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

ST LAWRENCE COOPERATIVE DAY CARE
KYLE RAE

CANADIAN UNION OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES, ONTARIO DIVISION

PAY EQUITY COMMISSION

AFTERNOON SITTING

ONTARIO ASSOCIATION OF INTERVAL AND TRANSITION HOUSES

UNITED FOOD AND COMMERCIAL WORKERS INTERNATIONAL UNION

NURSES COALITION FOR PAY EQUITY

PAT SCHULZ CHILDCARE CENTRE
METRO TORONTO COALITION FOR BETTER CHILD CARE

CONTENTS

Wednesday 20 January 1993

Pay Equity Amendment Act, 1993, Bill 102

Public Service Statute Law Amendment Act, 1993, Bill 169

St Lawrence Cooperative Day Care; Kyle Rae

Jane Mercer, administrator, St Lawrence Cooperative Day Care

Zeenat Janmohamed, staff member, Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care

Canadian Union of Public Employees, Ontario Division

Jim Woodward, legislative assistant

Irene Harris, equal opportunities representative, CUPE national office

Nancy Barrett, women's committee representative, Windsor CUPE council

Jill Oaker, women's committee representative, Durham CUPE council

Geneva Neale, women's committee representative, Hamilton CUPE council

Pay Equity Commission

Brigid O'Reilly, commissioner

Judith Killoran, legal counsel

Murray Lapp, director, review services branch

Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses

Trudy Don, coordinator

Joanne King, chair, pay equity ad hoc committee

Kim Fraser, member, lobby committee

United Food and Commercial Workers International Union

Brian Neath, assistant to Ontario director

John Tremble, researcher

Ralph Ortleib, international representative

Nurses Coalition for Pay Equity

Rita Schreiber, director

Anna Giallonardo, member

Pat Schulz Childcare Centre; Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care

Cheryl West, representative, Pat Schulz Childcare Centre

Zeenat Janmohamed, staff member, Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

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

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

Mathyssen, Irene (Middlesex ND) for Ms Carter

Murdock, Sharon (Sudbury ND) for Mr Wessenger

Poole, Dianne (Eglinton L) for Mr Mahoney

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

Also taking part / Autres participants et participantes: Evans, Catherine, policy adviser, rights and legislation, Ministry of Labour

Clerk / Greffière: Freedman, Lisa

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

The committee met at 0942 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 meeting of the standing committee on administration of justice to order. We will be continuing our public hearings on Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act, and Bill 169, An Act to amend the Public Service Act and the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act.

ST LAWRENCE COOPERATIVE DAY CARE
KYLE RAE

The Chair: I'd like to call forward our first presenters for the morning from the St Lawrence Cooperative Day Care. Please come forward. Good morning. Just a reminder that you'll be allowed up to a half-hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you would keep your remarks slightly briefer than that to allow time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you please identify yourself for the record and then proceed.

Ms Jane Mercer: My name is Jane Mercer and I'm the administrator of the St Lawrence Cooperative Day Care in Toronto. The organization was established in 1979, and it provides child care for over 100 children in the downtown community of the St Lawrence neighbourhood.

The vast majority of our parents are young, economically disadvantaged and female, and they are raising their families on their own. The vast majority of our teachers are also young, economically disadvantaged and female, and they worry about how they will ever afford to raise a family. As I'm speaking to you today, I'm speaking for the teachers of St Lawrence Cooperative Day Care as well as the parents of the day care, and I'm doing so because over 100 children depend on these women.

As you are all so aware, 45% of Canadian children of single parents are raised in poverty. They begin their lives at a tremendous disadvantage, a disadvantage that affects every aspect of their development and determines their future. As you are also all so aware, women, on average, earn 70% of what men earn. How the one is affected by the other is not a difficult connection to make.

These children, as well as these parents and these teachers, are among thousands around the province who are counting on this government to do three things that may just start to turn things around:

(1) The women and children of this province look to this government to implement legislation beginning January 1, 1993, that will enable all women employed in the broader public sector to compare their jobs to male jobs in similar establishments through the use of both the proxy and proportional methods.

(2) The women and children of this province look to this government to allocate the necessary resources to implement this legislation and to place on that a cap to make the payment by December 31, 1998.

(3) The women and children of this province look to this government to set up a process that ensures that boards of directors of child care centres throughout the province will be able to follow through on this legislation.

If the women and children of Ontario can't look to you, this NDP government, with the platform that you ran on and with more women in your cabinet than we have ever seen before, to make pay equity really happen, then who can we ever expect to do this? If it doesn't happen this year under this government, then it isn't ever going to happen, and for that, our daughters will hold you responsible.

Mr Kyle Rae: Good morning. I'm Kyle Rae, city councillor, city of Toronto, and I'm the chair of the city of Toronto's personnel committee and a member of the executive. I just have a few points to make on employment equity; sorry, pay equity. I've been dealing with employment equity with the firefighters for the last three weeks so I have that on the brain.

That the pay equity legislation needs fixing should be no surprise to anyone. From the moment it was introduced, many individuals and organizations from the public, private and community sectors have been critical of its conceptual approach, its limitations and indeed its method of enforcement.

If we are at all interested in addressing equity, we must look at all those factors which contribute to creating inequity. It is a well-known fact that both wages and representation go hand in hand. Yet on the one hand we have pay equity legislation which does not address injustices created for the individual, nor does it address workplaces where there are less than 10 persons. On the other hand, we have proposed employment equity legislation which only addresses representation, and still only in some workplaces.

In addition, while legislation is increasingly moving in the direction of improving individual human rights, this approach to equity, while purporting to improve the wages for women, can only do so for some women.

In keeping with the intent of the Pay Equity Act, the city has found itself the employer of one of three employee groups of the Toronto Public Library Board. For all other purposes, including collective bargaining, day-to-day management etc, the board is the employer, not the city. Yet now the city finds itself accountable for fulfilling management responsibilities under the Pay Equity Act.

This decision means that the city is now interfering in the board's ability to manage its employees, perhaps even undermining the board's autonomy. Specifically, pay equity is closely linked to pay practices, which in this instance are subject to the collective bargaining process between the board and its CUPE locals.

Pay equity is not an isolated issue; it is related to job evaluation and wage parity. To have different groups bargaining different aspects of such closely related issues for the same workplace severely restricts the employer's bargaining flexibility.

Pay equity is an ongoing process that requires maintenance. City involvement will not stop after any initial agreements but would continue indefinitely. This not only has major resourcing implications, but it will continue to impact on the autonomy of city boards, agencies and commissions. Typically, the city is a funder of these agencies and does not have a direct relationship or control of the organization or its employees.

Although it is important to expand coverage under the legislation such as you have proposed with the introduction of proxy and proportional value, there are still issues regarding the responsibility of those who would be used as the proxy comparators. What resources will be provided to employers to provide data and information in the proxy format? Who will absorb the costs for this? Will the Pay Equity Commission do this?

While I think these changes are necessary for improving the pay equity legislation, they still do not do enough to address the economic situation of women. With this type of piecemeal approach to equity, we cannot hope to eliminate poverty in this province. It is clear that to achieve equity we must implement policies and strategies which address the problem itself, and that is poverty.

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

Mrs Elinor Caplan (Oriole): I really don't have any questions. Your presentation was very clear. We've heard this from other groups before and I just want to say that I'm sympathetic to your frustration, because this is not the legislation Bob Rae promised, either in opposition or in the Agenda for People. This is not what women who knew the NDP position on pay equity expected from this government. I understand the position you're taking and I'm sympathetic to your frustration because I know that you're feeling deceived. Many groups have come before us to share that frustration.

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Mr Ted Arnott (Wellington): Thank you both for coming in today to address us. As Ms Caplan indicated, we've had a number of different day cares come forward to express their interest in and concern about this issue. I'd just like to know how big your day care is, how many employees and how many children you look after.

Ms Mercer: Our enrolment is just over 100; it's about 110 at the moment. We employ somewhere between 15 and 20 full-time staff. I haven't counted heads lately.

Mr Arnott: Where are you located?

Ms Mercer: We're right in downtown Toronto near the St Lawrence Market in that whole red brick co-op land.

Mr Kyle Rae: My constituency.

Ms Mercer: Ward 6.

Mr Arnott: Pay equity is costly. No one disputes that. It's very difficult to quantify what it's costing. I have a number of questions and I hope they can be answered over the course of this exercise that we're undertaking.

When we've got a $9.9-billion projected deficit this year, and actually it appears the provincial government borrowed in excess of that, how would you counsel the government in terms of new social spending initiatives relative to the size of our deficit? Would you encourage them to "let her rip," as they say, and increase the size of the deficit in the interests of social justice, as you see it?

Ms Mercer: This is like the kind of old million-dollar question and I don't expect I'm going to cover it in a couple of minutes. There's certainly no doubt that the women in Ontario, in the name of social justice, have every right to expect that. This is not something that is a privilege. This is not something that should be seen as, "It's wonderful that you've done it." I think it's something that's appalling that it hasn't been addressed before.

I think you have to bear in mind that of all the revenues you put out, at least half of those are going to come back through your taxes. I think it's a question that you should take to women who are living under the poverty line and put to their children. We have 45% of children of single parents and there are a lot of single parents out there. I don't know what the percentage is in that of homes that break up or who were single parents from the outset. It's a large percentage that are living as single parents and 45% of them are below the poverty line. That means they're not eating.

I don't know where you're going to find the money but I think you could start by closing some of the tax loopholes in the upper brackets. You've got tax write-offs that these women don't even dream of.

I can't answer any better than that. I don't think it's a question of sitting here debating dollars and social justice. I think you've got to put food on the plates of the children who are out there.

Mr Gary Malkowski (York East): Thank you for your very impressive presentation. I think your information was very clear and your concerns are valid. I have no disagreement with that.

For the record, the Liberal government introduced legislation in 1987, the Pay Equity Act, and there was a statement by the Liberal government back then. The Liberal government made a statement, a commitment to pay equity legislation. That was in March 1990, but that was all talk, and where is the action? I think nothing has happened and we are trying to take leadership now on this legislation, which is the reason we've introduced this.

We believe our legislation is an improvement when you compare it to the pay equity package the previous government introduced. Our cabinet is more than half women; I think more than 50% are women, and that's something the Liberals did not have. I think that reflects the sensitivities of each group. I'd like to know if you agree with that.

Ms Mercer: If I can take two points that I heard there, one is that the Liberals had not done any more than the NDP government has done, that in fact it did less, so we've got an improvement. I would say yes, we have got an improvement. This is certainly the best we've done so far.

The point I was trying to make in my deputation is that we count on your government to do this and do it properly and to get it all the way through, because if we don't get it done under you, we will never get it done. That's why I say our daughters will hold you responsible, because the next Liberal government won't do it and the next Tory government won't do it, and we will just never get that done. So we've got to do one better than just improving the situation; we've got to get it right, and we've got to get it right this year.

Mr Malkowski: If I can ask a supplementary to that, following up on some of your comments about the government definitely facing a serious deficit once pay equity legislation is enacted, do you not feel there will also be economic benefits stemming from that? If so, what kind of impact do you think it would have? How will it be impacting your own day care staff? What kind of projections would you make, positive and negative both? You've talked a little bit about the economic growth. Do you think that will stem from the enactment of this pay equity legislation? Could you expand a little on the positive effects you see happening?

Ms Mercer: In terms of the positive effects for the staff in our day care, certainly if their salaries go up, that's going to be one positive thing. Of course, the negative is that half of it's going to come off in taxes. They aren't, unfortunately, in the bracket where they can benefit from all the loopholes and the write-offs; they can't make those kinds of investments. But that certainly is going to be positive for the staff in our day care, and in turn that means greater stability. We have a lot of young staff and they don't stick around. They do this for three, four, five years and then they move on into another field, maybe, or they end up leaving and getting married and staying at home with their children, because they can't see that they can support a family and keep working.

I don't know if that answers your question, but it will certainly be positive for our staff and the children in our centre, and just in terms of stabilizing the entire workforce, which includes a lot of women.

Mr Malkowski: I think you did answer me very clearly. This information has been very helpful.

Mr David Winninger (London South): I think I understand and appreciate your arguments, and I think you may understand our position but may not appreciate it. There was a statement you made both in your presentation and in response to Mr Malkowski's question that if this government, with a higher representation of females in it than ever before, doesn't do this, then no other government will.

I think we need to be clear on one aspect of this discussion, and I think you might admit this: that this piece of legislation does extend to an estimated additional 420,000 women. It's a positive step, the implementation of which is being delayed, but at the end of the day, in 1998, the tab will be the same. The reason Minister Mackenzie gave on Monday morning was that the Treasurer has said this is not business as usual.

You can accept or reject that position if you choose to do so, but I think it should be clear that once this legislation is in place, albeit the implementation of which is delayed, it will be very difficult for any future government to undo, because I don't think it will be acceptable to the vast majority of certainly women voters out there and many enlightened male voters as well. So it is something that is being done that will be very difficult for future governments to undo. So I don't think you need to despair and say that if this government doesn't do it, no other government will. You have a perfect right to say it should be done now and in full, and it's your right to submit that. I don't argue with that.

Ms Mercer: We don't have a crystal ball. I would certainly like to think you're right, that between all the enlightened male voters as well as the women voters, that we can see this all happen. We've just all waited way too long and we don't feel like waiting any longer. We need this in full and we need it now, and we need it for every single woman out there.

The concern is that we address this many percentage of the women or we address just a few more percentage of the women, and the ones who are getting left out are the ones who are in that very vulnerable position. They're in much less secure positions: They're not working for a municipality, they're not working for a big hospital. They're already in very vulnerable positions and they're already getting paid too little, and their children are the ones who are feeling it.

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Mr Winninger: I'm sure you could also appreciate that if we as a government were in office in March 1990 with a projected surplus in our budget, things might be entirely different.

Mr Kyle Rae: I think you would have told the public that you didn't have it. The previous government didn't do that.

Mr Winninger: I don't argue that.

Ms Dianne Poole (Eglinton): I hadn't intended to bring this up, but, Mr Rae, since you've thrown down the gauntlet, let me refer you to the auditor's report in the fall of 1991 that looked at the deficit that allegedly was left by the Liberals. The auditor very clearly stated that the deficit was left for two reasons. One was a very dramatic downturn in the economy which had not been anticipated and which resulted in social assistance payments skyrocketing. The second reason was some creative doctoring of the books by the NDP: front-end-loading payments, for instance, with the teachers' pension fund, UTDC and all these wonderful types of things. Just to clear that up, to start with.

Mr Kyle Rae: I hope every government has got creative auditing. I'm sure the NDP's not the first one to discover that.

Ms Poole: This was the Provincial Auditor; this wasn't another party complaining about the government's doctoring of the books.

I'd like to go to the delay of this legislation and the delay of pay equity engendered in this legislation. Mr Malkowski has said, quite rightly, that the previous Liberal government announced in March 1990 that it would be extending pay equity to an additional 350,000 women by adopting the proportional method in addition to the job-to-job. That is included in this legislation, but as Mr Malkowski stated, for three years nothing has happened. Two and a half of those years, quite frankly, have been an NDP government, so I'm glad he's acknowledging that they are responsible for the delay.

I'd like to go beyond that. We have had group after group come to us, including the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Pay Equity Coalition, the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care and the Ontario Nurses' Association. Virtually every group that has come before this committee has been extremely critical of the government for delaying the pay equity commitments promised in the 1987 bill for an additional three years.

In fact, I have the Hansard here from the Ontario Nurses' Association presentation. What they say is, "What we see before us in Bill 102 shows that the government has blatantly reneged on its promise to right the historic wrongs in women's wages." This is the line I would like you to pay particular attention to: "The amendments in the proposed bill do not merely delay pay equity; they begin to dismantle hard-fought gains." Obviously, one of the most important of these hard-fought gains was the deadline for the achievement of pay equity in the broader public sector by January 1, 1995, which this bill extends to 1998. There is also the maintenance of pay equity. A number of groups have been extremely critical that this legislation jeopardizes the maintenance of pay equity legislation.

Those are the types of criticisms we've heard, that say that instead of improving this situation -- the group of child care workers you've referred to in your comments, Jane, has made gains, yes, but this bill has done it at the expense of the other women in the broader public sector.

What I'd like you to comment on -- and you already touched on this when you said, "We're not prepared to wait" -- is, have you been lobbying the NDP government since Bill 102 came out in December to ask it to revert to what the 1987 legislation said, as far as having achieved pay equity in the broader public sector by 1995 is concerned? What has been their response?

Ms Mercer: I am a member of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care and the Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care, and I know that both these groups have been actively lobbying the NDP government since that news came. I personally was not one of the individuals involved in that. We try to spread our lobbying around a little bit. Maybe somebody else can answer that.

The Chair: Please come forward and identify yourself.

Ms Zeenat Janmohamed: My name is Zeenat Janmohamed. I work for the Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care and I'm an executive member of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. We have just initiated our process of lobbying government members as well as members of the opposition; in fact, we have our first meeting tomorrow morning with Rosario Marchese. So we're quite keen on lobbying everybody who has shown some interest and has shown some commitment to pay equity and ensuring that Bill 168 that was proposed should go forward, with an implementation starting date of January 1, 1993.

Ms Poole: I was specifically referring to the original schedule under the legislation passed in 1987, which stated that the broader public sector would achieve pay equity by January 1, 1995.

Ms Janmohamed: Quite frankly, Dianne, I don't think that's very realistic. We recognize that and I think you recognize that as well. So we're quite comfortable in supporting a move to have it fully implemented by 1998, and you know that the Ontario coalition has come forward and asked the government to put a cap on the pay equity payouts by 1998.

Ms Poole: I'm just surprised to hear that, because that's not what the coalition said yesterday. They were very clear that that was one of the things they felt should be changed in the bill.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Poole. Ms Mercer, Mr Rae, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this morning in giving us your presentation. Thank you.

CANADIAN UNION OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES, ONTARIO DIVISION

The Chair: I'd like to call our next presenters from the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Ontario division. Good morning. Just a reminder that you'll be allowed up to an hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you could keep your remarks slightly briefer than that to allow time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you each identify yourself for the record and then proceed.

Mr Jim Woodward: Mr Chairman, thank you very much. I'd like to introduce the people who are here. We have Nancy Barrett, the women's committee representative for the Windsor CUPE council; Geneva Neale, also a committee representative, for Hamilton CUPE council; we have Jill Oaker, who is the women's committee representative for the Durham regional CUPE council; and Irene Harris, the equal opportunities representative from the CUPE national office. I am Jim Woodward, the legislative assistant for CUPE Ontario.

By way of introduction to our brief, Mr Chairman and members of the committee, the Canadian Union of Public Employees is the largest union in Canada. Half of our members are women, who work in hundreds of different jobs and occupations in all jurisdictions in the broader public sector, including child care, social services, health care, education, public utilities and municipalities, among others. Many of these workers are in female-dominated workplaces.

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Pay equity is a main priority for our union. We have always supported the need for a legislative right to equal pay for work of equal value. We have bargained hundreds of pay equity plans under the current Pay Equity Act. Through the collective pay equity experience of our local union leadership and staff, we know the many flaws, loopholes and complications of the current act, which have caused thousands of our members to be denied full equal-pay-for-work-of-equal-value rights. We have lobbied for amendments to the Pay Equity Act which will extend coverage so that all women are covered under the current legislation as a matter of priority.

Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act, brings good news to the group of women who were left out of the current law, because it extends pay equity rights to them. We urge your committee and the government to support those parts of Bill 102 which extend pay equity rights to women who were not included under the current pay equity legislation and make the rights clearer and stronger. We also urge the deletion of those parts of the bill which take away existing pay equity rights and weaken what we currently have in place.

Based on CUPE pay equity experience, the following are our comments on sections of Bill 102, and various members of the committee will address each part of this.

Workplaces with less than 10 employees: These are not included in the current law and have been left out of Bill 102. While this is mostly a problem for women in the private sector, CUPE has had cases where women members have been told they have no pay equity rights because their workplaces have less than 10 employees. Unless there is an argument to show that such a workplace fits the broader public sector schedule in the act, these women have no rights to pay equity. There is no just reason for this. Bill 102 needs to add these workplaces. We support doing this by adding the following to the preamble of the Pay Equity Act:

"Employers are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of gender in the compensation of employees employed in the female job classes in Ontario. All employees employed in female job classes in Ontario shall be entitled to equality in compensation with male job classes."

Definitions: One of the strengths of Bill 102 is its inclusion of women who work in all-female workplaces by allowing comparisons to jobs in other public sector workplaces. The Ontario government is giving significant leadership on pay equity and is setting new standards, showing that pay equity is achievable for all women.

Terminology is important because the terms used dictate how easily understood, and therefore accessible, the method being used will be. Therefore, we're proposing replacing the term "proxy method" with the words "cross-establishment method," and the words "proxy employer" with the term "comparator organization." We also propose defining the all-female workplace needing to use a comparator organization as "an organization that must make use of the cross-establishment method in order to achieve pay equity."

Ms Irene Harris: I'll now address the issue of "crown as employer," which is section 2 of Bill 102. This section adds a section to the Pay Equity Act which represents a serious takeaway of pay equity rights which have been established under the current law.

Ontario pay equity law has recognized that in order to end systemic discrimination in wages, it is necessary to determine the pay equity employer or the employer which is the source of the problem when it comes to determining of wages paid. A pay equity employer controls the wages of workers by limiting the amount of funding which is allocated for wages and at the same time controlling services which are required to be delivered. When a pay equity employer is identified, it is fair to do a pay equity check to see if that employer has different pay equity practices for its male jobs from those practices applied to female-dominated jobs.

The need to establish whether or not there is a pay equity employer who is someone other than the employer noted in a collective agreement has only occurred in a few sectors. For example, at the Kingston-Frontenac Children's Aid Society all of the jobs are female-dominated. Consequently, these women did not have access to pay equity under the law. CUPE searched out an appropriate pay equity employer, using criteria established by the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal, so that the women could have pay equity. The Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal found that the province of Ontario is the pay equity employer for the women working at the Kingston-Frontenac Children's Aid Society. This gives those women the right to compare to male-dominated jobs in the provincial government.

There are other children's aid societies around the province that likely fit the same situation as Kingston-Frontenac. By agreement of all concerned, including the provincial government, determination of the employer was held in abeyance in several cases involving children's aid societies pending disposition of the Kingston-Frontenac hearing before the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. It is unfair and unjust for the government to now decide that it should have the right to delete its direct pay equity responsibilities. This represents a takeaway of existing rights.

Subsection 23(2) of Bill 102 makes the section retroactive to December 1991. We urge you to delete section 2, "Crown as employer," and subsection 23(2) of Bill 102.

We now, in this part, want to address Bill 169, the Public Service Statute Law Amendment Act, which is the companion bill which allows the provincial government to opt out of the obligation to end its part in systemic discrimination when it is determined to be a pay equity employer. Bill 169 also affects current reform of the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act, where consultations are taking place. Bill 169 gives the crown absolute power to decide who is a crown employee, and we think that these discussions are better left to the whole issue of sector reform. We therefore urge you to defeat Bill 169 in its entirety.

Ms Nancy Barrett: I would like to address the issue of the limitations of maintenance of pay equity. Bill 102 makes two references to putting limits on the maintenance of pay equity. This also represents a major takeaway of existing rights. Employers and bargaining agents bargained pay equity plans and set out how the gender wage gap was to be closed. This has been an important and significant task. Reference to maintenance in the Pay Equity Act and early decisions of the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal have made it clear that we cannot let the wage gap widen again. Once gender discrimination is identified, it must be eliminated and never reintroduced. Section 6 of Bill 102 would allow cabinet to water down maintenance of pay equity. Subsections 22(1) and (2) allow this to be retroactive. This is a major takeaway of rights. We urge you to delete section 6 and subsections 22(1) and (2) of Bill 102.

