, and I wondered, from the way you had said it, whether or not you were suggesting that money be taken away from the 9%? The health care budget, out of the total budget, is over 30% of the government's package. Are you suggesting that the 9% be dropped and the 1.2% be increased, or that within the confines of the health care reform initiative, where the idea is to move to community clinics rather than a hospital base and there would be a change, as you suggested, inevitably, I think, towards other health care professionals being utilized or services being utilized other than physicians in the end or that you would utilize different kinds of skills, it can be managed within the health care system? I think the long-term planning is looking at that very thing you've suggested.

But in terms of all the other ministries that exist -- I guess right now there are what, 26? I realize that you are health care professionals and that therefore your focus is obviously on your own milieu, but having said that, you also said that government can and has it within its own management capabilities of finding the money within its own system and the Minister of Labour should do so.

This is a little off topic. I will give an example. The Ministry of Tourism and Recreation announced $14 million for a skidoo trail. In my riding, the immediate outcry was, "Why are you spending money on skidoo trails when our health care system is so badly in need of doctors," because we don't have a lot of doctors in the north.

Mr Tilson: Why are you doing it?

Ms Murdock: Part of that is that the whole thing is that individual ministries are allocated so much money, and once they've got it, let's just say they don't go passing it off generously, "Oh, we've got $2 million extra, so we'll give it over to health care." They will spend it within their own ministry. I'm just wondering how in other areas you see utilizing that and then whether or not doctors should be reduced and nurses increased.

The other question I have is in relation to RNAO itself in terms of your salary levels and where you sit in the scale of wages, generally, so it's approximate.

Ms Callahan: There were a number of questions in your question, so you may have to repeat them. I'll attempt to answer the last question first. In terms of the membership of RNAO, we do represent, as I indicated, a wide variety of nurses throughout this province. Over 50% of our membership is made up of front-line clinical staff nurses. Our other members are administrators, educators, and certainly with some of the shift in salary ranges, we are seeing that there is a much smaller differential between the different groups, if that was your question, between the different categories, if you will, of nurses, whether it be administrator, educator, clinical, front-line or care giver. There is not the degree of expanse between those groups.

Ms Murdock: given that nursing is predominantly female and you would more than likely move to a proxy system, you'd have to find some career that's equivalent in skills and so on, which would put you at, I presume, a different category, would it not? That would be the whole basis of this exercise. If you found a male job group that would be --

Ms Callahan: I think the whole basis of the exercise is recognizing equal pay for work of equal value, and that is certainly what our position is, if you're asking from the association's perspective.

Ms Murdock: You must have been looking at this. This has been discussed since 1987. You haven't been sitting, knowing that it's coming --

Ms Callahan: As I said, we've been discussing this since the 1960s.

Ms Murdock: But knowing that, I guess what I'm asking is, what group are you looking at in terms of comparator?

Ms McMillan: If I can interrupt, I think that's very difficult to say, because nursing is not a homogenous group, so it would be in terms of the different job categories within the profession. For example, a nurse scientist with a PhD would be compared, I assume, to another scientist and a clinical nurse who's giving care at the bedside would be compared with someone else who might require the same kind of knowledge and skill. I would expect there might be a difference between those two, so it's very difficult for us to say and who would we say would be our logical comparator group? It would be much easier if it were a homogenous group, but it's not.

Ms Murdock: So you don't have any objections to utilizing the method suggested in Bill 102 in terms of applying to the Pay Equity Commission to find a proxy comparator group?

Ms McMillan: No. Our concern is primarily the timing, the fact that the bill is not introducing the legislation in the way we had initially expected. We've been waiting a long time. We are concerned that it's being stalled and put off.

Ms Murdock: The payment date?

Ms McMillan: Yes.

Ms Murdock: Okay.

Ms Poole: I know Elinor Caplan has a number of questions for you, but I just wanted to make one comment before we go to Elinor. I think, Pam, when you answered Mr Arnott's question about whether doctors were overpaid, you showed exceptional diplomatic skills worthy of any cabinet minister. So if in the mid-1990s you're looking for a career change, we can offer you a candidacy of a riding of your choice. We'd be pleased to have you join the Liberal cabinet. There's my offer out of the way; now for the tough questions.

Mrs Caplan: Just to put things into some perspective -- and I am quite familiar with both pay equity and the situation of nurses -- I'm surprised the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Labour would not be aware that nurses have been compared to pastry chefs in the examples of the kinds of comparators that have been found. What I found particularly galling was that nurses were paid less than the pastry chefs in a hospital. In each employment situation your members are going to be compared to different occupations. The whole essence of pay equity is that you're not looking for the same work, but you are looking for work of equal value and it could be anywhere from the maintenance department to the bakery. It's then the opportunity that staff have within the concept of pay equity to make the argument and negotiate as to the value to the employer.

I know the existing law has frustrated nurses to a large degree, although there have been many benefits. Most of the frustrations have been the lack of willingness to negotiate by some of the employers, and I'm very aware of that frustration from my conversations with the Ontario Nurses' Association.

But I find some of your comments particularly interesting, because for the first time what you've really said, what I heard you say -- and I'll ask you to just verify that, because I also see Bill 102 as a giant step backwards -- would you agree it is a step backwards, that it does not even begin to implement that which was put forward in the package of 1987 and is a major disappointment, especially coming from the NDP government that said it was going to do so much more?

