Yesterday, Michael Ignatieff stated that pay equity is “a basic human right” and blasted the Conservatives who “[…] very clearly used their 2009 budget to impose their ideological opposition to pay equity for Canadian women.” I have to agree with Ignatieff on both counts.

Last year, I wrote a research paper for my Poverty Law class at Robson Hall (“Canadian Pay Equity Regimes in Context: Evaluating the effectiveness of pay equity dispute resolution mechanisms and remedies”) in which I compared the pay equity regimes of every jurisdiction in Canada. In particular, I was interested in access to effective remedies for women being paid less than men for work of equal value. In general, pay equity legislation only protects public sector workers, not workers in the private sector (although Ontario and Quebec also extend pay equity protection to some private sector employees). Most provinces and the federal government employ a legislative regime in which women may file a pay equity complaint either through a human rights commission or a dedicated pay equity commission.

The only exceptions to this type of legislative framework are the three western provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan and British Columbia have both adopted equity frameworks – essentially government policies that require public sector employers to implement some form of pay equity through the collective bargaining process. Alberta is the only jurisdiction in Canada that has no pay equity protections whatsoever. Alberta, like British Columbia, does require that workers receive the same pay for “the same or substantially similar work” (the wording of the legislation in British Columbia is “similar or substantially similar work”). However, this does not constitute pay equity, as such. Pay equity requires equal pay for work of equal value, even if the specific job classes are substantially different. In other words, pay equity looks at the value of the work being performed, not the similarity of job descriptions.

The budgetary measure to which Ignatieff is referring in his statement is a provision of Federal Budget 2009, which promises to eliminate the role of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in the federal pay equity regime. Instead, the government promises to integrate pay equity more closely with the collective bargaining process in order to “ensure that the employer and bargaining agents are jointly responsible and accountable for negotiating salaries that are fair and equitable to all employees.” Ostensibly, the government’s rationale is that the current system is “a lengthy, costly and adversarial process”; however, as Ignatieff indicated in his statement, there is reason to believe that the Conservatives’ real motivation is an ideological opposition to pay equity as such.

It is first of all worth pointing out that the government’s characterization of the current complaint-based regime is not altogether inaccurate. In fact, many of the early pay equity cases involving large public sector employers took years or even decades to resolve (see e.g. Bell Canada v. C.E.P., [1998] F.C.J. No. 1609 (Fed. C.A.), rev’g (1998), 143 F.T.R. 81 (Fed. Ct. TD), leave to appeal to S.C.C. refused, 27063 (July 8, 1999)). However, it would be wrong to conclude that a complaint-based mechanism for pay equity can’t work in practice, as I argued in my paper:

One of the lessons thus far has been that many of the delays in the current regimes relate to difficulty in understanding and implementing the complex technical requirements of job comparison. This issue can and should be addressed in a number of different ways. First, the highly technical and specialized nature of pay equity befits a specialized administrative apparatus including a binding tribunal that is institutionally separate from other human rights and labour bodies. The Pay Equity Office, Commission, and Tribunal model championed in Ontario and Québec is promising in that it recognizes and affirms the sui generis nature of pay equity within the corpus of human rights and labour laws. Decision makers within that apparatus will therefore be better equipped to apply the technical requirements of pay equity in a more expedient manner. The second (and related) point is that pay equity commissions should be sufficiently staffed and resourced so as to better assist non-unionized workers in bringing a complaint against their employer.

In any event, even if we were to conclude that a complaint-based model in unworkable, the collective bargaining alternative is even worse. Again, quoting from my paper:

The most glaring gap in pay equity law is the jurisdictional gap. While most jurisdictions in this country have implemented some form of pay equity legislation, scores of Canadian women enjoy no pay equity protection at law. This includes those provinces in which internal government policy affords only remote administrative law challenges to women in segregated jobs. Female workers in Alberta have no legal recourse to obtain a remedy for violations of their human rights in respect of equal pay for work of equal value.

The complete lack of legal protection for workers in these jurisdictions does not sit well with the characterization of pay equity as a human right. Indeed, the complete omission of any protection for pay equity in Alberta undermines the universality of human rights. Yet even among jurisdictions that have enacted legally-enforceable pay equity laws, the scope of the legislation has generally been limited to the public sector. Ontario and Québec stand alone in providing any pay equity protection to women in the private sector. Again, this limitation in scope to is a curious departure from the characterization of equal pay for work of equal value as a human right rather than as a policy decision.

The ultimate shortcoming of current pay equity regimes is not the principle of equal pay for work of equal value, but the lack of access to effective and timely remedies. While the complaint-based tribunal system suffers from many glaring flaws, the relegation of pay equity away from tribunals and into the collective bargaining process represents a major retrenchment of women’s legal right to a pay equity remedy. In this sense, I would argue that Ignatieff’s position against the measures outlined in Budget 2009 is the correct one. I would go even further, though, by establishing a dedicated pay equity commission and extending the legislation to cover federally-regulated private sector workers.

My one and only criticism of Ignatieff here is that the Liberals voted in favour of Budget 2009! Clearly, voting in favour of a federal budget does not imply endorsement or consent to each and every line of the budget. For example, the NDP‘s support of a ways and means motion in September does not imply that party’s support for every line of the motion, so much as their desire for trade-offs in respect of employment insurance. For every vote in the House of Commons, politicians must engage in a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the good parts of a bill outweigh the bad parts. A great deal of horse trading goes on between all of the political parties, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

However, a major point of contrast between the NDP and the Liberals is that the NDP has consistently maintained the position that human rights are non-negotiable. That is, while the New Democrats will make policy concessions within the legitimate set of options available to government, they will not endorse any bill that undermines fundamental human rights. This explains, for example, the difference between how the New Democrats and Liberals have voted on same-sex marriage legislation in the past (the New Democrats voted unanimously for same-sex marriage, save for one MP who was ousted from the party in consequence; several Liberal MPs voted against same-sex marriage).

To the extent that equal pay for work of equal value is a human right (and Michael Ignatieff seems to think that it is), doesn’t it follow that the Liberals voted in favour of against, in Ignatieff’s words, “a basic human right”? If so, what does this say about the Liberals’ attitude in respect of the universality of human rights? It seems to me that the undermining basic human rights appears to be a deal-breaker for New Democrats, whereas the Liberals are willing to vote in against human rights where it suits their purposes.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just grumpy from studying too much for my exams. In any event, Ignatieff’s change of heart on the federal pay equity regime is a welcome change.