The issue of extending pay equity payments until 1998: Section 7 of Bill 102 allows employers in the public sector to take until 1998 to close the wage gap identified in their pay equity plans. This extension is being given as a legislative right and is not related to whether or not the employer can meet the original 1995 deadline.

We now have employers who are refusing to make their pay equity payments promised on January 1 of this year. In many cases public sector employers have completed their pay equity plans ahead of the 1995 requirement. Completing equity increases is especially important to women who are close to retirement. Now women who retire before 1995 lose pay equity increases coming into effect after they retire. Not only are they shortchanged by not having all their pay equity increases; these increases will not be reflected in their pensions.

It also affects women who are being laid off. Incomplete pay equity increases mean receiving lower severance pay and unemployment insurance benefits, which are based on the rates of pay that you are receiving at the time of layoff. These are significant losses to thousands of women.

This amendment unfairly gives a free hand to employers who have not made the effort to complete pay equity adjustments as soon as possible, even when they may be in a financial position to meet the original 1995 completion date. We urge you to delete section 7 of Bill 102.

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Ms Jill Oaker: I'm going to speak to proportionate value. We are very supportive of the addition of the right to proportionate value for those women who did not have a male comparator under the current legislation. This will allow many women who did not have pay equity rights to now have access to pay equity. We commend the government for bringing this forward.

We also support the intent to allow employers and unions to work out our own methods for determining proportionate value, thereby allowing different workplaces to do what best meets each situation. Regulation-making ability or proportional methods are unnecessary.

We urge you to delete clause 22(1)(g.1), which allows regulations on proportionate value methods. By deleting this, you will properly leave the choice of proportionate value methods to unions and employers who in turn can use the government's Pay Equity Commission for advice and guidance.

We also need flexibility to allow proportionate value to be done using any number of male jobs. Bill 102 appears to prevent us from using only one male job class by use of its term "representative group of male job classes."

We urge you to amend clause 21.3(1)(a) by referring to "a representative male job class or a representative group of male job classes."

We are also pleased that the law gives employers and unions the flexibility to do proportionate value for all jobs, provided that no one gets less than what the original job-to-job plan provides. This is an important protection of existing rights. However, there is a concern about what happens to those employers who should have completed pay equity plans under the current law but have not yet done so. It is important to make sure that Bill 102 does not create a loophole which allows an employer who is late with his current obligations to revert to a plan under the proportionate value section, where payments do not start until January 1, 1993.

In order to ensure that existing rights are not taken away in this way, we urge you to amend section 21.2 by adding subsection (6) as follows:

"21.2(6) Any employer who has failed to post a pay equity plan and who can achieve pay equity for some or all of its employees in female job classes under the job-to-job method of comparison must do so before using the proportional method and must comply with the schedule for payments found in section 13."

Also, proportionate value payments apply to women who were unfairly left out of the current law, which required payments in the public sector to start in 1990. The government's Bill 168, which was introduced at the end of 1991, required proportionate value payments as of January 1, 1992.

We urge you to amend clause 21.10(1)(b) to read, "in the case of employers in the public sector, effective as of the 1st day of January, 1992, or earlier."

Ms Geneva Neale: I'm going to speak on pay equity for all-female workplaces. That's section 7. We are very happy to see the government include the right for women's jobs in all-female workplaces to be checked for gender discrimination in wages by comparing to jobs in other public sector organizations. As we mentioned earlier, this is setting an important example to other provinces and countries which are looking to Ontario for leadership in pay equity for all women.

(1) Earlier, we mentioned that we would like to see the terminology on the "proxy method" part of the bill changed so that the terms better fit the method being applied, and also so that the terms are more easily understood.

(2) We would prefer to have female jobs in the all-female workplace compared to male jobs in the other organization. It would be simpler and easier to "borrow" the male job descriptions and male rates of pay from the comparator organization; proxy employer in the bill. The all-female workplace could then do the job of applying its negotiated gender-neutral comparison system to its female jobs and the borrowed male jobs to determine whether or not there is a wage gap and, if so, the amount. We urge the government to revisit this model as an easier one for the parties to work with and one which is less intrusive into the existing pay equity plans of the comparator organization.

(3) The group-of-jobs approach allows the proxy employer to choose a group of jobs when a similar female job is not available. This is too cumbersome and leaves too much to the discretion of the comparator organization. Therefore, we urge you to delete subsections 21.15(6) and 21.17(4) to remove this reference to group of jobs.

(4) Subsection 21.17(2) requires the all-female workplace to provide information with its request for information. There are two unnecessary pieces of information required by this section. The first is (c), which requires the organization chart showing reporting relationships. We know that many smaller organizations may not have such a chart, and they should not be required to develop one in order to meet their pay equity obligations.

The second problem is with (f), which requires corporate resolutions and documents verifying the request. This should not be necessary, especially since we are dealing with public sector organizations with a legislative requirement to request pay equity information from another organization. Therefore, we urge you to delete clauses 21.17(2)(c) and (f).

(5) Subsections 21.17(7) to 21.17(11) deal with confidentiality of information. We remind you that in all cases, according to the legislation, both organizations will be part of the public sector, operating on public funds. In many cases, the information being given will already be known. For example, jobs in hospitals, school boards, municipalities and social service agencies usually have common positions with salaries which are known through collective agreements or public minutes of board and council meetings.

Given this, we are concerned about the need expressed by Bill 102 to treat information with so much secrecy. Individuals involved in the bargaining of the pay equity plan have the potential to be fined $5,000 if the information is used for purposes other than pay equity; employers and unions are open to fines of $50,000. This threat of fines which can come as a result of being involved in the pay equity process will discourage committees from securing information through the channels set out in the legislation and using other means of accessing the information. Information used to bargain other plans in the public sector did not have this confidentiality of information required even when we had to use information on non-union job descriptions to bargain pay equity plans. This whole notion of confidentiality of information is unnecessary and troublesome. Therefore, we urge you to delete subsections 21.17(1) to 21.17(7).

(6) Pay equity payments will not start for women in all-female workplaces until January 1, 1994. These women should rightfully have been included in the first round and had their payments start in 1990 along with other public sector women. As well, these women must have payments completed in five years. Therefore, we urge you to change subsection 21.22(1) to January 1, 1993. We further urge you to amend Bill 102 to allow pay equity payments to be completed in five years.

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Ms Oaker: I'm going to speak to access to the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. There are three sections of Bill 102 which have the potential to deny rights as a result of a dispute going before the tribunal.

(1) One change would bind parties to any agreement settling a dispute which is to be heard by the tribunal. The current legislation respects the parties' rights to decide whether or not such agreements are made subject to ratification or subject to other needs which may exist because of the nature of the dispute. Consequently, subsection 25.1(2) is unnecessary and should be deleted. If it is not deleted, it is absolutely essential that the legislation include a requirement that the parties cannot waive any rights or disregard obligations of the act through such a settlement.

(2) Under the current law, parties to a tribunal hearing can be the employer, complainant and/or union. We also support that the pay equity office have access to the tribunal. This would be helpful to the pay equity process when the act is not being followed. We urge you to delete "any other persons entitled by law to be parties" and replace subsection 20(1), which amends subsection 32(1), with "(d) the pay equity office, where a hearing is held before the tribunal."

(3) The Pay Equity Act establishes minimum rights. Unions and employers together, or employers acting on their own for non-union women, need to make decisions in the context of the law which has established some pay equity rights. The act needs to reinforce the right of employers and unions to negotiate pay equity settlements while reinforcing the requirement to follow minimum standards.

We urge you to amend Bill 102 by adding the following subsections to section 34 of the Pay Equity Act:

"(5) An order of a review officer is not revoked except by a decision of the tribunal or an agreement by the parties relating to the subject of the order.

"(6) No employer, employee or group of employees or the bargaining agent may waive any rights or disregard any obligations under this act.

"(7) The pay equity office can request a hearing before the hearings tribunal with respect to a contravention of subsection 34(6)."

Ms Irene Harris: We want to conclude by saying that Bill 102 allows many important improvements to the Pay Equity Act. The government is taking needed, overdue steps to give all public sector women access to pay equity rights. However, at the same time, the government has proposed taking away pay equity rights by removing its responsibility as a pay equity employer and by delaying pay equity wages which were promised to be paid by 1995.

It is the takeaways in Bill 102 which cloud our freedom to celebrate the important gains women are making because of this government's positive initiatives. We urge the government committee to respect and keep existing rights and to move ahead quickly and bring into law its positive changes. Then, together, we can truly celebrate the commitment this government has made to bring about equality for women.

With that, we're ready to take any questions you've got.

The Chair: Thank you. Each caucus will have about 10 minutes.

Mr Arnott: I won't have 10 minutes for my questions, but I want to thank you very much for coming in this morning to express your view on this issue. You've offered us a perspective, I think, that the committee has not heard exactly to date, so we certainly appreciate that.

I have a couple of questions. The first one is that in your introduction you state, "Pay equity is a main priority for our union," and you rank it according to a series of priorities you must have. I assume that the preservation of existing jobs within your workplace is your top priority, is it not, at this point in time?

Ms Irene Harris: That is a major priority, pay equity is a major priority, employment equity is a major priority. All of these are things that are important to our members. I think the preservation of jobs is important and how jobs are preserved is important.

If you're saying, "Would you like to talk about trading off of priorities?" we're not prepared to do that, if that's where the question's going. I think the preservation of jobs is critical. Employers have to have some accountability about how they're using funds, especially funding that they get through taxpayers or from the government directly. There's got to be some accountability about how that money's used and therefore how jobs are preserved or not preserved or how pay equity obligations are met or not met.

Mr Arnott: That's exactly where I'm going, because I'm afraid that your two priorities may be contradictory. If you assume that the component of government spending which goes to salaries and wages for employees in the Ontario public service and broader public sector is going to remain constant, which I expect by and large it will over the next couple of years, if pay equity is brought into place, jobs will be lost. That's my fear.

Ms Irene Harris: Could I remind you of something? One thing that's interesting with the Pay Equity Act is that employers are required to spend 1% of payroll a year. We have a lot of employers at pay equity bargaining tables whining because they can't speed up the payments. We go in and say: "Let's close the gap in a year or two. Let's not wait the five years until 1995."

A lot of employers we deal with in good faith did that. They said that's right. Often the pay equity payments often don't come to more than 5% of payroll and they found a way to do it. It might mean they didn't buy the brand-new photocopier or they waited for some other equipment they bought or they didn't buy a new building, in order to meet other commitments.

We know that in every workplace, employers are balancing out how the money is spent, and our sense is that the pay equity payments have not been that onerous. They haven't been like 100% of equivalent of payroll. The act only requires 1% of payroll. We don't understand why some employers can, in good faith, pay it out before the 1995 deadline and others can't. We're saying you should keep in mind that it is a small portion of the overall budget. We don't buy it when employers say, "When you make these pay equity payments, it's going to break us."

We've had a lot of employers who tried -- some were doing layoffs. I can think of a hospital that was doing some layoffs and said at the time that it was the pay equity payments and the health tax that it now had to pay. So we were going to bring forward a complaint to the hearings tribunal to prove that they were reducing wages, in effect, by blaming the layoffs on pay equity payments. What we found when we scratched beneath the surface was that pay equity payments and the health tax had nothing to do with the reason for the layoffs. What they were doing was bringing in some outside management firms contracting out work.

I think you can't just make these sorts of bald generalizations that if we somehow pay women equity, we're going end up losing all kinds of jobs. It's not fair or reasonable, I think, to say that pay equity is the cause of that problem.

Mr Arnott: I believe it's true. I think if you want to look at all employers and say all employers can afford it, you're doing the same overgeneralization you're suggesting I'm doing. Business bankruptcies have gone up significantly in the last couple of years. You can see from those figures that some employers cannot afford to stay in business and they've gone out of business.

Ms Irene Harris: No. In the private sector, of course, the law says they pay 1% of payroll and it goes on until the pay equity payments are completed. The private sector didn't have this 1995 deadline. But I think in the broader public sector it's a fair question to ask, why is it that some municipality school boards and hospitals have paid it out in a reasonable time and some have been able to say, "Okay, here's how I'm going to measure it out in 1995," and there are those who are obstructionist enough to say: "I don't want to hear about it. I'm only going to pay the little wee bit that I'm required, 1% of payroll, that's it. Come see me in 1995"? Now the law's going to say, "As of right, no questions asked, go to 1998."

What we're saying is that we need some accountability from those employers. Let's take a look. Let's open the books and say, is it true that by 1995 it's going to break the bank or break the municipality to the point where it can't cope? Why didn't the law say something to the effect of, "They've got to show that in fact they can't meet these requirements, and why could they not meet them when others could"?

I just think it was unfair to say everyone can drag it out until 1998, because the ones dragging it out to 1998 are the ones who obviously didn't make an effort to stage the payments out in a way that it could be made in a reasonable amount of time by 1995.

Mr Arnott: You mentioned municipalities. Some municipalities, certainly in the riding I'm privileged to represent, are concerned about municipal property taxes and wanting to keep them as low as possible for a variety of reasons. That pressure that's been brought to bear on them may be, to some extent, governing their actions.

Switching to another issue that you've raised, workplaces with less than 10 employees: You would like to see the coverage extended to those workplaces.

Ms Irene Harris: Yes.

Mr Arnott: How many Ontario residents pay dues to your union?

Ms Irene Harris: Nationally we have about 450,000 members. We have about 225,000 members in Ontario.

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Mr Arnott: You state in that portion of your presentation, "CUPE has had cases where women members have been told that they have no pay equity rights because their workplaces have less than 10 employees." So you do represent some employees in small private sector establishments.

Ms Irene Harris: Yes. We have some small private sectors. We don't have very many, mind you.

Mr Arnott: Do you know how many?

Ms Irene Harris: I've maybe come across 10. What happens is that we've had, say, a really small nursing home or an art gallery or something where the employer will say: "Oh, I don't have to do anything because I did a head count. I have less than 10 employees, so I'm off that hook."

Fortunately, the current schedules of the act make it pretty clear. It's pretty inclusive in terms of the broader public sector, because at the time the Liberals put in the same appendix we had under the wage control legislation, so it's pretty inclusive. But if you can't find some way to say they fit those schedules, you might have some small private sector -- semi-public-service sector oriented but it doesn't meet the schedules. If they have less than 10, then the answer to them is, "You're just not covered in any way." That employer is off the hook. In a sense, pay equity doesn't apply to him.

Mr Arnott: Or her.

Ms Irene Harris: Yes. Very few hers, unfortunately. Maybe we wouldn't have the problem if there were more hers in that situation.

But what happens is, the women say: "Why is that? Why does this apply to everybody else? What's so magical about under-10s? What is it that's there that they should be let off that hook?" We're saying they shouldn't be.

The other option we had in discussing internally in CUPE is that we also don't understand: Where you have a legitimate private sector group that's under 10, I think we could also be saying, "They should have to sit down and bargain a pay equity plan with us," and do that proactive approach. We understand that in such a small situation that might be a little bit of overdoing it, so this kind of general thing in the preamble would give those women a right to say to the employer, "Let's check to see if we've got equal wages here," or if there's a question about it, they have some ability to file a complaint.

I think you just need it for the few employers that still haven't recognized it's 1993 and it's time for pay equity rights for all women. I think a lot of employers are going ahead and doing it. A lot of our smaller ones that were semi-private sector said, "Let's just bargain a plan and be done with it," but there are the few who say: "I don't like pay equity. I don't want to do it, and unless the law says I have to, I'm not doing it." We're saying just put something in the preamble that allows a complaint where it's obvious that kind of discrimination is at play.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Arnott. Mr Winninger, then Mr Lessard and then Ms Murdock.

Mr Winninger: I'll defer to my colleague.

Mr Wayne Lessard (Windsor-Walkerville): I want to thank you for your presentation. I think it's always helpful for committee members to have some specific suggestions and recommendations for change, so we appreciate that.

In the presentation you refer to the Kingston-Frontenac case and you mention that there are children's aid societies around the province that might fall into that same situation, and it might go beyond children's aid societies to other types of government agencies as well. I wonder if you have any idea what numbers we might be looking at of people who may fit into that situation.

Ms Irene Harris: Sure, I'm happy to. Do you know that in the children's aid societies, we were told from Community and Social Services, and our figures show it, there's like 4,000 employees? That's what we're talking about in children's aid societies -- not a very big group.

What we told ministers in response to the bill is that it's our sense that when you're determining whether or not the government is a pay equity employer, or a municipality or whatever, the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal put some very strong criteria. It's really hard to meet the tests to show that someone else is a pay equity employer.

For example, in a lot of municipalities we've been able to show that they're the pay equity employer for libraries, but at the tribunal we lost a case. In one case they said, "Not strong enough." I disagreed with the decision, but we lost it.

With the children's aid society, the facts were so clear that the government is the pay equity employer. I don't think they are for other purposes, but for that purpose it was clear that they are, so the tribunal said, "Okay, you pass the test on this one," so we won that decision.

It's our sense that in our jurisdiction none of the others fit. Children's aid societies and libraries is it, because the criteria has laid out are so strict the tribunal, and it makes it so hard for you to prove that someone else is a pay equity employer. It's our sense that if the government had given this pay equity with the crown as employer for children's aid societies, then for our union this section is not a problem, because we don't think we can fit it for anybody else, and we think it's really unfair. This retro-1991 date -- when the government introduced Bill 168, it said: "You've got Kingston in the door. Now we're closing the door." I think that was unreasonable and unfortunate given the small number of people who were there. We're not sure that in the end the cost is going to be that onerous. So for us, once the children's aid societies are included, I don't think we have any arguments for any other pay equity employers.

Mr Lessard: I'm going to suggest to you that one of the reasons for unions and others taking that approach is that the previous Liberal legislation and the job-to-job comparisons didn't permit pay equity to a lot of women. I'm going to further suggest, now that the options are expanded with proxy and proportional value, there is that extension of pay equity to more women. So they wouldn't have to go through the same sort of test as in Kingston-Frontenac, expend the time, the funds and the energy and take the chance that they may lose. Would you agree with that?

Ms Irene Harris: No. I think there's a difference. The difference is that the children's aid society workers were able to show that they have a pay equity employer under the current law. Weak as it is, they're under it and they would get their money between 1990 and 1995. Hopefully, you'll get rid of that 1998 date and it will still be 1995. They have a pay equity employer under the current law within that time frame.

I don't think it's good enough to say to them, "Don't worry about it; we're going to let you come under proxy; your money's not going to start till 1994, and we're going to dole it out till God knows when it's going to be completed," and say they got the same thing. What you have done is taken away their better access under the current law and put them into this other program, which is really later money stretched out over a longer period of time.

I would like to see the people in the all-female workplaces have the same 1990 to 1995 date, be under the current law and all that kind of thing, but I think we've agreed they aren't. It's been slow to bring them on stream, but they're in a different category because they don't fit a pay equity employer test. When you look for some social service agencies to find if there is another pay equity employer other than their own, there isn't. They don't meet the tribunal's criteria. They could never win a case. They are in a different category, as are the children's aid society workers.

Ms Sharon Murdock (Sudbury): Thank you for a really good presentation. I just have a couple of technical questions, mostly for clarification, because they have been made by others. One is on page 8, under "Pay Equity for All-Female Workplaces." It's a point that has been made by other groups, but I've never asked this question before, so we'll see.

Duties and functions: I know you've used the terminology "job descriptions" throughout some of the points you've made, but when you're applying to a proxy or cross-establishment organization, you'd be listing the duties and functions of the job you would like it to be compared to. Correct?

Ms Irene Harris: Yes.

Ms Murdock: I know at the behest of the Equal Pay Coalition, the specific female job classification was used in the legislation, and I notice that you're asking for male to be used rather than female. My question is, why would you bother with either, with designating the classification at all, if you're going on job functions? Why does it have to be male or female within the proxy organization?

Ms Irene Harris: I think partly because we've argued that when you talk to the women in the all-female workplace about what is pay equity, they understand it the way we all do: "I'm in a female job. I get compared to a male-dominated job to check to see if there's a wage gap." The notion of value-determining comparators with the male job class fits the International Labour Organization convention and all that kind of stuff. Pay equity for them means the same thing as it does for other women.

I think what's good about Bill 102 is that you had talked about saying, "Okay, you're going to find the female job in the other workplace that's similar," but in terms of the money that comes out, it's whatever their male comparator is paid. In a sense, you're just doing a different route to the male comparator than what we're suggesting here. We think this is a little more practical. The difficulty is that we're going to be dependent on that other pay equity plan, what that similar female got and how it was determined. We might determine a different way of doing the comparator for the all female workplace.

I think both models are great, because they get us to the male comparator rate of pay and that's what it's all about. We think this is just less intrusive into the proxy's pay equity plan.

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Ms Murdock: The other question I have, if I have time -- I've been admonished by the Chair that I don't check with him often enough -- is under section 21.2 with the definition of -- using the job-to-job before you use the proportional method, and the employer being required to do so. I know that on page 6 you gave your definition, or what you would like to see added as a subsection (6), which might prove interesting since there already is one there. But I would like you to look if you have the act --

Ms Irene Harris: I don't, no, but I have it memorized.

Ms Murdock: Look at the definition under subsection 1.

Ms Irene Harris: You're at 21.2(1)?

Ms Murdock: Yes.

Ms Irene Harris: Okay.

Ms Murdock: Since the language is already there, I'm just wondering if what you want could be achieved, because we don't disagree with you that the employer should be going through job-to-job before you start utilizing other methods, unless there's no other way to utilize that.

One of the suggestions we made yesterday was that following the comma after "job-to-job method of comparison," we would put "then the employer shall use the proportional." Would that achieve the same thing for you that you're asking on page 6 of your submission?

Ms Irene Harris: It might. Yes, that might do it, because we want to just make sure that in some way they have to do job-to-job if they can. If the legal advice is that would do it, that would be fine with us.

Ms Murdock: Actually, I haven't checked with our legal counsel. We're not disagreeing with the concept. Mind you, I read 21.2 as saying that. I see it as saying that, but obviously when you have a number of groups coming before you, their interpretation saying it doesn't say that or that it could be interpreted differently, I don't see anything -- if there's a way of making it clearer --

Ms Irene Harris: Yes, we had the same concerns. When we first read this we thought that did, and actually you put stuff in proportionate value that we are really cheering about because we think our only concern was: Make sure people do what they have to in proportionate as an addition for those women who weren't covered. So there's a lot of good things here. It was pointed out to us, too, that there could be this loophole where an employer would say, "Well, I'm going to jump to proportionate value and leave the other stuff aside."

Ms Poole: First of all, I really want to commend you for your brief. It is not only comprehensive, but you've really make it very balanced without some of the partisan comments we sometimes get into and I think that's important. You've tried to be very objective about what you like and what you don't like about the legislation.

It seems to me there are three major ways in which you say the legislation takes away. One is the reference to the fact that the crown has given itself a right that no other pay equity employer has, which is to have the sole discretion as to whether it is the employer. The second was the watering down of the maintenance of pay equity, which I think you described quite thoroughly. The third, of course, is the delay of the timetable for the public service by the three years from the original 1987 legislation.

I think you've covered those extremely well, but the question I have for you relates to your discussion on page 9 about proxy and some difficulties you have with the way proxy has been determined. The government said on Monday when it appeared before the committee -- the Minister of Labour said they had two models. The first model for proxy was seen to be unacceptable or inadequate, so they went to the second model.

But it appears to me from what I've heard so far -- and I don't know whether you could confirm this -- there was fairly broad consultation on the first model, but the second model came as a surprise where female jobs were being compared to female jobs as opposed to the traditional pay equity approach of comparing female jobs to male jobs. I'm wondering about that consultation. Did you have an opportunity to --

Ms Irene Harris: Oh, I think there was a lot of consultation, as I recall, because I remember the first model that was floated: We'd only get what the female comparator got, not what her male comparator was paid. Actually at the time the ministers were Tony Silipo for Management Board and Marion Boyd from Comsoc with Bob Mackenzie. I think to give Silipo and Marion Boyd extreme credit, we told them this was a denial -- by giving the women just what their female comparator got and not the male comparator rate. It's this notion of not being compared to a male comparator which was really disarming. I think to their credit they delayed a cabinet submission in order to have fuller consultation with unions and women's groups and some employers to say, "How are we going to do this?"