Ms Callahan: We believe this is a stalling mechanism, that through this the process will not be achieved in the dates outlined under the original act, and that's very concerning to our members. We have heard from a number of nurses who have been working to achieve pay equity within their own settings for a very long time, and this is not respecting the process.

Mrs Caplan: A few plans have been developed and negotiated, as I understand, although very few. But one of the interesting things I found, through the discussions of the impact of the existing legislation, is that when Gerry Phillips announced in March 1990 that proportional value was going to be a tool available, that many of the plans have already begun to use and implement proportional value within the existing time lines and there is a fear that this legislation in fact, as a step backwards, will delay further the implementation of that policy which has been in place since 1987.

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There are also grave concerns because of some of the estimates that we have about what the effect of the proxy comparator might be, especially at a time when you have the government, rather than looking at the kind of restructuring that would free up some of those wasted resources -- I think you said it very well and very diplomatically -- within the health system in particular -- I agree with you that the resources are there and that nurses should have the first call on available resources as far as transfers. When you see the priority that the existing government has set in place, what you've found is that the money has gone to those -- in the first year, if you take a look at the impact of the wage increases to OPSEU, to the doctors -- $474-million, almost a half-billion-dollar increase in that first year -- and the increases that have gone to teachers, that's where the money has gone and that's partially what's got us in this huge conundrum and deficit problem right now also. But the money that the NDP spent for its priorities went to the haves, as opposed to those who have been disadvantaged, and then it's cut back on the support for pay equity that was promised, so nurses are losing their jobs as a result of the policies of this government.

One of the concerns that I have with the proxy comparator is that this NDP government says that's not going to come into place until 1998, well beyond the mandate of its government. Cynically, my colleague mentioned 1995 as an important year for the NDP. That's going to be the election year.

Ms Poole: That's when the payouts start.

Mrs Caplan: That's when the payouts are supposed to start and the commitment of 100% funding, but we've seen that they haven't done what they said they were going to do. They're not doing it now. This is, I agree with you, a betrayal of women who believed that they were going to come in with a better plan.

The question that I would have within that context is, unless major changes are made, in Bill 102 in particular, do you think that it should be supported or defeated?

Ms Poole: Or amended.

Mrs Caplan: Well, if they won't amend it substantially; unless there are substantive changes made to this existing piece of legislation as we see it today.

Ms Callahan: That's a very difficult question to answer.

Mrs Caplan: Remember, if this is defeated, the existing legislation stays in place.

Ms Callahan: Right, right. We have a lot to lose either way. I think the commitment of this government was to achieve pay equity. We believe that we should achieve pay equity and we need to push for that process. I'm not directly answering your question, I realize --

Ms Poole: With diplomatic skills.

Ms Callahan: -- and it is, I have to be honest, a very difficult one to answer at this point. I'd like to defer that to our written submission.

Mrs Caplan: I'll be looking forward to hearing what you have to say, because I agree with you: I think that Bill 102 is a step backwards and it puts off into the future for possibly another government. I think that the women, particularly nurses, are feeling quite betrayed by the NDP.

Do I have one more question on Bill 169?

The Chair: If you want to make it very brief.

Mrs Caplan: Yes. Bill 169 deals with the definition of "employer." You haven't mentioned anything about that. I know that nurses have a special interest in that because of the Haldimand-Norfolk case. I wondered if you wanted to make any comment on Bill 169 and the implications, particularly for nurses.

Ms Callahan: I think that the Haldimand-Norfolk case was a precedent-setting case. We need to ensure that those precedents stay.

Mrs Caplan: Bill 169 changes that. Are you aware of that?

Ms Callahan: I may have to refer to my notes.

Mrs Caplan: Bill 169 allows the government to determine who is the employer when the government is not the employer, not only for the purposes of pay equity but for any reason.

We've already heard that the Frontenac-Addington case would not have been permitted, we have heard that the McKechnie Ambulance Service case would not have been permitted and I think if you look carefully, you'll see that it has huge implications as well for the Haldimand-Norfolk case. You haven't mentioned that in your brief. Since the nurses had a special interest in that, I thought you might want to comment further on that. I see that as well as a betrayal certainly of what Evelyn Gigantes had to say when she was Minister of Health and withdrew support for the Haldimand-Norfolk case. Certainly, her statement said that she was going to do one thing and here they've done exactly the opposite. I just want to draw that to your attention.

Ms Callahan: Thank you very much. I'm just referring to my notes here. In fact, I have a comment to myself that this is the case. I'll have to go back and take a look at that further and possibly we'll clarify that further. Thank you for bringing that to our attention.

The Chair: Ms Callahan, Ms McMillan and Ms Papp, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this afternoon and giving us your presentation.

Mr Tilson: Mr Chair, in looking at the draft, will the meeting start at 9:30 or at 10?

The Chair: Promptly at 9:30.

Mr Tilson: So the Association of Local Official Health Agencies is attending?

The Chair: Yes. They are confirmed.

Ms Murdock: I just want to advise that the ministry staff for both Bill 102 and Bill 169 are seated over there for the benefit of any of the members of the committee, if they have any questions or comments or requests or whatever.

The Chair: Thank you. Seeing no further business before this committee, this committee stands adjourned until promptly at 9:30 tomorrow morning.

The committee adjourned at 1707.