Canada's Pay Equity Act

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Nov 20

RE: Advancing gender equality in Canadian workplaces.  Hamilton Spectator 16 Nov 20 Op-ed written by Federal Minister of Labour Filomena Tassi and Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos.  Note the illicit substitutions of equality for equity, and equal pay for work of equal value instead of equal pay for equal work, which the current law.

If nothing else, the work by Filomena Tassi and Jean-Yves Duclos shows that some people never learn, especially when the lesson is not to their political advantage.  The very concept that the “average woman” is paid less than the “average man” was exploded decades ago by, among others, the American economist Thomas Sowell.

Let me give you a personal example.  For the 1984 federal election I did an analysis of the Hamilton Mountain riding for one of the candidates, and used the most recent data from Statistics Canada.  It showed that forty percent of working women worked in retail while thirty-three percent of men worked in unionized jobs.  Given that retail wages were close to minimum while union wages were good in those days, the “average man” received higher income than the “average woman!”  In order to achieve something like equality, not only did women working in retail have to become steelworkers, but a lot of steelworkers had to change jobs and work in retail.

When Sowell learned that young male doctors earned more than young female doctors, he looked deeper and found that on average the young male doctor worked five hundred more hours per year than young female doctors.  Well, if you work more you get paid more.  He also learned that among tenured professors, women who never married earned more than men who never married.

This whole business of gender pay equity is nonsense on stilts; you have to control for a lot of factors.

The principle is equal pay for equal work, but Tassi and Duclos call for equal pay for work of “equal value.”  Who is to determine what work is of “equal value?”  The commander of the Canadian army earns less than many pilots and experienced surgeons.  How do you compare the relative value of those jobs?  What is the relative value of teaching grade 4’s as compared to grade 12’s?  Is a principled answer even possible?  Generally, people get paid for their experience, but if a person of less experience is doing the same job, shouldn’t he or she get paid the same as the more experienced person?

There is no principle by which one can determine what work is of equal value, especially across widely disparate occupations.  Only the marketplace can determine that; a government bureaucrat cannot.  The effect of implementing the monetary penalties regime is already known: it will reduce the tendency of employers to hire women, indigenous, visible minorities, and the disabled because doing so will only cause them trouble.

The danger of putting too much power into the hands of government is that the hands of foolish do-gooders who haven’t done their research wind up hurting the very people they say they’re trying to help.

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