I think the model in Bill 102 was probably the compromise position and does get us to the male comparator rate; so I think in that sense the government has done very well. But I guess we're saying, "Let's have one more crack at trying to get a model we prefer," which is to borrow male job descriptions and rates of pay, bring them into the all-female workplace and use them to do your plan, so that you're less intruding into how the other plan worked out in terms of the male/female comparator.

Ms Poole: It seems to be a more direct approach. The other may end up accomplishing the same thing eventually, but you'd have to go through the female route to begin with.

Ms Irene Harris: I think they both get you to the same spot at the end of the day, but we have a lot of plans that we've bargained where outside groups would be borrowing the information from our plans, and then we've got to tell them, "Well, in this case we bargained that this female has this male comparator." That proxy organization might do it differently, given a different set of circumstances. We think the way we're suggesting is a little easier on everybody. But I wouldn't want to see the end goal changed based on either model.

Ms Poole: Well, I'll just thank you once again. You've shown really a very broad range of knowledge on this particular subject and you've been very helpful to our committee.

Ms Irene Harris: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Poole. Ms Caplan.

Mrs Caplan: Yes, thank you. I'd like to take the couple of minutes I have to talk a little bit about 169. I think you're quite correct in your very excellent brief when you point out that 169 has very little to do with pay equity and a lot to do with collective bargaining, particularly with the provincial government and the declaration of employee status. I share your cynicism and I said so, by the way, during second reading in the Legislature when I pointed out the timing of the bill and the alternative ways that it could have happened.

I've been on the record before and wanted to say that it was never contemplated in the original pay equity policy that you would ever have province-wide wage rates or collective bargaining. I think that was clear to everyone and that was never the intent. But I believe you could have dealt with the definition for the purpose of pay equity in Bill 102 if that was really the government's intent. Do you agree with that?

Ms Irene Harris: I agree with that but I wouldn't want to see that definition in Bill 102 because I know the Liberals were going to put in a definition of "employer." They floated that idea with us and we pleaded not to do that. You know, if it's not broken, don't try to fix it.

Mrs Caplan: But I know there was concern about the definition of "employer," but rather than bringing in something which goes far beyond pay equity in a separate piece of legislation which I think is -- you make the point in your brief that it's going to limit debate on the implications in Bill 169, quite legitimately. I think that's a legitimate concern of yours. Since the original Bill 168 was tabled at the same time as 169 and then a year later when Bill 102 was tabled, if the government was concerned about the definition of "employer" for the purposes of pay equity it could have been included in the definitions section and then you could have had a proper debate, especially now since we're looking at reforms of the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act which is coming down. My question is: Were you involved in the consultations around that issue, unrelated to pay equity, from your knowledge?

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Ms Irene Harris: No, as I understood it at the time, because of this crown-as-employer item coming into Bill 168, we were working with the government hoping to at least settle the children's aid societies, because in our sense, that was the last group that could really meet the tests. So that section for our union was not onerous at that point if in fact we'd reached a settlement. We were advised that Bill 169 was being brought in because they had to cover those parts. How that affected Bill 168 affected the crown employees act; therefore, they would be bringing something in to show that.

In the meantime, our union got involved in the consultations on the crown employees bargaining act -- actually it was our legal counsel, another department of CUPE -- and we got talking about why Bill 169 was sitting there when it's so intrusive into these other consultations, and that's why we're agreeing that you should get rid of Bill 169 for those reasons. Also, we don't want this crown-as-employer section in the Pay Equity Act. If that goes, then Bill 169 really has total lack of relevance.

Mrs Caplan: I just have one further question. We've heard from others that it would be preferable to deal with the issue of employer for the purposes of pay equity within Bill 102 and to deal with the definition of "crown employee" within the collective bargaining or Public Service Act as part of the reforms for CECBA. What I've heard you say is that you agree with that.

I'd like to move just for a minute to Bill 102 because what we've heard from a number of people is that this bill penalizes the good employers who negotiated in good faith and made the payouts. Whether they were public sector or private sector, you had a number of good employers who sat down and negotiated with you. So you have the government rewarding bad behaviour and interfering in that kind of good-faith collective bargaining. Do you feel that this a result of Bill 102 that perhaps the government hasn't contemplated?

Ms Irene Harris: I'm not sure, because we didn't have any consultation on that. We found out about the 1998 extension when the bill was introduced, and we had a lot of questions about it because I guess that means we don't have information that employers might have given to the government. Maybe there's some real concern; maybe there are some real problems.

For example, we know that in some female-dominated workplaces, like the hospital sector, they have not been able to make the payments as fast as municipalities or school boards, where there aren't as many jobs competing for the pay equity fund. Maybe there is a need to revisit some of that stuff; we don't know. But I think we need to understand a little better why it is necessary to go beyond 1995. What are the figures? What are the outstanding amounts in different plans? We're concerned that it will change from workplace to workplace. If some of them can show that they owe 50% of payroll in 1995, then maybe it's something that we've got to look at.

Mrs Caplan: Are you aware of any of those fiscal analyses? We haven't seen them either. Have you seen any of them?

Ms Irene Harris: No, we haven't seen them. Could I just make one correction: We do not support a definition of "employer" in Bill 102.

The Chair: Ms Harris, Mr Woodward, Ms Barrett, Ms Neale and Ms Oaker, on behalf of this committee, I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this morning and coming and giving us your presentation.

PAY EQUITY COMMISSION

The Chair: I'd like to call forward our next presenters, the Pay Equity Commission. Good morning. Just a reminder, you'll be allowed up to an hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you'd keep your remarks slightly briefer than that to allow time for comments and questions from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you each identify yourself for the record and then proceed.

Ms Brigid O'Reilly: My name's Brigid O'Reilly. I'm the Pay Equity Commissioner and I'm here with my colleagues Judith Killoran, legal counsel to the pay equity office, and Murray Lapp, director of the review services branch at the Pay Equity Commission.

The Pay Equity Commission welcomes this opportunity to speak to the standing committee on administration of justice on Bill 102, An Act to amend the Pay Equity Act.

Our presentation is in three parts. Part one looks at how the Pay Equity Act is working now and comments on the overall purpose of Bill 102. Then my colleagues Judith Killoran and Murray Lapp will outline proposals to make the act work better and will comment on the issue of maintaining pay equity and a proposed change on this issue in Bill 102.

At the Pay Equity Commission we have been working with the current Pay Equity Act since 1988, when the commission was formed. We have firsthand experience with employers, employees and unions in their efforts to achieve pay equity. We know what the problems are and we think we know what many of the solutions are. Our experience has informed the proposals you have before you in Bill 102 for proportional value and proxy approaches to pay equity.

The Pay Equity Act should ensure that work traditionally done by women -- caring work, caring for our children, caring for our parents, clerical work, sales and service work -- is paid the same as work of equal value done by men. The act seeks to narrow the wage gap between women's work and men's work. Put simply, it requires employers in Ontario to pay their employees for the value of the work done, regardless of whether women or men principally do it.

The commission was established by the act. It's divided into two parts: the pay equity office and the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. In turn, the pay equity office has a number of branches. The policy and research branch is responsible for developing policy within the office and for conducting research on pay equity issues. This branch was responsible for the 1989 report that showed how proportional value and proxy approaches to pay equity could expand the benefits of the act to women in predominantly female sectors of the economy.

A second branch is the information and educational services branch. Since 1988 this branch has worked very hard providing information on pay equity to a variety of groups affected by the legislation, essentially the same groups we cited earlier: employers, employees and unions.

We have a toll-free telephone hotline that handled 29,000 calls last year alone, and that's about an average for each of the years since the commission started. Since our startup in 1988, we've also run 4,000 seminars, workshops and consultations on pay equity and have reached almost 70,000 participants face-to-face in these, and we've informed thousands of other employers and employees through our newsletters, our training video, our advertising and our print materials.

The review services branch at the commission investigates and mediates complaints or objections that arise from those who are negotiating a plan or affected by a plan. Once a complaint is made, the review officer investigates the issues involved and attempts to help the parties reach a settlement.

We stress that pay equity is a workplace-centred, self-managed process and has a high rate of settlement at review. Of almost 3,400 cases that have come to review since 1989, 85% have been settled. If a settlement cannot be reached, the review officer can issue an order which outlines a resolution to the issue confronting the parties and gives the reason behind the decision. Any party to an order may request a hearing at the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal.

As we mentioned earlier, the policy and research branch was responsible for producing the report on the achievement of pay equity in sectors of the economy which are predominantly female. The commission was given the mandate to prepare this report in the original legislation. That 1989 report recommended that the act be amended to include both proportional value and proxy comparisons.

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As was pointed out by the Deputy Minister of Labour in these hearings a couple of days ago, proportional value comparisons have by and large been readily accepted by the public and private sectors as a way of achieving pay equity. Employers large and smaller in both the public and private sectors have told us at the pay equity office that they welcome the addition of this approach, proportional value, to pay equity. The proxy comparison was also proposed in that 1989 report and also has received widespread support in the broader public sector. We at the commission are very supportive of Bill 102, which includes these two methods of comparing jobs so that pay equity can be achieved in more of Ontario's workplaces.

The Pay Equity Act is not perfect, as we have said. At the commission we've had a number of recommended changes to the act since 1989, once we saw it start to work, and we're pleased to report that most of these changes are found in Bill 102.

I know that all of my colleagues at the Pay Equity Commission, an extremely hardworking and dedicated group, welcome many of the changes that Bill 102 is proposing and we look forward to working with the new act so that the benefits of pay equity can extend to more Ontario women. However, we must say that women have waited too long for these changes and we share the frustration with the delays in implementing proportional value and proxy approaches to pay equity.

There are two areas of Bill 102 in which we see the need for change. One relates to review officers' orders and the other to the maintenance of pay equity.

Ms Judith Killoran: As was mentioned earlier, I'm Judith Killoran and I act as legal counsel to the pay equity office.

I'd like to comment on our proposals relating to review officers' orders. A number of organizations that have preceded us have supported these proposed changes in their briefs to this committee, and we would hope that their support for the changes will strengthen our case.

Subsection 24(5) of the present act states that "Where an employer or a bargaining agent fails to comply with an order under this section, a review officer may refer the matter to the hearings tribunal." Subsection 25(1) says, "The tribunal shall hold a hearing where such a reference is made."

In three separate cases, the tribunal has not been able to hold a hearing under a subsection 24(5) reference. In the third case, the pay equity office sought standing as an applicant in a hearing before the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal but was denied. The effect of this finding has been that orders of review officers are enforceable only when one of the workplace parties pursues enforcement of an order.

There are circumstances when this is extremely difficult. For example, some applicants or women seeking their pay equity rights request anonymity. Often they fear reprisals if they pursue their rights. Unless the pay equity office can take the order to the tribunal on behalf of the anonymous employee, the individual cannot seek the enforcement of the order and of her pay equity rights. For the anonymous complainant, the pay equity office needs standing at the tribunal.

Another example is those employers who will not fulfil their pay equity obligations unless ordered to do so. An employer can easily ignore an order once she or he realizes that the only way the order will be enforced is to have an individual employee apply to the tribunal for enforcement. As with the first example, fear of reprisal will deter the individual from taking her employer to the tribunal.

Further, some employers will not fulfil their pay equity obligations, will be ordered to do so and will ignore the order because they know that the individual employee does not have the resources to proceed to the tribunal to seek enforcement of the order. It has been argued that the user's guide to the tribunal and the assistance of the pay equity advocacy and legal services clinic, which is referred to as PEALS, are adequate aids to the individual woman seeking enforcement of an order.

The evidence runs counter to the argument. Even with a user's guide, appearing alone before a tribunal can be daunting, and not many individuals have chosen to do so. PEALS is doing an excellent job of representing women, but it does have limited resources. It probably cannot take all the individual cases that have arisen or will arise.

Another circumstance which causes problems is when both parties to an order neither comply with it nor contest it, with the effect of contracting out of the act. In each of the above cases, for example, where a potential applicant seeks anonymity or fears reprisal for seeking to enforce an order, or does not have the resources or easy access to PEALS to help in applying to the tribunal, that applicant could be assisted by the pay equity office if it had standing at the tribunal and could enforce its orders. So too the office could enforce an order when parties neither contest it nor comply with it.

Overall, individual women, most of whom are unrepresented by a union, would be better able to exercise their rights under the act. Furthermore, greater cooperation between parties who are negotiating pay equity would result if the parties know that the pay equity office can proceed to the tribunal as an applicant for enforcement of an order. A section in the act which allows the office to seek to enforce an order would be as much of a deterrent to non-compliance as the exercise of the power itself.

It has been suggested that with such a section, the pay equity office would proceed to the tribunal in a large number of cases. However, in the past four years, there have only been three cases concerned with the enforcement of orders. We would restrict our participation in future to those circumstances.

The pay equity office proposes that subsection 32(1) be amended to read:

"(d) The pay equity office, where a hearing is held before a tribunal."

In its decision Mississauga Hydro-Electric Commission, the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal found that review officers' orders were not binding unless by a decision of the tribunal. The pay equity office believes that orders issued by review officers should not be revoked, except in two particular circumstances. In the first circumstance, one of the parties applies to the tribunal, and a decision is rendered that could revoke an order. In the second circumstance, the parties agree to a settlement of the issue which may differ from the order. Such a settlement must comply with a further subsection, which I will discuss.

The pay equity office proposes that section 34 of the act be amended with this subsection:

"(5) An order of a review officer is not revoked, except by a decision of the tribunal or an agreement by the parties relating to the subject of the order."

We refer again to the Mississauga Hydro-Electric Commission decision, which stated that the act was voluntarist and implied that parties are free to fashion settlements which meet with the parties' approval, but do not meet the requirements of the act.

The pay equity office believes that there should be a section which deters parties from agreements which do not comply with the act and, in effect, makes a strong statement to parties that they cannot contract out of the act. Such a section would send the message that there's no advantage to ignoring a review officer's order and to agreeing to a settlement at the tribunal or elsewhere that does not meet the minimal standards set by the act.

The pay equity office proposes that section 34 be further amended by adding this subsection:

"(6) No employer, employee or groups of employees or the bargaining agent may waive any rights or disregard any obligations under this act."

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The office proposes that section 34 be further amended by adding this subsection:

"(7) The pay equity office can request a hearing before the hearings tribunal with respect to a contravention of subsection 34(6)."

With this proposal, the office would have standing as an applicant in circumstances where agreements are made which seek to evade the requirements of the act. The office would have an opportunity to present its case, but the tribunal would make the final determination. This section would provide an effective enforcement mechanism for subsection 34(6) and would deter parties who consider contracting out of the act.

Mr Murray Lapp: As was mentioned earlier, my name is Murray Lapp. I'm the director of review services at the pay equity office.

I'd like to address section 6 of the bill, which amends section 8 of the act by adding a new subsection (5). This is on page 3 of the bill, and the section is again reflected in subsections 21(1) and 21(2) of the bill.

This amendment allows for a regulation to be written which would limit the maintenance of pay equity by employers. In the commission's view, there is no need for such a regulation, and any limitation on maintaining pay equity will serve to undercut the achievement of the basic principle upon which the act is founded.

The act was, as you know, passed so that the portion of the wage gap between the earnings of males and females, which is the result of systemic discrimination, could be closed. The act's core requirement is to establish and maintain pay equity, as set out in section 7. If the requirement to maintain pay equity had not been provided for, the achievement of pay equity would truly have only been a one-shot deal. In other words, the extent of individual inequities would have been identified and addressed, but the same forces which had generated the discrimination would have been allowed to come back into play and re-establish the wage gap. It's difficult to imagine that it was the Legislature's intent to allow systemic discrimination in the setting of wages to re-emerge.

Our comments to you on this bill have, in other respects, been contained to advice about the act's administration and to our ability as an agency to give effect to the act and transform its objectives into reality. In doing this, we are committed to the achievement of the principles which give the act its purpose.

It's for this reason that we are highlighting the impact of the proposed subsection 8(5). Simply put, if this section of the bill is passed, the gains made in addressing pay inequity could be undone; in a few years' time, the Legislature may need to consider another pay equity act in order to recoup the lost ground that this section has the capacity to bring about.

This section only calls for "limitations," not for the erasure of maintenance altogether. "Limitations," however, are matters of degree, when the issue of established rights is an absolute. You cannot entitle someone to a portion of a right. A year ago, in January 1992, the Court of Queen's Bench of Manitoba delivered a judgement that a limiting provision in Manitoba's Pay Equity Act contravened the equality provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The limiting provision related to the capping of pay equity costs. The decision said that the capping of costs was unconstitutional in that the right to pay equity or equal pay for work of equal value, once established, could not be limited to a pre-set quantum. It appears to us that a parallel exists here. The difference is that in Ontario the amount becomes limited by allowing the right, once achieved, to be eroded.

The fact that the proposed section calls for a regulation is also troublesome. We do not know what the specific limitations in the regulation would be, but it would have the potential to do nothing but unglue the act from which it flows.

If the section is passed and a maintenance requirement is limited by regulation, employers will save money. This should not be the motive behind a change of this sort. Other proposals in this bill, which we have not specifically spoken to, address the question of delaying the costs associated with the achievement of pay equity. Undoing the adjustments already made under the act should not be the approach taken to fitting pay equity rights into a weak economy. The women the act benefits have underwritten the costs of doing business for decades by working for less money than the value of their work, by male standards, should have delivered. It is one thing to ask them to stretch full achievement of their rights for a few years; it is quite another to ask them to give up a portion or all of what they have gained in the exercise of their rights.

At the commission, we've been asked for guidance on how maintenance works. The act, in one sense, is not specific in providing these details. In another sense, however, the meaning of "maintenance" is self-evident. The act provides the method for achieving pay equity in the first place; "maintaining" means reapplying the same principles and methodology to ensure that the gap that was once there does not re-emerge for any reason.

The commission published a booklet in June 1990 which discusses maintenance, and we've distributed a large number of copies through our efforts to educate and inform those responsible for implementing the act's requirements. As part of our ongoing work in this regard, we will be responsive to any needs for additional information on this topic.

Much like our approach of providing interpretative guidelines to assist parties to achieve pay equity, we would prefer not to have a regulation issued with respect to maintenance. In a relatively new legislative area, attempting to be definitive in a regulation would itself limit the scope of the topic and ignore the better understanding of all dimensions of the issue which develops through experience and a growing body of case law.

While we are the experts in what pay equity is, we continue to admit that we do not possess a perfect knowledge of systemic discrimination in all its facets. Maintenance is integral to remedying pay inequities based on gender. It would be to pull up short in the efforts to eradicate the problem if we were at this stage to draw a fence around what maintenance means.

In overall conclusion, we are very supportive of Bill 102. We recommended the two new approaches to pay equity, proportional value and proxy three years ago, and we see both approaches as the best way to extend pay equity to more Ontario women.

The Chair: Thank you. You each have about 11 minutes for questions and comments.

Mr Winninger: I'd like to come back to one of the earlier issues you raised around standing before the hearings tribunal. At one point in your presentation, you indicated that the commission had applied for standing at the hearings tribunal and that standing was denied. The first part of my question is, why was standing denied?

Ms Killoran: Standing was denied on the basis that we did not have a substantial and direct interest in the litigation. We were seeking enforcement of a review officer's order, and neither of the parties were prepared to appear as applicants before the hearings tribunal.

Mr Winninger: If the Pay Equity Commission doesn't have a substantial interest, who does? A number of groups have suggested that unions, for example, or employee organizations be given standing to represent the interests of the individuals who may be daunted by the formalities of a hearings tribunal. Do you agree with that?

Ms Killoran: Those who are members of bargaining units have the option of being and are represented by their bargaining agent, usually through legal counsel. Those who are unrepresented, are not members of bargaining units, have access, as I said, to PEALS. We would hope to supplement and improve accessibility to the hearings tribunal by offering our legal counsel solely for the purpose of enforcing orders.

Mr Winninger: I understand why the Pay Equity Commission might seek standing. I'm also wondering whether you would agree or disagree that a union or other employee organization be, of its own desire, given standing where the individual doesn't consent or object to being represented by the organization.

Ms Killoran: I don't have any objection to that if it's in agreement between the union and the individual. I can't foresee those circumstances actually occurring.

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Ms Murdock: As a supplement to what David has been asking, in those cases where the Pay Equity Commission was not recognized, did you go on for judicial review? You are reviewable. Did you apply to go to court on the question? If the Pay Equity Commission doesn't have any standing -- I mean, I would seriously question that. I don't think, from the sound of it, that you went on for judicial review. If you didn't, then why didn't you?

Ms Killoran: We approached this in a very measured way and sought a legal opinion as to the advisability of proceeding to judicial review. It certainly was one of our options. We arrived at the conclusion that our interests would be better served by seeking an amendment to the act. For example, if we had proceeded to judicial review, it would deal with that case only and might not have wider implications.

Ms Murdock: Mind you, though, you would say the precedent has been set. But under subsection 24(5), you have automatic -- well, I don't know. I have difficulty, because I read the act as saying that you do have; the act gives you that right.

Ms Killoran: That was always our assumption and our reading of the act. It was our experience with the first two cases that the hearings tribunal made the assessment that it couldn't hear the cases because there was no applicant; after the case had been referred, neither party would be an applicant. Our response to that was that we would come forward as the applicant and solve the problem. When we did that, we were told we did not have standing as an applicant. So we see that there must be a gap in the act, in the present interpretation of the act, in that there's a power to refer, but then that does not lead any further unless one of the parties is prepared to be an applicant.

Ms Murdock: But traditionally, a judicial review -- once a decision is made in any of the courts, it is considered precedent-setting and could be referred to in a subsequent case, correct?

Ms Killoran: It would depend on the particular circumstances of each case. In this situation, it might not have been very helpful.

Ms Murdock: Most of the groups to come before us haven't gotten into, in great detail -- with the exception of consultants being allowed standing -- any of the provisions under Bill 102 that will affect the operations of the Pay Equity Commission. But because they have particularly addressed themselves to who would have standing, a lot of the groups, particularly yesterday and the day before, the unions in particular, were concerned that consultants would have standing. I want to know your opinion on that.

Ms Killoran: I'm not prepared to offer an opinion on that. It is not something that's within our area of concern. We're not speaking on behalf of the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. I'm speaking on behalf of the office.

Ms Poole: Thank you very much for coming before us. Obviously you have -- I don't want to say the ultimate expertise in this area, but certainly close to it. I do appreciate, Brigid, that you came to meet with various members of the opposition who indicated that we would like to meet with you and get the benefit of your expertise earlier on in the process, so we appreciate that.

You've highlighted particularly two areas in your brief, one which was basically the administrative side and how you would like some changes as far as your status before coming before the tribunal, that type of thing; then the second one, which I think is a really crucial issue, is the maintenance issue, and you've put it very strongly here. You've said, referring to subsection 8(5), "Simply put, if this section of the bill is passed, the gains made in addressing pay equity could be undone; in a few years' time, the Legislature may need to consider another pay equity act in order to recoup the lost ground that this section has the capacity to bring about."

I would assume that the government consulted heavily with the Pay Equity Commission when it was drafting, first, Bill 168 and then its replacement, 102. When they came to you with a draft version of 102, did you point out the dramatic implications of this section? Because even though we've had a number of presentations that have said they think this is step back and that it's going to have an impact, I don't think most of the presenters realize how deadly this little section is and that it can really undo a lot of work. Was there consultation, and did the government give you a rationale for including that section?

Ms O'Reilly: We worked with the policy branch at the Ministry of Labour primarily on proportional value and proxy, as our experiences I cited with how the Pay Equity Act works helped to inform proportional value and proxy. So that's the area from which we came.

Ms Poole: So there really wasn't a great deal of consultation on this particular section; you didn't have that opportunity to actually address it. I was concerned when I saw that section in there, particularly as group after group has picked up that this is going to be a real problem. I don't know why it is in there, what the motivation was. I would have thought that if anybody could shed light on it, it would be the Pay Equity Commission. Perhaps we're going to have the Ministry of Labour back for more questions, and I think potentially the minister on this particular one, so we'll ask them that question.

You said you've dealt mainly with proportional value and proxy in your consultations with the government. When the Liberal government announced in March 1990 that it was going to extend pay equity on the basis of proportional value, at that stage I assume there was a consultation with the Pay Equity Commission, particularly because of your extensive report, in how to implement it.

Was there any discussion, for instance, of terminology, such as "a representative male job class" being the terminology as opposed to "male job class (classes)"? Was there any talk about that type of terminology? Because we've had, I think, probably three basic criticisms of proportional value.

One is that there are regulations allowed on proportional value, as opposed to including the mechanisms right in the legislation. The second was in terminology, such as using "a representative male job class." A third one was allowing employers who had failed to do what the legislation required them to do, which is to post a plan on the job-to-job method, to go directly to proportional. They collect $200 as they pass Go, because they get to choose the mechanism which allows them to delay the implementation, and not go through the process that the responsible employers used in doing their duty under the act.

I wonder if you could comment on these particular sections of 102 that have come under some criticism from various groups as to how proportional value would be implemented.

Mr Lapp: I think there are two parts in there. First, in terms of the representative group of male job classes, most proportional value methods, the vast preponderance, require more than one male job class. There are some limited circumstances where theoretically it could be done with one, but you'd want to take a pretty close look at it. I think for that reason the wording was put in as being in the plural, and if it arose as an issue, then at that time there'd have to be some discussion as to whether the plural included the singular in a situation where you could justify using a single male job class.

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Ms Poole: Just on that point before you go on to the other ones, we had a presentation from the Ontario Nurses' Association, ONA, which submitted that this type of very loose terminology was going to end in extensive litigation. As you're well aware, ONA has been before the pay equity tribunal with a number of precedent-setting cases and knows full well the cost of going to tribunal. They said that if the terminology "representative male job classes" was used, they foresaw a great deal of expensive litigation down the road. Would you like to comment on that?

Mr Lapp: Yes. Essentially, if you take the two ends of the spectrum, being the notional definition that's in the bill and one where the bill would prescribe a very tight, set-out formula for proportional value, our clear preference was for the former. In other words, where you set out an idea of what it is you're trying to achieve in order to meet the objectives of the act --

Ms Poole: Right in the legislation.

Mr Lapp: Yes -- it then leaves latitude to accommodate the variety of fact situations there would be in making proportional value work. In other words, if you have a very tight definition, it would exclude the use of proportional value in a lot of settings where the facts just didn't fit that type of definition, so it was our preference to have a definition of proportional value which essentially enabled it to be successful as opposed to restricted its use.

Can I just go back to the second part of your first question, which had to do with the commencement date, if you will, of proportional value adjustments. The bill sets out that proportional value must be used if there's a situation where there's a female job class which was not able to be compared under job-to-job. It also essentially says that you could use proportional value instead of doing job-to-job. It's my understanding of the bill, and I guess I look at it more closely from that point of view, that the bill requires you to have tried job-to-job first, then requires you to use proportional on those that you can't, and that those dates stem from the job-to-job dates.

Ms Poole: Just on a clarification on that matter, that certainly isn't the understanding of the legal counsel of the groups that have come before us. They are interpreting that to mean that an employer who has not done job-to-job who should have done job-to-job in fact will now opt to go for the proportional method because it has a later commencement date and that they're limiting their liability. So if you would either like to comment now, or perhaps if you would like to take a second look at that and report back to the committee later, I would be very appreciative.

Ms Killoran: That wasn't the intent of the section, and if that indeed is the effect it has, I think it can be fairly easily corrected. But that hasn't been our interpretation of the section to date.

Ms Poole: Thank you. We'll perhaps ask for legal counsel's interpretation then of that one.

One final question: Something else that you haven't mentioned in your brief, and I understand that you wanted it to be very specific to administrative tasks the commission is engaged in, but one other area which you haven't mentioned in the brief is the fact that the implementation date for the public sector as established in the 1987 pay equity legislation, which was January 1, 1995, as a deadline for achieving pay equity in the public sector, that particular deadline has been extended to January 1, 1998.

Many of the groups, in fact I think all of the groups that have come before us, have been extremely critical and see this as a step backwards, that it will affect women's pension plans and there will be ramifications for women in that it is breaking a commitment that was made. Would you like to comment on that? Is it your estimation that the government should proceed with the January 1, 1995, date?

Ms O'Reilly: If I could just back up a little bit, I think some of you are familiar with the background of the first act. When the first act came about, the most mature experience in North America at that point was the state of Minnesota, where pay equity extended to parts of the public sector, not to it entirely. Their overall pay equity costs had come in at something between 3% and 4%. It appears from reading background pieces and some of the work around the current act that that was a kind of guideline to this idea of a five-year span being able to capture those pay equity shortcomings in the public sector.

We've heard this morning too from unions that have seen that the 5% in particular areas isn't problematic, and they're unfamiliar with how it's problematic in other areas. We're in the same boat that they are, that we're not aware of how it's problematic in other areas, but it appears to be.

Ms Poole: So do you support the extension of the time line or not?

Ms O'Reilly: As we said in the brief, we share the frustration of women who see this delay in the time line and delay in the implementation dates for proxy and proportional values. We share that frustration because this has been a long time coming and a long time improving.

Mr David Tilson (Dufferin-Peel): Thank you for your presentation. I'd like you to help me with the Pay Equity Commission and tell me a little bit about it. What's the staff complement of the Pay Equity Commission?

Ms O'Reilly: We're now at approximately 80. About 65 of those are on the office side and about 15 on the tribunal side.

Mr Tilson: Can you tell me the percentage of that staff complement that are men and women?

Ms O'Reilly: Off the top of my head, it's about 25% to 30% men.

Mr Tilson: Is there a reason for that?

Ms O'Reilly: No, not a particular one that comes to mind.

Mr Tilson: I just find it interesting, the subject of the Pay Equity Commission. There's almost an inequity there as far as the other way, which gets to a question on this very important issue in our society.

We all recall when bilingualism became an issue, particularly in the 1970s in this country, and there has been, and still is in my opinion, a certain amount of resistance to the implementation of bilingualism throughout this country. Whether they are wrong or not, there is a certain amount of resistance among certain areas of our country on that topic.

Can you tell me what resistance you have found, in telephone calls, if you indeed document those, or correspondence to your office, to what has gone on and what is about to go on?

Ms O'Reilly: I do, with the head of the commission, contact a lot of people throughout the province of Ontario, and I have had telephone calls to phone-in shows, if you will, and very, very few people in this province have any difficulty with equity and very few of them have any difficulty with pay equity. Some occasionally do ask just the sorts of questions you have asked, but those questions don't seem to be at the root of a particular problem. I think they're just checking up that males and females are represented at the commission.

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Mr Tilson: I can honestly say in my constituency office I don't, unless some calls have come in that my constituency staff haven't told me about -- but there haven't been many calls that have come into my office for or against the subject of pay equity, at least in my riding. Maybe there have and they just haven't been drawn to my attention.

My question to you is whether you, not necessarily you personally but your staff, get correspondence or calls expressing positive thoughts or negative thoughts on this subject?

Ms O'Reilly: There are always going to be some people who have some difficulty with a notion like this, but the calls that come into our hotline are people who are asking questions about how they do achieve pay equity in their workplace.

Mr Tilson: Yes. I understand that you're going to have the inquiry type of call but calls, for example, from employers who are expressing a concern as to the effect that these decisions may have on the operation of their businesses. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth; I'm trying to ask what sorts of calls, if any. Maybe you don't get any. That's fine too.

Ms O'Reilly: We get very few, as I say, who are opposed to the principle of equity, which I think most Canadians are not.

Mr Tilson: Right. Now, can you tell me, do you docket the calls?

Ms O'Reilly: Yes.

Mr Tilson: Do you have a process of docketing the calls? What do you do? Are the contents of those calls put down or just simply that so-and-so called at a particular time on a particular day?

Ms O'Reilly: No, we have forms.

Mr Tilson: You have indicated what the complement of your staff is now. With the implementation of this bill, can you tell us what your forecast of your staff complement will be between now and the turn of the century?

Ms O'Reilly: We anticipate that we will need more staff -- not a great many more -- to work through these two new approaches to pay equity and we anticipate going to ask for some increased resources, but we don't see that extending probably to the end of the century.

Mr Tilson: Do you have a report that you can make available to the committee on that subject?

Ms O'Reilly: No. We are still in the anticipation stages and working through it in our offices.

Mr Tilson: So you haven't advised the government as to what staff complement might be necessary for the Pay Equity Commission to satisfactorily implement the proposals? You haven't provided the government with any of that information?

Ms O'Reilly: In the estimates process, which I guess most people on the committee would be familiar with --

Mr Tilson: I'm not. Maybe you can tell us what to expect.

Ms O'Reilly: -- we did alert the government to the fact that the expansion of pay equity could involve more resources at the commission.

Mr Tilson: Can you provide details of that today?

Ms O'Reilly: No, I can't provide those details today.

Mr Tilson: Can you undertake to provide the committee with that information?

Ms O'Reilly: I can talk to the Ministry of Labour and see what --

Mr Tilson: No. My question is directed to the Pay Equity Commission as to what information the commission has that it could make available to this committee.

Ms O'Reilly: Okay, I'll find out what information we have that we can make available.

Mr Tilson: What information do you have?

Ms O'Reilly: As I said, we are discussing it at the commission itself relative to what we anticipate.

Mr Tilson: I understand that, and of course the concern I have is that the minister made a statement, when he appeared before this committee, indicating anticipated costs this year and the years in the future. I'm trying to find out details about that. It would seem to me that one of the sources of what the cost of implementing this legislation is is through your commission. I'd like you to help the committee and give us that information.

Ms O'Reilly: As I said, we're still under discussion at the commission as to the resources we might need in order to see the expansion of the act and the amended bill.

Mr Tilson: So at this stage you've given the ministry very little information is what you're saying.

Ms O'Reilly: Yes, that's right.

Mr Tilson: Okay. What sort of outside staff do you contract, particularly in the legal area or any other area currently?

Ms O'Reilly: We do contract research of employers who have passed the compliance date of pay equity from our policy and research branch.

Mr Tilson: Can you provide us with details of that currently, as to what that means?

Ms O'Reilly: That's one research project a year that we commission.

Mr Tilson: I guess what I'm looking for is the number of people that you contract out to and the cost to the commission that entails. Can you provide that to the committee?

Ms O'Reilly: I'm not sure whether I can or not at this very moment, but I can certainly make an effort to find out.

Mr Tilson: Can you tell us what estimates, with this legislation, contracting out and the size of the staff you'll be contracting out or the number of individuals you'll be contracting out will increase by, if any?

Ms O'Reilly: I can try and provide those estimates, but at this point I can't off the top of my head.

Mr Tilson: You don't have that information is what you're saying.

Ms O'Reilly: I don't have right now a projection of contracted research. That's your question?

Mr Tilson: That's my question.

You're at 150 Eglinton Avenue East. Can you tell us whether you anticipate, with the increase of staff, that you will require more office space to properly operate the Pay Equity Commission?

Ms O'Reilly: At this point we don't anticipate increased space needs.

Mr Tilson: When this legislation is fully implemented, do you believe that you will require more office space?

Ms O'Reilly: At this point we do not.

Mr Tilson: At this point you do not, but when the legislation is fully implemented -- I'm speaking of the turn of the century -- with the forecasts that you'll be making to properly administer this legislation, do you anticipate that you will require more office space?

Ms O'Reilly: At this point I don't anticipate that we will.

Mr Tilson: I wonder if you can philosophize with me for a moment on the subject of pay equity. Will there be a time that the size of the Pay Equity Commission will be downsized because of, hopefully, objectives that will have been reached?

Ms O'Reilly: I would anticipate that, yes.

Mr Tilson: When would you anticipate that?

Ms O'Reilly: I can't say at this moment when I'd anticipate that, but, as you probably realize, in the private sector the compliance dates for pay equity have been staggered according to the size of the employer, so the largest employers, those of over 500 employees, posted their plans on January 1, 1990. We're now moving in the private sector through to the end of those compliance dates, which would suggest that there could be some stabilizing or shrinkage of the functions of some of the Pay Equity Commission.

Mr Tilson: I guess what I'm getting at is that if you anticipate that the objectives of this will be reached -- and hopefully they will. I'm sure the government is hopeful they will be reached and I'm sure you are. Having said that, is there a proposal with respect to the retaining of staff, that you anticipate there will be a period of time when you will not need a certain number of staff?

Ms O'Reilly: In the life of an act like this that does have these phases, that makes a great deal of sense, yes, and we do probably anticipate that.

Mr Tilson: In your hiring practices, have you made it clear that there may be a time when, because the objectives hopefully will be reached, staff will no longer be required? Have you made that clear to the people on your commission?

Ms O'Reilly: We all work very closely with the act at the commission. We see that the act does have these compliance dates, that the act and pay equity itself have a life which, as you say, we hope will lead to achievement. The Pay Equity Act also now calls for a review in 1995 of the act itself and of the functioning of the act, and we certainly anticipate in the planning we do at the commission that the life, size and function of the commission will be part of that review as well.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Tilson. Ms Poole?

Ms Poole: Just to ask --

Mr Tilson: Are we going around backwards?

The Chair: No, this is just for clarification.

Ms Poole: Just a point of information I'm asking for. In my question I had asked if we could have legislative counsel give us an opinion as to whether section 21.2 of Bill 102 makes it clear that if an employer who has failed to post a pay equity plan and who can achieve pay equity for some or all of its employees in female job classes under the job-to-job method of comparison must do so before using the proportional method and must comply with the schedule for payments found in section 13.

Could we have that clarification from legislative counsel as to whether they feel that this is already contained in Bill 102 or whether it would be necessary to add this section in order to ensure that some of these employers who have not fulfilled their duties do so?

The Chair: We'll contact legislative counsel and get back to you on that. Ms O'Reilly, Ms Killoran and Mr Lapp, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this morning and giving us your presentation. This committee stands recessed till 1:30 this afternoon.

The committee recessed at 1201.

AFTERNOON SITTING

The committee resumed at 1345.

ONTARIO ASSOCIATION OF INTERVAL AND TRANSITION HOUSES

The Chair: I'd like to call this meeting back to order. I call forward our first presenters for this afternoon, from the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses. Good afternoon.

Just a reminder, you'll be allowed up to one hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you would keep your remarks slightly briefer than that 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 Trudy Don: My name is Trudy Don. I'm the coordinator of the organization. With me are Joanne King, who's the chair of our pay equity ad hoc committee, and Kim Fraser, who's on our lobby committee. I can't remember everybody here, but a couple of our members are behind us here as well.

We probably won't take up a whole hour; we haven't got an awful lot to present. I will read our brief. We have a few questions that we ourselves would like to ask of the committee that we are not very clear about.

The Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses is the umbrella organization for 82 shelters for abused women and their children across Ontario. As an association, we provide advocacy on behalf of the women who come to our shelters for protection and support as well as on behalf of the shelters that provide these services.

Approximately 900 women are employed in the shelters across the province -- this is a fairly accurate guess; we are not quite sure of the exact number, but it's around about 900 -- as executive directors, front-line counsellors, advocacy workers, child care workers, public education workers, housing advocates, administrative staff etc. The average number of staff employed by each shelter will depend on the number of beds in that shelter and can range from eight to 15 or more staff. Our shelters are operated as non-profit charitable institutions governed by community boards of directors, at least the majority of them. Some of them are still run by regional or local councils. Those are the family resource centres that were started in 1983-84.

Salaries for these workers range from a minimum of approximately $22,000 to a maximum in the $45,000 range. About a third of the shelters are unionized, while several others are investigating the advantages of unionization.

The first shelters that opened in the early 1970s received their funding through federal manpower and immigration grants -- local initiative projects -- that were intended to reduce the unemployment rate. Salaries were set at the rate for minimum wage. In fact, I think our take-home pay was $85.16, if I remember correctly, per week. By the mid-1970s, contracts were signed with municipalities and/or provincial governments for purchase-of-service agreements.

To date, shelters still negotiate their budgets with regional program supervisors of the Ministry of Community and Social Services as part of the hostel agreement under the General Welfare Assistance Act. The reason why we want to emphasize this is because we have a particular concern about the fact that services for abused women are still regarded as a welfare issue rather than a human rights issue. I know this has nothing to do with pay equity, but I think it's important to point that out. It's one that we've been fighting for a long time and feel strongly about.

OAITH, with all other female-predominant sectors, has waited anxiously for an opportunity to achieve equitable pay for the dedicated women we represent. We believe that the continued existence of shelters for abused women and children has been made possible by our members' willingness to work for low wages as they put their belief in women's rights to live a life free of violence and persecution ahead of their own rights for equitable pay. We believe the recognition of this dedication, through the achievement of pay equity, is long overdue.

However, we are uneasy about the reality of achieving pay equity by way of the amendments outlined in Bill 102. Our workplaces are all predominantly female; there are no male job classes with which to make comparisons. Therefore, our comments to Bill 102 refer primarily to the proxy method of comparisons.

Let me explain. We're not all that sure we understand this bill either. We haven't have an awful lot of chance to really investigate this with the kind of expertise that I believe is needed to read this.

Mr Tilson: Neither have we.

Ms Murdock: Speak for yourself.

Mr Tilson: I'll be looking forward to hearing you explain it.

Ms Murdock: And I'll be happy to.

The Chair: Order. You'll each have your opportunity.

Mr Malkowski: On a point of order, Mr Chair: I prefer to hear the presenters rather than the arguments back and forth.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Malkowski. Please proceed.

Ms Don: Our major concerns with the proxy method described in this amendment fall essentially into three categories: (1) our inability to anticipate critical aspects of implementation, as the information will appear in the regulations to which we have not as yet had any access; (2) the inherent limitations implied in this version of proxy comparison; and (3) the obstacles to implementing this process: a time-consuming, unwieldy method with scarce resources.

We'll address these three points in turn.

(1) Information contained in regulations, essential to our understanding of the implementation process, includes, but is not limited to:

(a) The limitations/guidelines for the selection of the proxy establishment by the seeking organization. We quote here from Bill 102:

"The seeking employer shall select the proxy establishment to be used for the purposes of the proxy method of comparison in accordance with the regulations."

This information is key to our ability to envision the sorts of comparisons which may be forthcoming and to anticipate the level of cooperation and integrity and sophistication of the pay equity process of the proxy establishments.

(b) The limitations on seeking employers wishing to enter into an agreement for the purpose of combining establishments -- that again is section 21.16 of Bill 102.

Our ability to implement pay equity by the proxy comparison method, on a shelter-by-shelter basis, will be severely constrained by our lack of resources. Women's shelters do not have human resources departments, funds for engaging consultants or the administrative staff time necessary for implementation as outlined at the present in Bill 102. Therefore, we're keenly interested in all possible means of collectively responding to this amendment either on an association/province-wide basis or on the regional or other sizeable groupings combinations.

If we had to do this on an individual basis or just on a small regional basis, we're just not going to be able to do this, ever.

(c) The additional information which seeking organizations may ask for from the potential proxy establishment.

"21.17 For the purpose of making a comparison for a key female job class using the proxy method, a seeking employer may request any potential proxy employer to provide it with the following information relating to a potential proxy establishment of the potential proxy employer:" -- it's wonderful language; I love it -- "Such other information as may be prescribed in the regulations."

"(2.e) The request contains such additional information as may be prescribed by the regulations."

We'd be interested to know if this additional information could include a detailed description of the job information gathering and a description and evaluation system of the potential proxy establishments. It seems to us particularly important information if the seeking organization is to feel confident that it is providing its employees with an equitable, comparative job rate.

We are aware that pay equity has been implemented with varying degrees of sincerity and expertise and would want assurance that our members will not be held hostage by rates achieved through shoddy implementation on the part of the proxy establishment.

(2) The inherent limitations of the proxy method outlined in Bill 102: We'll list only those aspects which we see as most critical: "(a) the comparison to female job classes in the proxy establishment," and "(b) whose duties and responsibilities are similar to those of the key female job class in the seeking organization."

We see this limitation as a shocking departure from what we consider to be the essential nature of the original Pay Equity Act. The value of female-to-female job class comparisons, as described here, will be completely dependent on the integrity of the proxy organization's pay equity process. As we continue to assume this government's intentions are honourable, we ask you to reconsider. Otherwise, proxy comparisons will result only in entrenching any gender-based inequities not addressed by the proxy establishment.

We also believe the limitations of comparisons to similar job classes to be another major departure from the original concept of pay equity, which we understood was largely focused on achieving legitimacy for comparisons of dissimilar jobs.

It seems to us the essential nature of pay equity for our members is minimized and restricted by these limitations and that female-predominant sectors are given an impoverished and impractical device with which to combat wage discrimination. We cannot but wonder if this in itself is an example of systemic gender discrimination in law and a violation of charter rights.

(3) The obstacles to achieving implementation with scarce resources: The process of implementing proxy comparison as described throughout part III.2 of Bill 102 will be a cumbersome one for women's shelters. Most women's shelters in Ontario have fewer staff than many small employers. We expect that each phase of implementation will impose a significant burden of time and, therefore, money.

The collection of information, the development or adaptation of a bias-free evaluation system and the evaluation system process itself all demand a great number of woman-hours. To add to that the need to communicate with the pay equity office to initiate the process and to correspond with one, several or maybe a series of potential proxy establishments indeed may not be possible without an injection of funds for this purpose.

We therefore want to be clearly on record as saying that without additional resources being available to us with which we may fund relief staff positions and/or contract with those who have greater expertise or availability, we must seriously question our ability to implement the proxy method.

As suggested earlier in this brief, the regulations may hold the answers to some of our questions. As we cannot foresee which sorts of establishments may act as proxy establishments, we are unable to project the impact of this act on our relationship with them. The majority of our shelters exist in small and medium-sized communities and rely heavily on good relations with their community for the ability to do public education, develop protocols and seek support in the form of fund-raising etc. It seems to us that the seeking organizations may be placed in some jeopardy, where those good relations could be destroyed, if the process of information gathering and reviewing does not progress smoothly.

In conclusion and to state our case most plainly, we wonder if the cost of achieving pay equity will prove to be greater than the results. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you. Each caucus will have 15 minutes for questions and comments. Ms Poole.

Ms Poole: Thank you very much for coming today. I think you've put together a very well versed brief, and if you don't understand all the terminology of the Pay Equity Act, believe me, the members of the committee are trying to wade through it as well. We found a number of presenters have made the same point.

In fact, we had originally scheduled two weeks for pay equity hearings. I don't think the problem is lack of interest --

Ms Don: Oh, no.

Ms Poole: -- but we've only filled up one week, because I think a lot of people feel totally inadequate wading through all the language and technological explanations in order to get to the meat of it. So we really do appreciate your comments.

You've made a number of unique comments that we haven't heard before, and I think this is partially because either the other sectors we've heard from have been a lot of child care workers who would find it much easier to find a proxy comparator organization than, say, the transition houses, or we've heard from women such as the nurses, who already, for the most part, are covered under the current Pay Equity Act but feel that this act is a clawback. But you're in kind of a unique situation, so I'd like to explore that.

One of the things you say, and you're actually the first group that I think has made this point so clearly, is, "The obstacles to implementing this process:" -- referring to proxy -- "a time-consuming, unwieldy method with scarce resources," that this is one of your major concerns, and it is the resources I'd like to talk to you about.

Late in the fall, I think it was November, OAITH had your lobby, and at that time you were very critical of payments to the shelters that had not kept up with the rate of inflation. The concern I have, which I think is shared by a number of broader public sector groups, is that if the government doesn't come forward with the funds for the pay equity, not only to make sure the women themselves get the payments but also the process of ensuring pay equity, you will be in a really untenable position. Right now, you're really stretched to the maximum for your resources. Have you talked to the government about this? I'm not quite satisfied with what they've said about picking up the cost. I haven't seen any specifics. I haven't heard them say they're going to give you the resources to implement the plan and I haven't heard them say they will guarantee that 100% of the costs will be borne by the government so that you don't have to cut more programs. I wonder if you've talked to the government about this and, if you have, what the response has been.

1400

Ms Joanne King: I don't think we have specifically addressed that with the government yet. We're hoping this is our first step in communicating our concerns, and we will certainly be communicating to the government our concerns about the expense of implementing pay equity.

Ms Poole: I guess that is one of the basic concerns there have been with proxy, that it's extremely expensive. While the very valid point has been made that there's no reason why this government should make women responsible for bearing the brunt of this, while that point has been quite validly made, I am concerned that if the government doesn't pick up its share, women will be in a worse position than before, because you will either have to cut staff or women will have to be working much harder to do the same job because there will be fewer resources.

So I would really urge you to talk to the government about this and try to get some commitments from it. When we asked for a costing -- they haven't been able to give us a costing. For instance, when Bill 102 came in and there was a three-year delay in implementing the current act in the public sector, I asked the Ministry of Labour for a costing of what the whole thing was going to cost, and it has no numbers.

I'm concerned that with a government that is fighting a very real deficit problem, once again we'll be behind the eight ball, because you'll have payments cut and you'll end up bearing the burden. I don't know if anybody wants to comment.

Ms Kim Fraser: One of the things we're also concerned about is whether, when pay equity is finally realized with proxy, this will be a fair method of addressing wage disparities, whether it will really do that in the long run. That's one of our other concerns, and we're just beginning to look at the concerns you're raising about how we actually go about trying to use a proxy method, whether it will be really difficult, expensive and, in the long run, even if it's achieved, whether it's a really fair way: to look at another organization where women have achieved pay equity and then just take its adjustment, whatever that may be.

Ms Poole: One of the points you've made in your brief regarding this is the fact that you believe female jobs should have been compared to men's jobs, that this proxy method is a very convoluted way of reaching that and it depends on the integrity of the pay equity progress that the comparator organization has gone through: If there was something wrong with their process, then you will be comparing yourself to an inequitable situation.

Ms King: Exactly, and we have no way of knowing what their process has been, necessarily, because we're not sure to what extent we will know what process they've used, exactly how their surveys were done, what their evaluation system has been. We're not sure that we'll have that information.

I've been an executive director at two shelters. At my current shelter we live in an area with a population of about 15,000 in the town. My former shelter was in an even more remote area, with a population of 1,300 in a small town, where the possibility of finding a proxy establishment may be very unlikely, or at least having a choice: There may be one proxy establishment we perhaps could use. What would happen in an instance where we found their process did not meet our standards of integrity? Would we be in a position where we would need to expose that and then suffer even further difficulties within our community? Those are our concerns.

Ms Poole: That means you have to go outside your geographic boundaries, which has its own set of problems attached to it.

I had one final question that was in my mind just before you made that comment. By the way, I must say that I thoroughly agree with your comments about the regulations and wanting things spelled out in the legislation, as opposed to leaving unknown quantities to regulations. I think that point is quite well taken. I did have one other question which was crucial at the time, but I'm going to let Mrs Caplan go, in case it floats back to me later.

Mrs Caplan: Your brief is excellent. I'm very much aware of the frustrations and concerns you have. Pay equity policy has always been quite technical and difficult. Unfortunately, the terminology in this legislation continues that difficult precedent.

There are a couple of things you haven't mentioned in the brief which have been brought to our attention from other presenters. One that was addressed as well by the Pay Equity Commission, the tribunal people who were here this morning, was on the issue of maintenance. Under the existing legislation that was passed in 1987, there was a principle that said that once pay equity was achieved, there was an obligation that those gains be maintained. This legislation is seen as eroding those principles. The Ontario Nurses' Association has said that's a step backwards. We've heard from a number of presenters that they see this as regressive. CUPE, which was here this morning, made the same point that this was a step backwards. We have a number of people who are pointing to what I think has been overlooked by a number of groups. Did you see that in this legislation? Is it something you overlooked or is there some reason that you haven't mentioned it in your brief?

Ms Don: I think it was overlooked, frankly.

Mrs Caplan: So you're not aware that that's one of the significant changes in this legislation?

Ms Don: One of the problems, as I think we've pointed out in our brief, is that we're extremely understaffed all the time. You really need to have that expertise to be able even to realize that these things are changed in the next legislation. It's extremely difficult to keep up with that. I'd just like to remind you that Kim and I made a presentation about three years ago which I think we called, "Just give us the money," and I think we still feel that way.

Mrs Caplan: I've always seen the issue of low wages as a separate issue from pay equity, particularly in certain areas of work in the province. I think of interval and transition houses and others where there are not comparable jobs. Often it's an issue of undervaluation that has nothing to do with the comparison of like male work. As you say, there may not be anything like it at all and it is simply a question of undervaluation and low wages. I see those as very separate issues.

The last point I would like to make is that I think one of the reasons some of the advocates for justice and equity for women have missed the erosion of the principles in this legislation is that they would never have believed that Bob Rae and the NDP would have taken away from women the fundamental principles that were fought for and gained in the original Pay Equity Act in 1987. I'm concerned, because I think a lot of people are disappointed in this legislation but haven't looked beyond that to what the implications are and how serious this is, as we've heard from a couple of presenters: a backwards step in taking away some of those gains that were fought for over the years.

The Chair: Ms Poole, you have about four minutes left.

Ms Poole: Thank you. I finally got my brain together and thought of the question that floated through my mind as you were speaking earlier.

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You've been fairly critical of the proxy method in Bill 102. I think you've described it as complex and unwieldy. There's no doubt, it's a costly way to do it. I've been trying to think whether there are other ways we could accomplish the same goal. For instance, in your sector, which is female-dominated and underpaid, is there a way that we could raise those wages without making you wait so long and without having you go through this process which you don't have the resources to implement?

One of the things that I found worked really well with child care workers and homemakers was a wage enhancement scheme. Back in 1987, New Directions for Child Care had what it called a direct operating grant, but it was really a wage enhancement for child care workers. It has now been in since 1987 and it's been supplemented by another wage enhancement program by the NDP government. It has made child care workers the highest paid in Canada; their wages are at least starting to approach something human as opposed to subhuman. I'm wondering if we could do the same thing for transition and interval house workers.

Ms Don: I think a first step was made on that. We had a salary compensation thing where the bottom wages went up from $18,000, I think it was, to $22,000. Unfortunately, it hasn't kept in step. It's still down there. I think one of the reasons is what I pointed out: It's still trying to be paid under GWA, which is not the appropriate vehicle by which to fund these services. I think this really is a big issue.

When I sat in this room about 10 years ago when we had hearings on this, this was one of the recommendations which at that time was made by that all-party committee, that services for abused women should no longer be paid under general welfare assistance. We keep coming back to that, because I think that's where the problem is. As long as you try to fit us within that very limited legislation, you're going to be stuck in that and there's no way we could ever get out of it.

The reason I point it out is that we started off with LEAP funding at minimum wage. I think this is what has landed us in this position at this time, 20 years down the road. Because we started so low, we've never been able to catch up. I think you're right. The only way to do it is to do the enhancement thing.

Ms King: When that salary compensation process occurred several years ago, a benchmark was set at $27,500. Anyone earning less than that got the $1,000 per year -- maybe it was $1,018 or something like that -- added on to their salary. As Trudy points out, in the case of workers who were then earning $18,000, they came up to $22,000, so there was a certain disparity there, but for other workers, it just locked them in at what was still less than adequate wages.

Also, concerning the point about the historical budgets, we've been tied to base budgets, so wherever a shelter started off living with the LEAP grants and the very, very poor base budgets, it's been stuck with those base budgets and cost-of-living increases. The system has maintained this female ghetto for us.

Ms Poole: This whole area needs to be revisited.

Ms King: I think there is a way to change that by looking at things like OAITH's alternative funding formula and our vision for funding, wherein we set out what we felt were adequate wages and our funding formula for the services that are essential services in the shelters.

Mr Tilson: Thank you for your presentation. You certainly raised some issues we will spend some time thinking about, and there's one issue in particular I'd like to canvass with you. But before I get to that, I will say that, as a man at least, I must congratulate the work a transition house does. I've had an opportunity as the provincial representative to become more familiar with the transition houses in my riding, but unless you're a woman or a politician, I doubt you get into those places. I was pleased that the staff took the time to take me on a tour of the place and show me the conditions you work under, in my riding at least, and I assume it's a province-wide problem. I'm speaking specifically of the town of Orangeville and the counties of Dufferin and Caledon. Under the funding that's allowed, they do an exceptional job.

I am getting to a question on all of this. Because of the need for funding, simply to make it work -- I mean, obviously, you used the words "scarce resources," and that exists now -- considering what is required of you people, the expertise, the service that's required, and considering what you're being paid and considering the conditions that you're working under. I don't think a lot of people know that, perhaps for security reasons or for whatever reason. Obviously, the only reason I got in there was because I was the provincial member. It helped me understand some of the problems that you're going through.

When we start talking about pay equity -- and yours, of all groups, is a group that can be set up as a prime example of where pay equity cries out for assistance -- the difficulty is with the philosophies of governments, and I say plural to that, in the emphasis of funding to your organizations. There may be some minor movements, but very little. You've talked about different funding plans, but so far, from my observation, it's all talk.

The real question is, unless the government is prepared to put not only the funding that you want but the additional funding that's going to be required -- because money has to come from somewhere; it just doesn't grow on trees -- and considering that the problems that you're dealing with are increasing if anything, would it be fair to say that your appeal to this committee is not only to make some excellent observations with respect to the legal writing of the legislation but also to cry out for funding, and not only the funding that you have been asking for?

I don't think this legislation will work in your operations without major assistance, particularly at the level that you're at. I don't think it can possibly work unless the government is prepared to make a commitment. I'd like you to comment on that.

Ms King: I think that's the point we have made in our brief and continue to make, that while we do appreciate the commitment on the part of this government to pay equity for women, we find this legislation will be difficult for us to implement without additional resources.

Mr Tilson: Because there's only so much money in the budget that you get now. You keep crying out and saying the budget's terrible, the funding's terrible --

Ms King: Absolutely.

Mr Tilson: -- and you now have another add-on where if this legislation is passed and is processed, you now have additional demands on that budget. Where is it going to come from?

Ms King: Where is it going to come from, and just the work involved in the process of determining the proxy method, when our commitment in the shelters is to put the majority of our dollars into direct services. So we do not have large administrative groups of staff. We don't have the human resources department. The executive director, where she exists, does everything. She's human resources, she's fund-raising, she's community networking, she's public education, she's staff supervision, orientation, training, the whole kit and caboodle in one person.

I look at it for myself and I think, oh boy, this is going to be a lot more work, and we are very, very slim on the administrative support side because we want our dollars in direct services. Unless there's an influx of dollars specifically for this task or unless we are able to do it provincially in some way so that it's done once and for all for everybody at the same time in a good way, with integrity, we're just looking at more burnout on the part of our administrators in the shelters. I just don't see how it can be done.

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Mr Tilson: The second of my two questions, Mr Chairman, is to direct the delegation to page 4 of your brief under the heading "Inherent limitations of the proxy method outlined in Bill 102." You have addressed this somewhat with respect to the questions from the Liberal Party members of this committee. When I make heckles that I'm having trouble understanding this legislation too, I am. I'm quite serious with that.

Dealing with this specific area, with some of the comments that have been made by this delegation, to help me understand it, and the delegation has indicated that they have trouble understanding some of the terminology in the legislation and where the legislation's going, I would like if the staff could come to the table and provide their comments specifically on that paragraph 2, which goes on for part of page 4 and the top part of page 5.

The Chair: Would staff like to come forward. Please identify yourself.

Ms Catherine Evans: I'm Catherine Evans, policy adviser at the Ministry of Labour. I'm wondering if there's a specific --

Mr Tilson: Sorry, I was just making some comments to Ms Poole. I appreciate that it might be appropriate to ask the parliamentary assistant to make some comments. I guess my questions are more of an administrative type as opposed to a policy line of questioning, which is why I have asked the staff. I hope I didn't slight you by not directing questions to you.

Ms Murdock: Not at all.

Mr Tilson: They have asked in the statements, and I guess it's specifically with respect to paragraph (a), which I'd like you to comment on, at least from an administrative point of view, because they're questioning whether it will work:

"We see this limitation as a shocking departure from what we consider to be the essential nature of the original Pay Equity Act. The value of female-to-female job class comparisons, as described here, will be completely dependent on the integrity of the proxy organization's pay equity process. As we continue to assume this government's intentions are honourable, we ask you to reconsider. Otherwise, proxy comparisons will result only in entrenching any gender-based inequities not addressed by the proxy establishment."

Dealing with that, I think it's an excellent point and I would like some reassurance from you, who've perhaps had some assistance in preparing this legislation, that their fears are unfounded, or perhaps the government may want to reconsider some amendments.

Ms Evans: The act requires all employers who have pay equity plans to evaluate their female job classes and male job classes on the basis of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions. That is the basic rule of the law which the act sets out. One has to assume that employers and bargaining agents and employees will observe that rule of law.

Mr Tilson: As I understand this delegation's question, given the position they're in -- I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I maybe should ask you to clarify what you mean, but I believe you're saying that, with the wording that's being suggested in the legislation, it's impossible to do what is being suggested, to adequately protect you and, to use your words, it could result in entrenching gender-based inequities.

Ms King: We're not certain without seeing the regulations exactly what information will be available to us on the part of the organization with whom we would be seeking to proxy, and if we didn't have sufficient information, we wouldn't be in a position to assess the integrity with which it had conducted the pay equity process. That's where our concerns are arising.

Mr Tilson: Mr Chairman, I realize I'm unfair. I don't mean to be unfair to staff, and maybe at this time I will ask the parliamentary assistant. This question is something that certainly gives me great concern. Women's groups want some certainty. They want to know where we're going. The difficulty is, should it be left to regulations or should this particular area be put right in the legislation as opposed to being left to regulation? No one knows what this means.

Ms Murdock: On Monday the ministry submitted the schedule on which under "Counselling, referral and accommodation services....shelter for battered women," the proxy group that they would be going to would be "municipality providing accommodation services." It is included under there. But I would also point out that in terms of funding -- I understand the problem -- there has been no reference within the submission, except at 21.15, but under 21.16 they can join together to form groups to negotiate their proxy plans as well.

Mr Tilson: I'd like you to stay specifically on this.

Ms Murdock: I don't think it should be done legislatively, because things change. Legislation is difficult.

Ms King: Is the list available to us now?

Ms Murdock: They were submitted, so yes. You should be able to get them. I would guess she'd have to photocopy them for you.

Ms King: Do you know what would happen in the event that you were located in an area where there was not a municipally run hostel service?

Ms Murdock: The next geographic area. That's also under 21.16.

Mr Tilson: This is, Mr Chairman, a question which I asked the staff when they gave their original presentation, that there are going to be groups such as those that are before us right now who are going to come to -- they may not come to this committee, but they're going to be there and they're going to say: "What the heck is all this about? What do we do?" My question was, "What type of educational program is being put forward?" and with all due respect to the minister, I don't think he adequately answered that question. Perhaps you've had time to reflect on that.

Ms Murdock: That's a different part to the same question. The Pay Equity Commission has officers available to go and explain to any requesting group that wants even just simply information that isn't necessarily going to even set up a pay equity plan, just to be involved and to know what it's all about. They will go and assist.

Also, in the organized setting, many of the unions, as we've seen here, have their own pay equity ad hoc committees that will go and explain to their own membership, and in some instances will explain to non-union membership, how the pay equity plan, certainly on job-to-job and PV, and now proxy, will work.

But the other thing is that then you still have the legal aid people, where we have the pay equity advocacy workers, who are now included under the legal aid plan, to assist for the unorganized groups as well. I know that your group is only one third organized, but the other two thirds do have those other options. So there are avenues to go and get information.

Ms Don: I think one of the problems we've encountered -- and we have done this. We have sought information from the commission, from Peel, from the coalition etc. One of the big problems we keep running into is that very few people understand what a shelter worker in fact does. We don't fit in comfortably with most other job descriptions, because we're so many-faceted. You're not just a front-line shelter worker; you're also a public educator, you're a counsellor, you're the whole gamut. You have to have some legal expertise, you've got to be able to do fund-raising etc. I think this is one of the big problems we're running into. People say, "Give us a job description," and we run to eight pages.

Ms King: To fully describe it. There are two points as well. Originally, when we anticipated the pay equity legislation, we continued to expect it to be as it had originally been designed in our estimation of things, that we would be comparing to male jobs, not female to female in other establishments. So that's one of our --

Ms Murdock: When it's my turn, I'm going to ask you --

Ms King: Yes, okay. Then the other piece was that when I'm thinking about this comparison to the municipally run hostels, I'm wondering if in fact, when we look at and do our assessments, what if we find that our job evaluations don't show those jobs to be similar in the outcome?

Ms Murdock: It wasn't municipally run hospitals, I don't think. She's got a photocopy.

Ms Fraser: It was hostels.

Ms King: Did you not say "accommodation"?

Ms Murdock: Yes. I thought you said "hospitals."

Ms King: No, "hostels."

The Chair: I'll allow Mr Tilson one further question.

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Mr Tilson: I invited Mrs Murdock to participate and she's done just that. I thank you, although I will say that we have just seen, in this last exchange of comments between the delegation and yourself, that the bureaucracy in this thing is just going to be awful. It's going to be awful to administer and it's going to be awful to understand.

Ms Murdock: That's why it's taking it so long to get here.

Mr Tilson: I'm just telling you that these people have come in all innocence and are having a difficult time understanding it. Yes, I was out of order in making heckles about understanding it --

Ms Murdock: I was out of order too.

Mr Tilson: -- but it's a serious problem. Don't take offence, but how are groups such as yours, let alone me as an elected representative, going to understand all this stuff?

One final question to the delegation: Your last sentence probably sums up one of the major pieces of criticism that can be given to this legislation, particularly with an organization such as yours, which states in conclusion, "To state our case most plainly, we wonder if the cost of achieving pay equity will prove to be greater than the results." That, of all the statements you have made today, is a concern I think both opposition parties -- and maybe the Liberals will speak for themselves but certainly our party -- have with respect to where we're going in this thing.

Can you tell me a little bit about your budgets? We start talking about the 1% cap. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Ms King: We're expecting 0% this year. We got 0.5%; we're expecting 0%.

Mrs Caplan: There's a 1% annual obligation to achieve pay equity. That's what he's referring to. What's the annual average budget?

Ms Don: Many shelters are now facing $100,000 deficits at this point. In fact, I was talking to a shelter director yesterday afternoon who said, "I don't know how we're going to do this without laying off half the staff." In all fairness, I've been doing this now for the past 20 years and I've sat in this room with both the PCs and the Liberals and this time with the NDP, and we don't know where we're going to go from here. It really hasn't made a whole lot of difference who we've been addressing. The problem's been there all along. I think it's a basic problem of not understanding the necessity of these services. I can't state that clearly enough and I really feel that is the big problem.

Mr Tilson: I understand you're trying to do your job and you're not trying to favour any particular political party; I understand that. But I think you've just said it in a nutshell, and I think it would be most appropriate to hand the floor over to Mrs Murdock and allow her to ask some questions.

Mrs Caplan: Can I ask one question, since he has a couple of minutes of time left?

The Chair: No, he doesn't. He's gone over now.

Mrs Caplan: Oh.

Ms Murdock: Yes, it's an interesting thing, because you're right. I heckled back and I do apologize for that. It's just that sometimes we can't let something just remain without any kind of response. It is confusing language, although the concept of proportional value and proxy has been discussed for so long now. I know that women who have been in the discussions and have been talking about it within their own groups have an understanding of how they have to make those things. I know you're concerned particularly with proxy, besides the other issues that have already been discussed -- is the fact of female to female.

I know that what it comes down to, and I think Ms Poole said it, is the integrity of the system used by the proxy comparator group. But the thing is that if you're going to have any kind of system at all in which this can be used to raise women's wages up to some kind of parity, you have to have something there and at least this a beginning. It's certainly not the end, by any stretch. That proxy comparator group has already gone through its whole pay equity plan and based that female job classification wage on a male group. You would agree with that?

Ms Don: Yes.

Ms Murdock: So that even though it's female to female, it nevertheless has at one time been compared to the male classification. And I know, because your particular job requires so many different kinds of skills, that it's going to be difficult, there's no question, to find a comparator group that's going to fulfil all those; there are about a million. Women have been doing this since fire was invented. We're capable of doing everything, and we usually do.

Just to clarify something, you did get the down payment?

Ms King: No, not yet.

Ms Murdock: But you are getting it before the end of this year?

Ms King: Well, we're not sure. Are we?

Ms Don: We'd have to ask.

Ms Murdock: Okay. You did say you wanted to ask some questions so I should leave some time for you, but yes, the minister did say on Monday that the down payments would be paid by the spring, which means it has to be, obviously, allocated before the end of the fiscal year or otherwise it won't be in the next budget. He did state that on Monday, so just to ease your minds a little bit, you'll get -- I don't know how much that's going to be.

Ms King: Or how it's coming.

Ms Murdock: I wanted to ask about page 5 of your presentation, the paragraph before number 3: "It seems to us that the essential nature of pay equity...is minimized or restricted by these limitations." I'd like you to explain that more to me.

Ms Fraser: I'll try. Our organization has always been concerned with proxy as a method for achieving pay equity, when you compare yourself to another women's group that has achieved pay equity and apply that group's adjustment. It seems like sort of a pat formula to us. We understand that pay equity is only meant to address gender discrimination in wages, but there are other issues that come into rates of pay that other groups enjoy that are not strictly gender issues but where it could be argued that they are; for example, access to unionization.

When we're told even from the outset that there is a group that we will be able to use in our proxy comparisons, it seems to us that this is just a formula that's being used and that in fact pay equity is just kind of pat formula and it's going to be achieved in that way. I think many of us felt that job-to-job comparisons between even predominantly female job sectors with male job sectors that shared much in common with them would have been a more equitable way to go than the simple formula of comparing yourself to another women's group that has achieved pay equity.

Ms Murdock: Job-to-job has already -- obviously, in 1987 with the Pay Equity Act --

Ms Fraser: But only if there are male comparators in your workforce.

Ms Murdock: Yes, right.

Ms Fraser: We don't have that option.

Ms Murdock: No.

Ms Fraser: But to some extent, why would it be different if we had that option, if we have to go outside of our immediate workforce to look for a comparator or if we just conveniently happen to have one within our workforce?

Ms Murdock: Are you suggesting, then, that rather to a female comparator, it should be to any comparator?

Ms Fraser: There are job classes that are considered male job classes that shelter workers might be able to compare themselves to. I'm thinking of, for example, the police. There are many similarities between the kind of work the police do and the kind of work that shelter workers do, given certain things like working conditions, degree of safety, the front-line, crisis kind of facilitation that goes on all the time, shift work. There are many, many areas where one could compare, where someone who is from another group that is just applied to you -- I won't say arbitrarily, but that is applied to you -- may not be an accurate fit. So in that way, pay equity by the proxy method feels a bit kind of tokenistic to us.

Ms Murdock: Hmm. Okay.

Ms Fraser: That's been a complaint we've had for a long time.

Ms Murdock: Correct me if I'm wrong; I may be putting words in your mouth. I hear you saying to me that you don't like the classification under the schedule that you have.

Ms Fraser: No, I'm not just saying that.

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Ms Murdock: You prefer to be compared to a police officer.

Ms Fraser: I'm not saying that, necessarily. We just found that out today. We didn't like the whole proxy method that was in before.

Ms Murdock: This is not new, though; it has been discussed, the concept of comparison to a municipal --

Ms Fraser: That's true.

Ms Murdock: You may have just found out that it was -- the schedule was submitted -- but this has been discussed with you before.

Ms Fraser: Yes, that's accurate. But we also have concerns just about that whole method. That's something we're seeing here today and we've said all along that the method just seems to be kind of haphazard, if you will, or easy, convenient rather than --

Ms Murdock: Right. I hear what you're saying. The problem with all legislation is that it has to apply to the whole thing. Basically, what you're asking is for specific kinds of professions, that they have to be considered differently, and it's very difficult to be specific like that within any piece of legislation. But I have heard what you said.

Ms Don: It's not the first time we've said it either.

Ms Murdock: No. Well, I haven't heard it.

There was one other area in your presentation that I wanted to -- the injection and it has been mentioned, in terms of the injection of funds that you're requesting for the purposes of finding out which proxy comparator group you might use or otherwise. Under the Pay Equity Act itself no money was allocated to any groups to do that, none under proportional value for some of those groups that have already done so and then now, and none for proxy. I'm wondering, I know you've explained that you don't have the persons, but given that under section 21.16 you can group yourselves together to try to save costs and find your proxy comparator by joining together similar groups, whether or not that would ease some of your concerns.

Ms Don: We still need to have the bodies to do it. I think that's what it comes down to. Right now I'm the only paid staff in the organization. These two women are here having taken off time from their own work that they have to make up when they get back. It's a simple matter of bodies. How much volunteer work can you do in 24 hours a day?

Ms Murdock: It's just like a volunteer board of trade here.

Ms Don: There's a limit to the amount they can do. I think that's the big problem right now and it's not only -- we're preparing briefs for the budget hearings etc and we're constantly doing this kind of stuff. The pay equity committee's not the only one; we've got about 12 other committees and volunteers that are needed all the time.

I think the reason we feel this is a particularly important issue is because it's going to affect us for a very long time. Presumably, once pay equity is achieved it's going to make a big difference to all of us eventually, for a long time to come. It's because this is the big opportunity we have.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Murdock. Ms Don, Ms King and Ms Fraser. On behalf of this committee, I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this afternoon and giving us your presentation.

UNITED FOOD AND COMMERCIAL WORKERS INTERNATIONAL UNION

The Chair: I'd like to call forward our next presenters from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Good afternoon. Just a reminder: You'll be allowed up to an hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you'd keep your remarks slightly shorter than that 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.

Mr Brian Neath: My name is Brian Neath. I'm assistant to the Canadian director representing the Ontario workers. With me are Ralph Ortleib, an international representative, and John Tremble, a researcher for our national office.

We in the United Food and Commercial Workers Union would like to thank you for this opportunity to appear before this standing committee dealing with Bill 102 and Bill 169. Seeing that Bill 102 will have the major impact on our members in Ontario, we are going to confine our remarks solely to that bill and not deal with Bill 169 at all.

We would like to commend the Minister of Labour and his government for bringing forward these amendments to the Pay Equity Act, which will extend the benefits of pay equity to more than 400,000 women who are presently excluded. In particular, we support the government's commitment to ensuring that pay equity applies in predominantly female workplaces where no male comparator job exists. This is a tremendous advancement towards the goal of eliminating wage discrimination. We are also pleased by the proposed workplace postings which will ensure that people are aware of their rights under this legislation.

We, United Food and Commercial Workers Canada, are Canada's largest private sector union, representing over 180,000 workers across Canada. Over 50% of our members are women. Our membership is employed in more than 20 sectors of the economy, including retail, service, meat packing, food processing, brewery-beverage production and distribution, fishing, general merchandising, health care, shoe and leather and banking industries. UFCW Canada represents more than 70,000 men and women in Ontario. Also, as a sideline, I always like to indicate that we also have members who work in funeral homes and in hospitals.

The labour movement in Canada strongly supports pay equity. UFCW of course is no exception. UFCW Canada has conducted extensive research and consultation on pay equity. When Ontario's Pay Equity Act became law in 1989, UFCW Canada set up a pay equity task force to develop a response to the new legislation and to ensure that similar standards of evaluation were adopted by all locals and sectors of our organization.

The result was the development of the Neutralizer, a computerized pay equity system with a built-in gender-neutral job evaluation system. This system was designed by job evaluation experts from New Literacies Inc working with the UFCW task force. Using an unbiased and systematic process, the Neutralizer generates a report on pay inequities and shows exactly how the employer can make pay adjustments in line with existing Ontario legislation.

The Neutralizer has proven to be a highly effective tool in implementing pay equity, and to date, UFCW Canada has sold the Neutralizer to approximately 100 employers and is in the process of implementing the program in numerous other workplaces. Also, we believe that because of this particular program we've been able to avoid any long and hard battles at the tribunal.

In Bill 102, the government has decided not to include women working in private sector organizations employing fewer than 10 employees. UFCW Canada believes this exclusion should be reversed. Numerous studies document the role of women in the future labour force. In its April 1990 report, Ontario's Labour Market: Long-Term Trends and Issues in the 1990s, the Ontario government stated that the participation rate of women is projected to increase throughout the 1990s and that women will account for nearly two thirds of the total labour supply growth during this decade. By the year 2000, women will represent 48% of the workforce.

In addition, the Economic Council of Canada's 1990 report, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, which examined employment in the service economy, found that part-time employment has risen dramatically in the 1980s and accounted for at least 30% of net job growth in Ontario. Further, involuntary part-time employment accounted for 24% of all part-time employment. The report continued:

"Most part-time workers are employed in the traditional service subsector, and the overwhelming majority are either young or female (or both). By comparison with their full-time counterparts, part-time workers are much more likely to be short-term employees, to be non-unionized and to be employed in very small firms. They are less likely to be covered by a range of employee benefits, and in general they earn less on an hourly basis than full-time employees performing similar kinds of work."

There is a clear need to protect workers, particularly women, working in these conditions. Women should not be denied coverage under the legislation merely because they work for a small firm in the private sector. The act should be amended to allow women working in organizations employing fewer than 10 employees the right to make complaints before the commission.

We have decided, instead of having one person ramble on, that we're going to take turns. I pass it to John to deal with the next section.

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Mr John Tremble: I want to discuss some of the changes we're proposing for the legislation. Ralph Ortleib is going to talk about the proportional value comparison method, as well as the proxy method of comparison.

With regard to the preamble, we feel that women should be given the opportunity to launch a complaint of discrimination under the Pay Equity Act, and we're suggesting that this be recognized in the preamble to the Pay Equity Act. We've indicated the wording on page 4 of our presentation.

We also believe that subsection 8(5) of the act, which deals with the limitation regarding maintaining pay equity, should be eliminated, simply because this would be a step backward. We would rather see the bulk of the legislation provided for in the actual legislation itself as opposed to being done through regulation, which is relatively easily amended by the government of the day.

Regarding subsection 13(7) of the act, dealing with pay equity plans exception, we recommend that this section should not be amended as proposed by the government. While we understand that the government is in a dire financial situation, we feel it has to at least set an example and make some effort to implement pay equity as it's outlined in the legislation.

With regard to section 14, dealing with changed circumstances, we recommend that a new subsection 14.2(1b) should be added, using the same wording as in subsection 14.1(7). Unionized establishments should have the same sort of legislation as non-organized workplaces so there won't be any discrepancy between unionized and non-unionized workers.

Mr Ralph Ortleib: In relation to the proportional value method, we agree in principle. We think the inheritance of this government was a plan that was flawed, because in many instances a comparator was not available. Under the previous legislation, tens of thousands of women were denied increases they truly should have had, and we want to commend the government for bringing in the amendments. The only difficulty we have with it is really minor. When you bring in that legislation, we don't think the time lines of the adjustments under the act should be any different from what the government had originally proposed. We don't think the government should back down on that.

In the final analysis, we have some difficulty trying to understand why we would need a representative group of male jobs. We say that any male job class should be a comparator. We think the compensation adjustments in that area should start on January 1, 1992.

I want to make a couple of comments, because I've been involved with pay equity from the start. My concern and my union's concern, quite frankly, is not so much for the organized workers. Let me be very candid. We've had excellent cooperation from the Pay Equity Commission; we think it has done a commendable job under flawed legislation. We also think the education that has been proposed and has been done by the Pay Equity Commission has been excellent, under the circumstances. We have been able to use the commission for advice, for education, for whatever we needed to make the present act work. They've been very good in that area, and we commend them for that.

We wonder, though, under the new legislation, whether those people in non-organized plants -- I really have no way of knowing how, without enforcement legislation, non-organized women are going to benefit from any of this. I'm prepared to say -- couldn't prove it; it can't be disproved -- that under the present legislation and under the new legislation, when it's implemented, of the women in those non-organized plants and shops, and once you take away the workplaces with fewer than 10 employees and say they're not covered, I would say we'd be lucky if 1% of the women get any benefits out of pay equity, even as amended.

We think those people desperately need it and we think the legislation should put the Pay Equity Commission in a position where it advocates for those sorts of people. Trade unions normally don't need the advocates because we're advocates, but for those people who are non-organized, I dare anyone to prove it wrong that those non-organized women gain anything from pay equity. Even though we implement the proportional value method, I fail to understand how, without express moneys, express assistance, express help from the Pay Equity Commission to act as an advocate, to protect those women, to see that they get what they're entitled to under the legislation, they can benefit. I really don't know of any who will. And knowing human relations, I don't know of any of those women, on the lower end of the scale probably, who would be in a position to demand their rights under the legislation, unless there is an advocacy they can demand it from to act on their behalf.

Then we get to the next stage, the stage of when we get to the commission. This union's been fortunate: We've never had to deal with a tribunal, the legalistic, the time, the money and the frustrations that come out of that, vis-à-vis the nurses. We just wonder, even with the legislation -- because there's no change in the administration language of the thing -- how anyone's going to really benefit, except perhaps the proxy, if we ever get to the end of the line on the proxy end of it and make a determination of who the comparator's going to be.

We've recommended some changes to the proxy end of it. We think the government should amend the sections, especially on adjustment, because as we understand it, the proxy is going in there to attempt to look after the lowest-paid of the females in the province of Ontario. Fully understanding the amounts of money involved and the pressures on the government, we don't know how we can justify saying to them as a group that we're going to start these payments in 1995 instead of 1992. We think the first adjustments should start in January.

The proxy method of evaluation or comparison is intricate, to say the least. As we understand it, and again in conjunction with proportional value, before you can get either, you must do the male-female comparator. Our union doesn't have any difficulty with that. If we're going into proportional value, then let's go into proportional value. There are obviously no female comparators where the proxy comes into effect, so instead of doing this, let's go and find the comparator.

And the whole question of key female jobs: If we're going to compare key female jobs, as we understand it, "the female job class in a seeking employer's establishment having the greatest number of employees in the establishment," or, where there is a bargaining agent, the female job class inside the bargaining agent, the female job class inside the bargaining unit, we recommend that the legislation be changed to clarify the key female jobs.

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Again, when we get outside, when we go looking for that comparator, the section deals -- if we can't find a similar job class, and this present language is highly subjective, unnecessarily complicated and would require extensive work by proxy organizations, likely resulting in long delays.

UFCW Canada believes this section should be amended to allow the seeking organization to go to another proxy employer in the same geographic area, and if no comparators can be found in the same geographic area, then the seeking organization can go to the next geographic area. For that purpose, we've put here some suggested language for amendment changes to do that.

The whole question of obtaining information from potential proxy employers: I would think it's going to be extremely difficult if you're dealing with small employers who don't have the organizational charts and the sorts of sophisticated information that's necessary to do this; again, long delays. We just can't understand why that's in the legislation. We think it should be that a request for an organizational chart should be where one exists. If one doesn't exist, how do you get one? Do you have that seeking organization go out and go to the expense of putting together a chart? We just think that's bureaucratic and very complex and would likely delay the process.

We think that where the proposed legislation would require proxy employers to group jobs in a similar female job class, this would create a subjective process and we don't think that's necessary.

The question of confidentiality: As I understand the legislation and as I understand where the money's coming from, it's public information. We can't understand, in dealing with employers, the whole question of confidential information when they're putting out potential proxy employers. We just think that is not necessary and should be deleted.

Again -- we want to get back -- we think the compensation adjustments should take place in 1993 and that the full plans would be implemented by January 1, 1998.

We further think -- and this is very important -- that where the act says that, "Hearing tribunal settlements are binding on parties," this section should also state that all settlements should comply with the act, as follows: "No employer, employee or group of employees or the bargaining agent can waive any rights or disregard any obligation under this act."

We are inundated with calls from small employers who are unorganized and people who are unorganized. All at once a document goes up on a wall. A settlement is arrived at. There have been no discussions, a deal has been cut, and in many cases an officer comes in and gives an order -- and we've had a few of these -- and then you have to negotiate around the order and the order does not comply with the officer's order.

Let me give you an example: An officer comes in and you're having a difficulty. Our neutralizer theoretically can say that the employees would get $100 a week. The officer comes and says, "No, it's not $100; we're ordering $90." She orders the $90 and then you end up four or five months down the road agreeing to $15, or trying to agree to $15.

We think that where the gender-neutral plans have determined what the settlement should be and the order's given by the officer, that order can't be changed without compliance by the tribunal.

Parties to the proceedings: We have a real concern about the litigation end of it. We understand that more and more pay equity plans are going to the tribunal and going to litigation. There is an attempt by people to become parties to the hearing. We think that the unions and the employers stand alone before the tribunals, before the hearings. Besides all the lawyers we've got in there, we don't need the consultants. We think the law should be very clear and the consultants should be excluded, and the law should be changed in that fact. We want to commend the commission up to this time, under tremendous pressure, to keep that out.

Our last and most questioning thing is where the proposed act talks about posting of plans. In many instances, our collective agreements supersede the terms of the Pay Equity Act. If we have collective agreements that don't allow posting except with the express provision of the employers, then it's sometimes extremely difficult for us to do what we want and to put those plans up where employees can see them. We think the employer should be required to post those plans in all establishments where they come into force.

We want to tell you that we don't think a pay equity officer's decision should be revoked without a hearing of the tribunal.

There are some other minor things that we want to leave for your reading and my colleague will finish it up.

Mr Neath: In conclusion, we are pleased to be part of this process and we want to congratulate the Minister of Labour in tabling the amendments to the act, which will extend pay equity benefits to thousands of women who are presently excluded. We also strongly support the government's commitment to ensuring that pay equity applies to predominantly female workplaces where no male comparator job exists. These represent important changes which will eliminate future wage discrimination.

However, we have some reservations about Bill 102, which we feel takes away from the Ontario government's commitment to the women in Ontario to end wage discrimination. In particular, the implementation of pay equity should not be set back as proposed in various parts of Bill 102. Further consideration must also be given to amendments which would allow women working in organizations employing fewer than 10 people to have the right to make complaints before the commission. This is a crucial point, especially for our union, given the current job creation in small private sector organizations, and we are opposed to various amendments to Bill 102 which leave issues to be dealt with by regulations.

We wish to commend the Ontario government, particularly the Pay Equity Commission, for the excellent work it has done in its educational programs to make people aware of the need for pay equity. We have an excellent relationship with this body and find the commission's publications and educational conferences are extremely beneficial to the community. We continue to be prepared to work with the government of Ontario and other groups to develop and implement effective pay equity legislation that will benefit the people of Ontario.

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The Chair: Thank you. Each caucus will have about 10 minutes for questions and comments.

Mr Arnott: In your summary you outlined in very brief terms your specific recommendations. You said, "Further consideration must also be given to amendments which would allow women working in organizations employing fewer than 10 people the right to make complaints before the commission."

I assume you'd made that suggestion known to the government in prior consultations at some point. Why do you suppose the government did not respond to that particular request of some people?

Mr Neath: I guess that's a difficult question for us to know, exactly why they didn't respond that way. I assume that question would be raised to them and they would give you the answer to that question.

Mr Arnott: You've no idea?

Mr Neath: No.

Mr Arnott: Nothing to say?

Mr Neath: No.

Mr Arnott: I suppose the goal of initiatives such as pay equity, employment equity, we're trying to take our society -- I suppose the government's trying to lead our society into an era where there is no discrimination based on gender of any sort. That's correct?

Mr Neath: Yes.

Mr Arnott: Do you ever wonder if the values and the attitudes in society are going in that direction irrespective of what government does?

Mr Neath: My response would be absolutely not. Even on something like this or any legislation on anything -- take health and safety as another prime example -- leave it to the private sector and it will not do it.

Mr Arnott: I don't mean the private sector, I mean people in general.

Mr Neath: But who are the people in general? If the public sector basically is the government, and the private sector is basically the business community, then who are you referring to?

Mr Arnott: I mean all of us in this room and everyone in the province. Are we not on our own, of our own volition, understanding that gender discrimination helps nobody?

Mr Ortleib: We as a union feel, and I personally feel, that left to their own -- the time has come for equality in this province, no question about that, and there's no question that there are groups and people out there who have various reasons for not wanting equality. I think, as difficult as it is in contemporary times now, with the economic situation like it is, that a government which takes the lead is extremely valiant and has to have a lot of courage to lead in that area.

I think that the present government, as difficult as it's going to be, has to start going down that road, not only to pay equity but also to employment equity -- to equity period. The days of the redneck, the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan and all of them are long gone. They're still there and they make a lot of noise, but I think people in the province of Ontario generally have concerns, especially because of the economic situation. But I think that down deep they understand the question of equality, not only pay equity but the other equities as well.

Human rights commissions across the country are now starting to impose some rather radical equality questions that lead to controversy. The old question is that when you're heading into changes, it's agitation or stagnation.

I think that this government, as difficult as it is, is going in the right direction, and I think that other political parties that yell in the background are doing a disservice to the eventual equality of the people of Ontario, because Ontario is a big province and whatever happens here is going to spread across the country eventually. It's not going to happen tomorrow. Unfortunately, employment equity is not going to happen tomorrow. I wish that it would. I really, truly do.

True pay equity should happen tomorrow. It's not going to happen; we're realists, we understand that. But that the desire is there and that people are putting themselves into groups to support issues like this, I think is commendable and I support the government's actions in those regards, as difficult as it's going to be.

Mr Arnott: I don't disagree with you that true pay equity and true employment equity are going to come about. I guess what I'm saying is, in my limited experience on this earth, I've often found that people are ahead of their governments in many ways in terms of their attitudes. I guess what I'm saying is that in my limited experience on this earth, I've often found that people are ahead of their government in many ways in terms of their attitudes. I think attitudes are changing with respect to gender in our society, totally irrespective and independent of what the government is doing.

Mr Neath: If I can respond to that, I think if you take a look at the stats you would be proven wrong. I think that if you take a look at the employers who don't have to introduce any type of pay equity and/or employment equity, those issues aren't there.

Take a look at the stats just released not long ago from I think Stats Canada that said that women are only at 70% of men's rate of pay. This is 1993 and we aren't going anywhere. We're not going to go that far or get to where we want to go unless there's some form of legislation that will drive us there.

Mr Arnott: Yes, it had increased from 1990, though, the average women's salary.

Mr Neath: Likely because of the pay equity inside the public sector as opposed as much to the private sector, although some of that may be related to the fact that there's pay equity legislation in Ontario and other provinces as well.

Mr Arnott: I have no figures to quantify what I'm about to say, but I find in my own personal experience and knowledge of people that there are increasing numbers of young women going into traditionally male-dominated fields like engineering and some of the higher-paying ones, engineering, medicine, the law. I would suspect that those people would have an impact on your figures as well over time and probably have already.

Mr Neath: Likely because they have been told through some form of legislation that they have to be paid equal to the men's job. If you're talking about an engineer, I'm assuming that if you're talking about equal work as opposed to equal pay for equal work, then that's been around for some time.

Mr Arnott: Yes, but that would have an impact on the numbers.

Mr Neath: I don't think so, but it's tough to say when we don't have the numbers in front of us.

Mr Arnott: Thank you.

The Chair: Mr Tilson, do you have any questions?

Mr Tilson: No.

The Chair: Mr Winninger.

Mr Winninger: I'd like to thank you for your very clear presentation. You expressed a concern earlier that unorganized workers would have great difficulty in enforcing pay equity, and the Pay Equity Commission itself, which made a presentation this morning, touched on the same point. Of course, they acknowledged the existence of the Pay Equity Advocacy and Legal Services clinic, which I'm sure you're familiar with, but they were concerned that it wouldn't be able to meet the needs of all the unorganized women out there and seems to be focused more in the Toronto area.

The Pay Equity Commission suggested that we legislate standing for the commission before the appeals tribunal because it asked for standing and was turned down.

Mr Ortleib: We don't have any difficulty with that.

Mr Winninger: No. What about standing for unions such as your own? I don't know if it's possible, but let's say an individual worker is somewhat cowed by the whole idea of going to the appeals tribunal and is reluctant to do that. Would you like to see your union have standing before the tribunal even if the individual person who should be the applicant isn't there?

Mr Ortleib: No. We say that if we're advocating consultants aren't there, then we shouldn't be there. If we want someone, we'll hire lawyers to do that sort of thing. But to have consultants -- I don't know whether I'm getting into ground I shouldn't be covering but the thing that sickens me as a pay equity practitioner and an employment equity advocate is the -- the plans that come out, those bloodsucker plans that come out, that are sold, they don't only suck from the workers and the people who should benefit; they suck from the employer too tremendous amounts of money to sell them a plan that is not gender-neutral, that's deliberately designed to circumvent the legislation, both pay equity and employment equity. The employment equity plans are out there now. We can sell you a plan for $100,000 that guarantees you nothing changes.

Mr Winninger: How do you get around that abuse of the system?

Mr Ortleib: They want status at the board to defend what they're doing. The thing that just recently, over the last year or so, has started to concern me is here we have a tribunal that says to a group of workers or to an employer, "Your plan is not gender-neutral." Do you understand that? I won't mention the names of the plan. You know them as well as I do. The next day that plan is implemented in another institution, because the law just covers that application. Do you understand what I'm saying? We think that's criminal, we think it's horrible and we think it's an injustice to the worker.

Somewhere governments should bring in legislation that defines that if a plan is proven to be non-gender-neutral, unless that non-gender neutrality is taken out of the plan, it can't be used to do things to other workers, even our own. If our plan is proven to be non-gender-neutral and doesn't comply, tell us and we'll amend the plan. But that doesn't happen.

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We just think that the Pay Equity Commission should have a stronger voice in determining gender neutrality. The commission has its own plan, a 12-point plan, an excellent plan. If we get in an argument with an employer, and we don't, they send in one of their officers and they start -- this is again aggravating to me -- from their excellent 12-point plan and go downwards. If that gives the true intent of justice to female workers, then I'm really in a different world.

I understand fully that this is an inherited plan from a previous government, and I understand that changes have to come slowly but, Jeez, when people are out there doing what they're doing with some of their plans, at that point in time governments or tribunals or whatever should say: "That's enough. This legislation is to do a certain thing, and it's not doing it the way you're proposing it."

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Winninger. Ms Murdock?

Ms Murdock: No, I don't have any questions, thanks.

The Chair: Ms Poole.

Ms Poole: Thank you for your presentation today. You've raised a number of issues which have been quite helpful to us. I'd like to raise a couple of points that were covered in your brief. The first is on page 4, where you've talked about the original subsection 13(7) of the Pay Equity Act and the fact that Bill 102 is amending this to say that the public sector achievements in pay equity don't have to be realized for an additional three years now, till 1998. Obviously, from your comments, you would like the original timetable as set out in the 1987 legislation for the public sector to be adhered to.

There are two points I'd like you to address. First, do you think that delaying pay equity for three years for the public sector will in effect reward employers who didn't do what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it? Second, could you talk about the impact it would have on women's pensions if that pay equity is delayed and in fact their pay hasn't changed in that period.

Mr Ortleib: To answer your first question, yes, it is justice delayed. We believe strongly that the implementation of the payments for pay equity shouldn't be delayed. We understand that any government, including yours if it were there, would be doing probably the same thing because of the economic conditions, and we'd be saying the same thing to you. We think that taking the money out of there -- it may come back in taxes or some other form; I'm not an economist, so I don't know that. But those people were promised, first by the previous government, that certain things were going to happen. It didn't happen for them.

Ms Poole: For example?

Mr Ortleib: What we're talking about here is the delaying of proportionate value.

Ms Poole: But the Liberal government did make an announcement in March 1990.

Mr Ortleib: I didn't see the legislation.

Ms Poole: Because there happened to be an election called in July, less than four months later.

Mr Ortleib: Well, I've got heartbreak for broken promises.

Ms Poole: You certainly would with this government, I must say.

Mr Ortleib: I mean direct broken promises. Here, the implementation's going. All we're saying is, accelerate it. Don't go backwards; accelerate it. They're cleaning up some flawed legislation. They're bringing in that legislation and they're saying, to bring that legislation in, because of the economic times, they don't have the money for it. We say, "Find the money."

I would want to toss a quarter to find out who was blamed for the flawed legislation. We don't like the delay. We don't think that it's beneficial to those people the legislation is supposed to protect. It's going to cost a billion dollars. That's a hell of a lot of money. If you say it real slow, it's a lot of money; if you say it fast, it's a lot of money.

We just think when you take that kind of money out of the pockets of the poor, the people who didn't get it in the first place, who were promised by another government they were going to get it and didn't get it, that they should not have to wait another three years for the implementation of that money.

Ms Poole: I'm just rather surprised at the tolerance of the broken promises by this government, who when they were in opposition said they would include under-10 employees, for instance, in pay equity, who said they would speed up the implementation of pay equity, not in fact take away from it.

This government, which as an opposition party said, for instance, that it was very critical of the Liberal government, which said that it was looking at, was considering whether the crown employees, that whole section which is included in Bill 169, and also section 2 of this legislation -- I don't have any problem with you saying that the previous legislation wasn't perfect. It was compiled by humans, and I don't think we've ever had a piece of perfect legislation.

But I can tell you the statistics quoted by the Pay Equity Commission this morning showed that the legislation is actually working extremely well, and with the announcement in March 1990 that the government was going to go to proportional, that would have extended it that much further. But we've heard a lot of comments from groups that have come in that have been very supportive of the 1987 legislation and been very critical of the three ways in which this government has in fact taken women a step back in that same legislation.

Mr Ortleib: I can understand those sorts of criticisms; I really can. But on the other hand, we as the trade union movement look at $350 million to $370 million already thrown into the public pot by this government in a very short period of time. Then whatever happens because of outside influences, the economy goes down, we have a government that has the responsibility of putting this money in here, but where does it find a billion dollars? I can hear the opposition screaming out of every window in the Legislature if the legislation came in and that deficit jumped another billion dollars. I wouldn't want to be sitting on anybody's part in the government.

Ms Poole: But realistically, hasn't this government given with one hand by saying that they're going to extend proxy to the larger public sector -- and they've said but they won't guarantee that they're going to help pay for this. Haven't they taken away on the other hand by then saying to the public sector: "We're not going to give you the pay equity we promised by January 1, 1995. We're going to delay for three years"? I don't see how women are that much further ahead. I'm sorry, but I think they've given with one hand and taken with the other.

Mr Ortleib: We know it's difficult. We don't agree with the money not being implemented, let me tell you that. But we understand, the practitioners in pay equity, how difficult the previous legislation was to deal with, and the previous legislation really caused the problems of the inequity that any government would have been faced with today. Any government that was in there, not just the government in power, would have had the hue and scream and would have had to understand the flaws of the legislation, try to improve that legislation and get caught on top of the fence.

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Ms Poole: I guess we'll agree to disagree on what another government might have done. I certainly would have been out there screaming front and centre if my government had done what this government is doing, and I would hope there'd be many of my other colleagues that would as well.

One other point I did want to bring up: You raised a very valid point about the proxy method of comparison, and one of the things you are unhappy with is that basically under the proxy plan adopted by the government it's --

Mr Ortleib: Proxy?

Ms Poole: Proxy.

Mr Ortleib: I lost part of my hearing fighting, so I have difficulty hearing.

Ms Poole: Sorry about that. I didn't mean to be that detrimental to you.

Under proxy, the government's plan that it's implementing would have female jobs compared to other female jobs, as opposed to female jobs compared to male jobs.

We had a presentation this morning, which I thought was quite good, from the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses, which deals with the assaulted women's shelters in the province. They too were very concerned about comparing female jobs to female jobs and this is what they had to say. I wonder if you see this as a real problem.

"We see this limitation as a shocking departure from what we consider to be the essential nature of the original Pay Equity Act. The value of female-to-female job class comparisons, as described here, will be completely dependent on the integrity of the proxy organization's pay equity process."

In other words, if they're comparing to another organization that had pay equity so that the female wages have been upgraded, what the organization is now having to do is compare it to a process where we're not sure the integrity of the process has been observed. For instance, if it was a bad plan or it wasn't implemented properly with the comparator organization they're comparing it to, then it might in fact -- I don't know if I'm explaining this at all in an articulate way, but what it would do is entrench gender-based inequities instead of resolve them. That was their point and I wonder if you think this is what will happen.

Mr Ortleib: I think they probably raise a valid point. One of my concerns, when we originally started to analyse this, was the whole question of comparing apples and apples. On the premise that the red apple had already been job-evaluated by a gender-neutral method and that --

Ms Poole: So to speak, and now the green apples --

Mr Ortleib: To a male or however, but they'd gone through the male comparison, and they're selecting a female comparator. Because the act says you take the lowest male in the classification -- I've had no experience with it, but I think, when you do two apples, it could cause some inequities. I would think that. I don't know that, because we've had no experience with that at all, and we haven't, quite frankly, put our mind to the question you raised. If they hadn't had a good plan, or they hadn't gotten justice under the plan we picked as a proxy, then obviously the seeker is going to cause an injustice to the people he's looking for. If the legislation goes through like this when we're doing it, we'll be damn sure that wherever we go for a proxy, the proxy was properly done if the female-to-female comparator remains. You raise a valid point.

Ms Poole: That's good, thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Poole. Mr Malkowski, one brief question.

Mr Malkowski: Thank you. I would just like to make a comment. It's not really a question, but I would like to thank you for your presentation. It was pretty comprehensive and very well received, and your concerns are very valid, the ones you've expressed to us.

I do have some concerns about the comments made by the member for Eglinton, Ms Poole. Maybe she's finally admitting that the Liberal government made some errors when it was in office, that no one's perfect and maybe it's time to recognize that, and that we're all people and that kind of behaviour -- there's always room for improvement.

Mr Tilson: On a point of order, Mr Chairman.

The Chair: Mr Tilson, on a point of order.

Mr Malkowski: -- and legislation can always be improved upon. We have a commitment to improve --

The Chair: Mr Tilson has the floor.

Mr Tilson: Mr Chairman, are we going in another round?

The Chair: No, we're not.

Mr Tilson: I don't understand why Mr Malkowski was even recognized, quite frankly.

The Chair: A valid point, Mr Tilson. What I did this morning was I recognized Mrs Caplan, because there was still time left for her caucus for questions. What I'm going to do is allow some latitude. If you want to ask a legitimate question of the presenters, I'm willing to do that.

Mr Tilson: I'm not prepared to listen to a debate between Ms Poole and Mr Malkowski and that's where we're going to go.

The Chair: But if we're going to get into partisan politics when we go on a rotation, then I'll stop the rotation. You'll be allowed one attempt.

Mr Malkowski: I'm not finished. I would like to --

The Chair: No, Mr Tilson has a valid point of order. Mr Malkowski is making a comment about what another member has said and he's not questioning the panel, so I won't allow Mr Malkowski to speak.

Mr Neath, Mr Tremble and Mr Ortleib, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time to come in this afternoon and giving us your presentation.

Mr Neath: Thank you very much.

NURSES COALITION FOR PAY EQUITY

The Chair: I'd like to call forward our next presenters, from the Nurses Coalition for Pay Equity. While they're coming forward, I would just like to remind the members of the committee that there is another group scheduled on the back page of the schedule, in case they didn't notice.

Good afternoon. Just a reminder that you'll be allowed up to an hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you would keep your remarks to less than an hour to allow time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, would you please identify yourself for the record and then proceed.

Ms Rita Schreiber: I'm Rita Schreiber. I'm one of the directors of the Nurses Coalition for Pay Equity. We call ourselves N-CoPE.

Ms Anna Giallonardo: I'm Anna Giallonardo and I'm a member of N-CoPE.

Ms Schreiber: N-CoPE is a grassroots voluntary organization of registered nurses. We have members across the province in unionized and non-unionized jobs. Our members practise nursing at all levels and in all areas of nursing specialization, from bedside to senior administration.

N-CoPE's purpose is to assist registered nurses who are seeking pay equity. Our activities include a speaker's bureau, education and assistance for nurses, public education about the role of the nurse, and lobbying activities.

An example of the sort of thing we do with our members is that we had a 62-year-old woman who was a nurse-researcher who was employed by a large university. The university published its pay equity plan and it gave her a 47% wage increase. We read about that in the newspapers. Unfortunately, the next day she was told that she would not see this salary increase. Either her hours would be cut back to make the old wage or she could quit her job or she could be transferred to the hospital with which the university was affiliated. That hospital had not published a plan yet. We assisted her to negotiate a settlement which satisfied her and which we are not allowed to disclose because she hasn't disclosed it.

We welcome the opportunity to provide feedback on Bill 102. We believe it is a step forward. We have to admit, though, we're caught by surprise by Bill 102 because we were expecting these hearings to be about Bill 168. The consultation process that we participated in in Bill 168, we felt, was productive and full. We feel that Bill 102 lacks certain guarantees of rights that Bill 168 enshrined. Thus, we feel this hearing provides an opportunity to put the consultation process back on track.

Nursing is typical of women's work: It's invisible; we are undervalued and underrecognized; we work long hours in dangerous circumstances; and our work is only really noticed when it's not done or is done badly.

I'd like to differentiate nursing from other fields of health care. One of my colleagues summarized it best when she said, "I'm a nurse because when a patient died, the physician said, `He died and there was nothing I could do,' but the nurse said, `He did not suffer because I did everything I could.'"

Registered nurses are there 24 hours a day caring for people. We care for you when you are in the first and last stages of life, when you are sick and when you are vulnerable. Yet, as we heard on Monday, Ontario's 100,000 nurses receive 1.25% of the health care budget. In contrast to this, Ontario's 10,000 physicians receive 9% of the health care budget.

Research shows that public health does not improve with increased numbers of physicians. It does show, however, that having increased numbers of nurses does make that improvement. This is largely a function of the different roles and different skills and not within the mandate of this discussion.

A recent study by Statistics Canada that was released last fall showed that women working full time in health care received only 58 cents on the male dollar. In reviewing for this presentation, I discovered that in Leviticus chapter 21 in the Old Testament there's a story about buying and selling male and female slaves. The female slave's work is worth 30 shekels, the male slave's work is worth 50 shekels. So not a whole lot has changed; we've still got that 60-cent dollar.

We recognize the financial difficulties this government faces. We realize that the transfer payments have been diminishing and that the business community is certainly doing what it can to discredit the government. However, it is our opinion that postponing pay equity payouts is a very false economy. Money put in women's hands is money put back into the economy through spending and through taxes. Furthermore, we have to be cautious to ensure that in times of financial crisis, we do not let our human rights erode.

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Ms Giallonardo: I just want to point out some particular concerns from our members and say that we work closely with the Equal Pay Coalition and share many of its same concerns. We have given you a fairly detailed submission, and I'm not going to repeat a lot of what's in there.

The first strong message we want to give you from our members is about Bill 169. We want Bill 169 and section 2 of Bill 102 withdrawn. Bill 169 and section 2 of Bill 102 deal with defining the establishment, that is, who is an employee of the crown. We feel that this is an attempt to limit the rights of workers by defining "employer" differently than the pay equity tribunal has already done. For nurses, the Haldimand-Norfolk decision was a very important one. We wouldn't want to see that undermined.

Another issue for us is women working in a workplace with under 10 employees. We urge the government to consider the decision to exclude women working in the private sector in workplaces with fewer than 10 employees. It would be unjust for the rights of women to be dependent on the size of their workplace.

We also work closely with the federation of labour. They suggested a change to the preamble, a section 1A to include the following:

"Employers are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of gender in the compensation of employees employed in female job classes in Ontario. All employees in Ontario shall be entitled to equality in compensation with male job classes."

We believe this strengthens the commitment to the intent of the act and also allows for the possibility of women in small workplaces to file complaints.

The other concern our members have is around the dates. We suggest that the government revisit the dates for full implementation under each method. The dates in subsection 21.10(1) under section 12 of Bill 102 should be, "first adjustments start January 1, 1992." Furthermore, we feel strongly that there should be a deadline for implementation of pay equity through the proxy method. Without such a cap, there would be no incentive for employers to implement pay equity at all.

Ms Schreiber: Our members feel strongly that money is not the central issue around pay equity. We are primarily concerned that our work be recognized and valued in accordance with our contribution to society. The work of the registered nurse is far more important than the tasks you may see us doing. Our expertise is in the thinking and evaluating of critical situations, something you will never observe with your eyes.

Margaret Mead once said, "You can judge a society by how it treats its vulnerable members: the sick, the elderly, the children." If we want our vulnerable people cared for by less skilled and apparently cheaper care givers, we can make that decision. However, we can only live up to our responsibilities as a social democracy if we provide adequate care by the most appropriate, skilled care givers in each circumstance.

We commend the government for extending the right to pay equity to a larger group of women and recognize that this commitment exceeds that of previous governments. We view this hearing process as a positive attempt to re-establish consultation. We hope that our comments are seen in that light.

N-CoPE is committed to the achievement of pay equity for all women and makes these recommendations to facilitate this goal. Ontario's Pay Equity Act of 1987 was an important step forward, but it did not go far enough. The proposed amendments to the act are important for our members who work in all-female or nearly all-female workplaces. As nurses, we value the work we do because it is meaningful, but meaning does not pay for our rent, our food, our child care expenses.

Nurses in VON, St Elizabeth, in public health, hospitals and nursing homes have all been waiting too long for pay equity legislation to provide their right to a just wage.

Nurses, as women workers, are tired of waiting. We are aware of the recessionary times, but we are also aware that the priorities in health care spending must be re-examined. Does a recession negate our rights as women? I don't think so. We challenge the government to live up to its commitment to human rights by moving forward and implementing pay equity for all women in the province.

Mr Lessard: Thank you very much for your submission. I'm interested in the comments that were made with respect to Bill 169 and the definition of the crown as the employer. We had a submission similar to that by the Canadian Union of Public Employees earlier today. They gave us some idea of the numbers of people who, if they were given the opportunity to continue to make applications to determine that the crown was the employer, may fall under that. Do you have any idea of the numbers we might be looking at if that option continued to be available?

Ms Schreiber: No, I'm afraid we don't.

Ms Giallonardo: It would be very hard to get those sorts of figures.

Mr Lessard: You can understand that that's one of our concerns as well. We wouldn't have any idea what the outcome might be.

Ms Giallonardo: I'd say about 10% of our members fit into that category: nurses working in small workplaces.

Mr Lessard: One of the things I suggested to CUPE is that one of the reasons that was an option pursued in the Haldimand-Norfolk decision was because the previous legislation denied pay equity to a large group of women. You've mentioned that in your submission: You commend the government for extending the right of pay equity to a larger group of women. I'm going to suggest that one of the reasons that was an option that was pursued was because previously women didn't have the other options available to them, the proxy method and the proportional value method, and that's the extension of pay equity rights you're referring to.

Following an option similar to the Haldimand-Norfolk case would involve time, expense and possibly some frustration to go through that procedure and at the end find out that you didn't meet the test. I wonder if you agree with me that by providing these options, the proxy method and the proportional value method, trying to meet the Haldimand-Norfolk test may not be necessary.

Ms Schreiber: While it may not be necessary, I would hate to remove it. I feel Bill 169 is taking away what the proxy and proportional value may give. I think this is rights-based legislation, and when you put in all sorts of curves that define the ways in which people can obtain those rights, you're limiting it. I think Haldimand-Norfolk should stand and I think the proxy and proportional value add to it. I'm not in favour of further defining or limiting the definition of "crown employer."

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The Chair: Any further questions or comments from the government side?

Mrs Caplan: Thank you for your presentation. We've had presentations before this committee by both the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario and the Ontario Nurses' Association. Are you familiar with their presentations to the committee?

Ms Giallonardo: The Registered Nurses' Association, yes. We weren't there for ONA.

Mrs Caplan: We'd be happy to give you a copy of ONA's brief. On page 2 of the brief, if I could just share it with you, they say: "By moving in the direction of Bill 102, this government" -- referring to the NDP government -- "has blatantly reneged on its promise to right historic wrongs in women's wages. These amendments" -- as proposed in 102 -- "do not merely delay pay equity, they begin the dismantling of hard-fought gains."

That's a direct quote from ONA. They referred to the legislation as regressive. "Retrogressive steps" is the way they have seen the legislation, which I think is very strong language. This is not only because of the extension of the deadlines, but also the changes around maintenance, which interfere with the original principles of this bill. And we heard this morning from the Pay Equity Commission that if this legislation as it stands is passed, it predicts the province may need to see another whole piece of pay equity legislation at some point in the future, because of the erosion that will take place.

Further, ONA makes the point that for proxy, "We reject the government's amendments regarding proxy comparison methods."

I will ask you to take a look at their brief, and then if you want to say anything further to the committee or write to us, I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say. What they say in the bottom line is that this legislation should not be supported as it stands, because on balance, when you look at everything the legislation does, the perceived gains, the message of the improvements, it's actually a step backwards.

Ms Schreiber: I don't think our members would go quite that far. Our members appreciate the fact that this is rights-based legislation, because there was talk at some point that it wouldn't be.

You've raised a number of points. Let's take them one at a time.

You mentioned the issue of maintenance. I can't recall if we included it or not. We are not in favour of cabinet having the authority to write regulations regarding maintenance. With all due respect to this cabinet and every other cabinet I've ever seen, I'm not impressed that it would not be used as a mechanism for dismantling pay equity which may somewhere have been achieved. Whether or not this particular government would do it, I'm not convinced that other governments would demonstrate the support for pay equity that this government has demonstrated. So I'm not entirely prepared to trash the government yet.

Our members are very concerned that this is not a Bill 168. We felt Bill 168 enshrined rights in a much clearer, much more obtainable way, particularly the proxy comparator, which in Bill 168 was female-to-male as opposed to female-to-female. We are concerned that the female-to-female is not quite in line with the idea of establishing comparable worth. If you're establishing comparable worth between female jobs and male jobs, then you have to compare female jobs to male jobs in some way. To do it one step removed by piggybacking, I think there's all too much risk of losing it there.

The other thing our members pointed out was that we are assuming the legislation is up for review in 1995, so presumably, this is just a step. We would hope, as part of the review, that an evaluation of the effectiveness of the existing legislation would be undertaken.

Mrs Caplan: Let me just interject. I would ask you, since the deadline's been extended to 1998, how effective would a review be in 1995 of legislation passed in 1993 that isn't going to take effect and reach maturity until 1998? Don't you think the review that will begin in 1995 will be jeopardized by the expansion of those deadlines?

Ms Schreiber: Would the review be jeopardized or would be outcome be jeopardized?

Mrs Caplan: Obviously the outcome.

Ms Schreiber: If the outcome if jeopardized, then that has to fall on its face as its own reward. I think plenty has already happened that could be reviewed and evaluated for its effectiveness. Very few of our members have seen anything that they would consider pay equity. Many of our members are spending a lot of money at the tribunal fighting for their rights. We appreciate the opportunity to do that, but it is still a drain.

Mrs Caplan: I want to spend a couple of minutes on Bill 169. I've made the point in the committee before that I believe Bill 169 has very little to do with pay equity and a whole lot of do with how the province collectively bargains with its own employees and those who would like to be provincial civil servants. The suggestion was made this morning that the issues of Bill 169, of who is a crown employee, in fact would better be dealt with in the reform of the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act, which is under review right now; and that if the government were looking at a definition of "employer" for the purposes of pay equity, that could be accommodated within Bill 102, although presenters have said, "Leave the definition as it is." The suggestion is Bill 169 is not needed and that it's quite deceptive. Do you have any comments on Bill 169 outside that perspective?

Ms Schreiber: I think we would tend to agree with you on that. I have nothing to add there.

Mrs Caplan: So your recommendation would be that Bill 169 could be withdrawn?

Ms Schreiber: That was the strong recommendation from our members. They made that very clear to us.

Mrs Caplan: Could you tell me a little bit about your membership? How many members do you have, and how long has your organization been in existence?

Ms Schreiber: We have formally existed since the summer of 1990, although a number of us were meeting before that. So it's in direct response to the implementation date, the posting of the first plans. Our members tend to be one or two representatives of a variety of workplaces. We currently have about 105 people, and when we polled them and totalled up the numbers they represented, it was something like 10,000. It's a very loose network, and because it's a voluntary organization, we might have consecutive monthly meetings and see completely different groups of people showing up.

Mrs Caplan: The only reason I asked the question is that I hadn't met with your group or heard about you before, and I was just interested in when you formed and where your membership came from.

Ms Schreiber: It's not that we didn't try when you were minister.

Mrs Caplan: In 1990?

Ms Schreiber: In the spring of 1990 we tried. That was before we had a name, though.

Mrs Caplan: I don't have any recollection of ever hearing from you.

Ms Schreiber: We have met with the Minister of Labour or the deputy.

Mr Arnott: I was interested in the size of your membership as well, but that question has been answered. I want to ask you a general question about philosophy, I guess. As taxpayers -- and I know nurses pay a lot of their salary in tax -- are you comfortable generally with government entering into programs the cost of which is totally undefined and totally unquantifiable?

Ms Schreiber: Yes, I'm comfortable with it, because I feel if government doesn't enter into the affirmative action type of programs, affirmative action will not happen. We've had 5,000 years of the Judaeo-Christian heritage to demonstrate that.

Mr Arnott: I'm not comfortable with it at all. I'm concerned about it, and I'd like to know what programs are going to cost before I would support them in terms of my role as a member. I think I have an obligation to the taxpayer, whose tax load is continuing to increase. There are many taxpayers who feel they're paying enough in tax and aren't interested in paying any more.

Ms Schreiber: Are you asking me, can we afford pay equity?

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Mr Arnott: No, I'm not. Generally, in terms of government, do you think it's my responsibility as a member to know, with some measure of assurance, what a program is going to cost? We go back to the presentation. You maybe weren't here for this. Earlier this afternoon, the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses said -- I can repeat it a couple times because I know you don't have it in front of you -- "In conclusion and to state our case most plainly, we wonder if the cost of achieving pay equity will prove to be greater than the results."

I think, as legislators, we all have an obligation to measure the cost of a program, the cost of an initiative, against the benefits that we hope it will achieve. If we don't have the slightest idea what it's going to cost, I think we have to be very cautious.

Ms Giallonardo: I guess I would wonder how that would help you in making a decision about pay equity.

Mr Arnott: Measuring costs and benefits.

Ms Giallonardo: Back to what Rita was saying, it's clear-cut that a change is needed. How is that going to be helpful to you in deciding to place that legislation? We've already said that we think putting that money into nurses' hands is putting money back into the economy.

Mr Arnott: Yes, I've heard that argument before and to me it's not as strong as other arguments I've heard.

Ms Giallonardo: We have the statistics to show that women are underpaid. How are you going to decide what level of cost you would tolerate to make that sort of decision?

Mr Arnott: Yes, but you said argument. In my case, as a representative of an agricultural riding -- I'm privileged to be the representative here of the people of Wellington -- I could make the argument to the government that it has cut assistance programs to farmers, say, and say that every dollar it gives farmers -- so once you increase it 100%, all that money goes back into the economy. I have made that argument and it isn't necessarily accepted and acted upon.

Ms Schreiber: The problem is that women are, as a group, poorly paid. We all accept that. Women have responsibilities for child-rearing, child-bearing and holding down jobs. To put money in women's pockets is one of the ways of keeping people out of poverty, and poverty, we know, is the biggest killer.

I was reading this morning that in places where there are massive layoffs and things like that, where there is economic depression, health care costs go up because people have more heart attacks, people have more pneumonia, people have more simple health issues. So it's penny wise and pound foolish to say we can't afford pay equity, because we pay for it now or we pay for it down the road.

Mr Arnott: If we're all richer, we're all better off, I agree. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Arnott. Mr Tilson.

Mr Tilson: I'd like to ask a question which I believe is a question of pay equity. It's a concern that I have with the distinction between nurses in private long-term-care facilities and public long-term-care facilities. I'm not an authority on the subject, but you probably are. Maybe you are, maybe you're not; who knows who's an authority on anything, I suppose.

I am told, and I am told by nurses who are in both of those facilities, that nurses are better paid generally in the public institutions as opposed to the private institutions. The reason that they are better paid is because the funding is far superior to the public facilities. Therefore, there is a tremendous discrimination between women, between nurses, who are trying to improve our long-term care. Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

Ms Schreiber: Not really. I'm not sure what you're getting at other than --

Mr Tilson: I guess I'm looking at the whole subject of inequities as far as the payment of salaries and wages to women. One can compare women to men. One can compare women in the public sector to women in the private sector. One can compare women who are working for the public service as opposed to crown agencies. One can compare women who are employed by businesses of under 10 as opposed to the other categories.

There are inequities. There are differences between women who are performing the same work, whether comparing to women or whether comparing to men. Should there be some sort of amendment in this legislation that would oblige the government to assist particularly long-term care facilities of a private nature; in other words, that the same funding that's given to public should be given to private?

Ms Schreiber: I could only provide my personal opinion on that, not the group's opinion. It seems to me that there are inequities between workplaces everywhere. Before the Ontario Nurses' Association existed, nurses in other parts of the province earned different amounts than nurses in Toronto. That's one of the reasons there's a union. As a nurse --

Mr Tilson: I appreciate I've caught you off guard.

Ms Schreiber: Yes.

Mr Tilson: We're talking inequities between what men are paid and what women are paid. It's just that this is the first opportunity I've had, quite frankly, to ask nurses questions on that subject. It does deal with the subject of inequality between nurses and it's a concern that I have in the long-term-care field.

Ms Schreiber: It probably speaks more to the inequality between patient care as well. I couldn't say --

Mr Tilson: Of course. Absolutely. I'm sorry, it's unfair of me to throw that at you. It's just that I thought perhaps if you were dealing with inequities as far as the salaries of nurses are concerned, this would be a subject you might have some thoughts on.

Ms Schreiber: We'd be happy to talk to our members and get back to you on that, though.

Mr Tilson: Thank you. I would like to hear from you more on that.

The comment you made is that money is not the issue. I'm going to pursue Mr Arnott's line of questioning. The public on the one hand, men and women, say they're not making enough money. Women say they're making less than men. Some occupations are being paid less than others. People say, "We're not getting enough to live on." There are all kinds of inequities that exist in this country, in this province, in this city. You're right. This inequity has existed for some time. Will the next government say: "These guys left a mess. We're going to have to delay it another three years"? You can almost hear someone saying that.

We are in a recession. It's going to cost $1.2 billion next year -- I'm trying to recall figures; it's going to cost $600 million starting in April of this year -- to implement this legislation. We're in a recession. The government's broke. Hospitals are not getting their transfer payments. We're worried about health care. We're worried about education.

The government is not providing moneys to hospitals, to health care givers, to universities, that are required to implement this legislation. They've made that clear, and you can criticize them. I spend every day down here criticizing them because of my concern for health care, education and the transfer payments to municipalities. That's one of my roles as an opposition critic. I get concerned about that. The fact is they're not giving any more money.

I guess I look at the subject of budgets and moneys that are available to provide health care in hospitals. Unless they change their minds -- and they're not going to change their minds. You know, one, two and two has become one, two and minus two as far as transfer payments are concerned. The games that are being played by these people are unbelievable. I don't know how we're going to finance hospitals. I don't know how we're going to finance our schools and the quality of our education.

I am not downplaying your concern. That's a given. Anybody who says he doesn't believe in pay equity is dead wrong. We all believe in pay equity. The question is, in response to your statement that money is not the issue, where's the money going to come from? Well, it can come from only one source and that's the government. They're not going to give it. If that's a given, the next question I have for you is, what would you cut from the health care budgets to allow pay equity for the nursing professions to proceed?

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Ms Giallonardo: I think that comes back to the way you're distributing the money that's being allocated right now. As Rita said, there are studies to prove that nurses are perhaps more effective in providing care than other professionals, and we need to evaluate how we're spending the money that we're spending now. We're not convinced there needs to be new money. We have seen new money provided. I'm not sure how much of an increase the doctors got this year, but I understand that it was new money. I don't know where it was spent.

Mr Tilson: I don't know a lot of things that go on in this place.

Ms Giallonardo: People say there's no new money, but money comes up for certain groups of individuals. We're saying that we have to evaluate the way we use the money. There are studies that Rita cited.

Mr Tilson: Have you got recommendations to this government as to where it's going to find the money?

Ms Giallonardo: People should be accountable within the hospital system for the way they spend money.

Mr Tilson: Have you got specific recommendations to this government or the hospitals as to where they're going to find money to implement the pay equity programs?

Ms Giallonardo: First of all, I'm not convinced that it's cost the government a lot of money, but I strongly urge it to look at the way it's spending its current money.

Mr Tilson: I understand that. I do that regularly. I'm with you. My question is, and I'm very serious about this, what will be cut? What should be cut?

Ms Schreiber: I really hate to hear the word "cut." I think what we have to start looking at is the cost-effectiveness of the health care we are providing. The other day, the RNAO mentioned the amount of money we spend on the last six months of a person's life. I think we have to look at that. God knows, I'm not saying euthanasia --

Mr Tilson: I hope not.

Ms Schreiber: -- but I am saying that there are times when someone is diagnosed with something that is terminal, for which there are no effective cures, there are no effective controls and treatment is ineffective.

Why do we spend $200,000 on the last six months of that person's life -- and, as a nurse, I would say ruining the quality of that person's life -- when we could spend maybe $10,000 or $20,000 making the last six months of that person's life meaningful because it would be pain-free and comfortable and they would be able to tie up loose ends with family and loved ones? That's a more humane approach.

But when the primary health care provider refuses to understand that perhaps or refuses to recognize it or sells the product, for whatever reason -- and I'm speaking from personal experience here -- then we get sucked into it. It's a buyer-beware situation with health care, and the public is not knowledgeable enough to know that when someone tells them, "Oh, yeah, we can do a lot," they should ask: "What does that mean? What does `doing a lot' mean? What will my life be like?" I think that's one point. I think we have to look at cost-effectiveness.

The other point is that you're talking about transfer payments that this government is not passing on to the MUSH sector. This government is not passing on what it is not getting from the federal government. The transfer payments from the federal Conservative government are drying up.

Mr Tilson: That's the problem. Nobody has any money. Where's it going to come from? Let's be realistic.

Ms Schreiber: I'm not convinced that the federal government --

Mr Tilson: Are you saying someone's hiding it somewhere? They're hiding more money over there? Come on.

Ms Schreiber: With the GST? I don't know.

Mr Tilson: Listen, if I could just stop you for a minute, I appreciate some of the things you're saying, but we're on the verge of getting into politics and I don't want to do that.

Ms Schreiber: We shouldn't, no; this is not a political arena.

Mr Tilson: I guess what I'm looking at is that I'm a legislator and I'm asked to be an expert on everything, including health care; you are in health care. You have specific thoughts, and you come into this committee and say: "Pay equity must be implemented now. Women have suffered long enough." I understand all that. Whether you're talking business or whether you're talking government, I do. The facts are there. You don't have to persuade anybody about that.

It still gets back to the question, I say to you that money is the issue. It's got to come from somewhere. It doesn't come out of the trees. I used that expression two or three times today. I need, as a legislator, as a person who's trying to provide, hopefully, constructive criticism to this government, need thoughts from you as to some of the things you are getting into. If you're saying this government is providing incorrect health policies, that there's waste and that there are other areas that could be made free by changing some of those policies, you're in the field and it would be very helpful for you to tell this committee your thoughts on how that money could be freed up.

Ms Schreiber: In order to free up money so that nurses get an appropriate wage, I think we have to look at the biomedical dominance of our health care system.

Right now we have a situation -- and I'm not saying this to doctor-bash -- which is controlled in a pyramid style with doctors on the top, and the doctors are the point of entry for health care. Even though I might only need to have some physiotherapy, even though I need some exercise or some nutrition regime or something, why do I have to see a physician to get moved over to go see those things?

I would be the last person on earth to tell you that the American health care system is good. However, in the United States nurse practitioners and nurse specialists, in their area, people with advanced preparation in a particular clinical area, are used as primary care providers.

I'm a psychiatric nurse. If I were to move across to New York state, I could carry a psychiatric clientele of any kind I wished: chronic, walking wounded or whatever. I could prescribe within my field psychotropic medications. I would be licensed. I could have third-party payments. That's somewhat more cost-effective even if you pay me $100,000 a year to do it. If anybody has tried to find a psychiatrist in this province, you know the waiting lists are long. To try and find a psychiatrist who is sensitive to the issues of women, lesbians, black people, immigrants or anything like that, you could wait a really long time.

We have a lot of nurses in this province, and we have a lot of capable nurses, a lot of nurses with advanced preparation who can be primary care providers in their areas of specialty.

Mr Tilson: I'm asking you a tremendous job, but I would ask if your group could provide some summaries of areas in which this ministry is undergoing matters of waste and in which policies could be changed which could providing funding to enforce the badly needed pay equity of the nurses in this province.

Ms Schreiber: We'd be happy to do what we can. I would have to point out that the policies of the Ministry of Health in terms of who practises what, in terms of the health disciplines legislation, were not invented by this particular government. It's been long-standing.

Mr Tilson: Listen, I'm just saying as a legislator who needs assistance to criticize these people --

Ms Schreiber: Absolutely.

Mr Tilson: -- I need all the help I can get.

Ms Murdock: You don't need any assistance.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Tilson. Ms Schreiber and Ms Giallonardo, on behalf of this committee, I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this afternoon and giving us your presentation.

Ms Schreiber: Thank you very much.

The Chair: As we're a little ahead of schedule and our next presenters aren't here, we'll call a 10-minute recess.

The committee recessed at 1618 and resumed at 1634.

PAT SCHULZ CHILDCARE CENTRE
METRO TORONTO COALITION FOR BETTER CHILD CARE

The Chair: I call this committee back to order. As our next presenter, I call forward Pat Schulz Childcare Centre, and I understand you'll be sharing your time with the Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care.

Ms Cheryl West: Yes.

The Chair: Good afternoon.

Ms West: Good afternoon.

The Chair: Just a reminder that you'll be allowed up to a half-hour for your presentation. The committee would appreciate it if you could keep your remarks a little briefer than that to allow time for questions and comments from each of the caucuses. As soon as you're comfortable, could you please identify yourself for the record and then proceed.

Ms West: My name is Cheryl West and I'm speaking for the Pat Schulz Childcare Centre, and I'm sharing my time slot with Zeenat Janmohamed from the Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care.

I supervise a non-profit infant-toddler centre in Toronto and I wanted to speak to you today about the quality-of-life conditions that early childhood educators live with.

First, I want to say that early childhood educators have been so hopeful about pay equity legislation as we believe that finally one of the most serious examples of systemic gender bias will be addressed. We know that only with the support of legislation will society address the value our work provides in our communities.

We are mostly women who are trained, dedicated and committed to meeting the demands of educating children from birth to 12 years of age. We work in partnership with parents, teachers and community members to ensure the healthy care and development of our children.

I work in a centre where the board of directors has tried desperately to compensate staff with fair wages under current funding limitations. The intent of this board of directors has been to pay wages as close to parity with our municipal colleagues as possible. However, this is not always possible. It seems to change year to year. However, I am still among the luckier women who work in the field. Being lucky in the field, however, pales when we look at the bigger picture.

I have 20 years' experience working with children in a variety of settings. In 1980, I began working as a home care provider on the strength of my public school teaching experience and qualifications. In 1986, I decided to work in centre-based care at the salary of $16,500 per year. Although returning to teaching has been an option for me from time to time, I prefer working with younger children, especially infants and toddlers. With that consideration, I decided to return to school for an ECE.

Although I recognized the personal and financial limitations in this decision, I never accepted them as just. Many of my colleagues are single and/or sole support mothers, as I am. We support families on frozen or shrinking wages. Other women I know in our field have decided to hold off on having children or not to bother having them at all because of low wages. Today, I have co-workers, each with 11 and 13 years' experience, whose wages have prevented them from having children or from being able to afford quality care for the children they do have.

A very large proportion of the young adult women I have worked with over the years continue to live with their parents because low wages make it impossible to live as independent adults. Many of us take second jobs to make ends meet. We live paycheque to paycheque with only the remote dream of a pension in our future. The quality of life as an ECE is seriously limited and many good teachers with years of valuable experience leave the field because we cannot afford to live, raise our own children, pay taxes or sustain reasonable lifestyles on the wages we earn. We must earn the lowest of any trained professional. We deserve a better deal.

Women working in child care centres have been holding out hope for this legislation for years, years where we continued to subsidize the child care sector with our low wages while providing necessary care for children whose parents drive the economic machine of this province. We have watched and waited long enough.

I can say that although Bill 102 provides us with hope, my co-workers and I are disappointed that the implementation date for proxy comparisons has been delayed a year. In addition, we must be able to use our municipal co-workers for comparison. This is fair and just. We urge implementation of a cap for proxy payouts of January 1, 1998. Otherwise, at 1% of payroll per year, I and others like me will have retired before we achieve our pay equity settlements.

The Chair: Anything further?

Ms Janmohamed: I'm sure you must be tired after a long day, so I'll be as brief as I can.

The Metro Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care was founded in 1983 by a broad-based membership, including parents, child care staff, trade unions and community-based social service agencies. As active members of the Ontario coalition, we would like to take this opportunity to endorse the recommendations made in its presentation to you.

We work to build a strong network of child care supporters across Metro and lobby for change in child care policy at all levels of government. We work closely with the regional and local governments to ensure that the child care system in Metro Toronto operates fairly and is accessible to all families.

Some of you are aware that Metro Toronto has the largest proportion of subsidized child care in the province of Ontario. There are approximately 20,000 subsidized spaces in Metro Toronto. Another 6,000 are full-fee spaces. We currently have 3,800 licensed vacancies at a time when there are 11,200 children on the waiting list for subsidized child care.

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In the last three years we have experienced the most difficult times in the history of child care. We have seen centres close and a reduction in subsidized spaces as a result of underfunding. Parents can no longer afford to pay exorbitant full fees which have resulted in vacancies and a tremendous increase in the waiting list for subsidized child care. Regardless of the difficult situations faced by child care programs in Metro Toronto, we continue to survive because we are committed to providing quality care for young children.

The Metro coalition represents child care staff who earn some of the highest wages in the non-profit sector. Our members earn an average of $25,000 per year. We recognize that our wages are better than most child care staff in Ontario, who earn an average of $22,000 a year. However, we also recognize that we cannot survive on these wages. As a predominantly female sector, we earn 70% of the wages that men earn.

We want to applaud the provincial government for making amendments to the Pay Equity Act which will extend pay equity to most workers in predominantly female workplaces like child care programs. The amendments will begin to address the wage inequities women face in the work force. Staff working in programs operated by the municipality earn an average of $3,500 more than staff working in the non-profit sector. With the addition of their pay equity settlement, municipal staff will earn an average of $5,000 more. Wages and working conditions of staff working in the municipal sector have served as a benchmark for wages in non-profit community programs. The work performed in both settings is identical. Child care staff in both programs strive to provide a holistic and balanced social and educational program for young children. The only difference between the two groups is that municipal staff have better wages and benefits. Consequently, staff in municipally operated programs remain in the child care field for longer periods of time and are able to provide consistent care for children. In the non-profit sector we face a higher turnover as experienced child care staff move to other careers which pay a living wage.

We believe strongly that the implementation of pay equity for child care staff in the non-profit sector will improve the quality of care that children receive, because better wages for staff is a major indicator of quality in child care. Staff who earn a decent wage are more likely to remain in the field of child care.

We urge you to ensure that the pay equity-adjusted wage rate of the municipal child care worker serves as the comparator for wages in the non-profit sector. In areas where a municipality does not operate child care programs, the seeking organization would go to the next nearest municipality that offers one to establish its comparator. We urge the government to begin payments as originally promised to January 1, 1993. Child care staff are not prepared to wait any longer for the government to meet its commitment. We urge the government to establish 1998 as a time by which pay equity must be achieved in the proxy sector.

In Metro Toronto, staff in community-based programs will have to wait approximately 30 years to achieve pay equity without a capping on the payoff period. This is an issue of fairness which must be addressed in the current amendments. To leave it open would be an insult to women workers. We urge the government to maintain the date for pay equity achievements in the public sector to 1995. In Metro Toronto, municipal child care staff reached a pay equity settlement of $1.17 per hour. These women should not have to wait another three years for pay equity.

In closing, the Metro coalition would like to reiterate comments made by several child care programs and the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. We are not prepared to accept additional wage subsidies as an alternative to pay equity. We see pay equity as an important justice issue for women. If the government can find adequate funds for the doctors and judges of Ontario it can certainly find the funds necessary to redress wage inequities faced by women workers. Thank you.

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

Ms Poole: Thank you very much for coming to the committee. It's good to see you again. The Coalition for Better Child Care presented on Tuesday, I think, and made many of the same points you have so eloquently expressed today. I think one of the major disappointments for the coalition was the delay: first of all, the delay from the timetable set in the 1987 legislation that the public sector would achieve pay equity by 1995, that delay for three years; and the second, which you've both addressed in your presentation today and which specifically impacts on your area, and that is the delay of implementing proxy.

When we were talking to Kerry McCuaig from the coalition she was very concerned that payouts from proxy wouldn't actually end up being in your pockets till 1995. That was her estimation. She said the child care sector won't see any payouts from this proxy pay equity till 1995, and I said that's really interesting; that's an election year. It means that the current government gets to take all the accolade for giving money to the child care workers in an election year and yet the cost of it would be borne by a subsequent government. I said, "Is that your reading?" She said, "Yes, and it makes me very, very cynical."

Are you cynical? Do you still have the optimism that this government is not only going to proceed with its promises, but do what it originally told you to do?

Secondly, are you aware that the coalition is estimating that the average payout to a child care worker on an annual basis will be in the vicinity of $350, and that's it?

Ms West: I'll take the first part of your question. I would probably not use the word "cynical." I would say, as I stated in my deputation, that we would be very disappointed. I think I'm here today to say what I said, and that is that if there is some possible way now to redress this delay, I want people to hear that and do something about it.

Secondly, yes, we are aware that the payouts are $300. This is at the 1% payout that they are $300.

Ms Poole: It would take a long time.

Ms West: Yes.

Ms Poole: I think I estimated three decades, but one of the child care groups said probably more like six decades. So you'd be retired first.

Ms West: Absolutely. That was my final point, that I certainly would be retired before I would see my settlement.

Mr Arnott: Thank you very much for coming in. I don't have any questions, but I hear your sincerity and the pride and devotion you put forward to your profession. I want to thank you for that, and thanks once again for coming in.

Ms Murdock: I apologize for not being here for your oral presentation, but I did read it. I was obviously here for the coalition's presentation the other day, and I see that you endorse it.

I notice in the last paragraph that additional wage subsidies are not satisfactory. Given that in 1987, when pay equity came in on job-to-job, and proportional value of course is now going to at least be in law, hopefully, once this gets passed, and then proxy initiated -- and we realize it's in some instances going to take a long time. Just given the complexities of proxy itself, it's going to take a long time for some groups to even find a proxy comparator. But there has been money set aside. Last year, $75 million was used. We've allocated $240 million for pay equity in pending legislation that would eventually get the employers in the job market to finally get pay equity within their own workplace.

I realize that it isn't an ideal world. It would be nice if we could do everything all at once. I'd be really happy as a female and as a legislator. But in the meantime, those adjustments that have been made, particularly in the day care sector -- in fact, it was because of the day care sector that this whole issue was raised. It isn't the best of all worlds, but it is satisfactory for the moment. Would that be fair?

Ms Janmohamed: No, it's not satisfactory for the moment. We appreciated receiving the direct operating grant. We appreciated receiving the wage enhancement grant. But pay equity is a justice issue and we've talked about this time and time again.

Ms Murdock: It's a right. Absolutely.

Ms Janmohamed: It's a right, and we are not prepared to settle for additional wage subsidies in its place. Quite frankly, I would turn around and ask you the question, are you prepared to take that long to pay it out to women who are the most undervalued and underpaid in the industrial sector?

Ms Murdock: That's why this bill is going through, or at least has been introduced. I can't be presumptuous enough to think that every single thing will go as planned.

I've stated here a number of times that we've been fighting for women's issues for hundreds and hundreds of years and pay equity is a really important one. The realities of this government, and I don't care whether it's an NDP or a Conservative or a Liberal government of any of the provinces, are that the money is just not there. You can put something in law, but if there's no money to pay for it, then what is the point of having it in law?

Interjection.

Ms Murdock: You had your opportunity to speak.

Ms Janmohamed: We know the government is in deficit, we know the government has been called bankrupt, but you've obviously found funds to settle with the doctors and to provide an increase of wages to the judges. We have suggested to you that it's perhaps time to look at a fairer taxation system.

Quite frankly, one of the things you might want to look at is paying full taxes on the wages you earn as an MPP. We know one third of it is tax-free. There are a lot of areas that could be looked at and think about priorities in terms of spending.

We're not prepared to take a back seat on this again. Like you said, we've waited hundreds of years. We've had this discussion before, and I don't think we're prepared to wait any longer. We have started to organize a lobby of MPPs, both in government and in opposition, and we'll be coming forward to meet with you to discuss not only pay equity but child care reform as well. We're not prepared to settle for this.

Ms Murdock: I have ongoing discussions within my own riding with groups on some of these very issues, so I'm well aware. I just wanted to ask you, because the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care has gone into the specific kinds of language that are used in the act, if you had -- let me put it another way. Out of all the things the coalition has suggested, if you had three major ones that absolutely had to be in there -- one of course I presume would be the three-year question -- what would be your other two?

Ms Janmohamed: Why three? They were simply suggesting --

Ms Murdock: I mean --

Ms Janmohamed: There are four recommendations in front of you. I think it's unfair to ask us to choose between the four, "Pick three out of four and maybe we can work something out." I think all four are reasonable.

Ms Murdock: I didn't say that. Which ones do you consider to be of the highest priority, is what I'm asking.

Ms Janmohamed: From the coalition's perspective, I would think that all four are equally important.

Ms Murdock: Are equal in priority?

Ms Janmohamed: Yes.

The Chair: No further questions? Ms West, Ms Janmohamed, on behalf of this committee I'd like to thank you for taking the time out this afternoon and giving us your presentation. Seeing no further business before this committee, this committee stands adjourned until 9:30 tomorrow morning.

The committee adjourned at 1654.