Social Policy in Ontario

“I don’t know if there’s any place called Damascus between here and, say, Hamilton or something, but somewhere she was travelling and she got the lightning bolt, and all of a sudden she’s found her conscience.”

I am quoting here John Yakabuski, PC Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, who narratively entertained the Ontario legislature on budget day, ostensibly debating the government’s pay transparency bill and what he assessed as the premier’s sudden social awareness, while managing to weave in bake sales, Buck Martinez, Willie Mays and the 1968 Mustang into which Yakabuski’s mother would cram 10 kids, which resulted in ill effects on the rear tires so that when she went to gas up at Raymond Conway’s, Ray would say, “Doreen, you’re going to have to get those tires replaced. The treads are showing through.”

The 51-minute speech was quite the road trip, though no one in opposition piped up to say “Are we there yet?” But somewhere in Yakabuski’s speech was this nugget: “It’s a skeleton bill.”

The Pay Transparency Act is almost that, sad to say. The Liberals’ move to redress the gender wage gap is inexplicably late in its tabling, vague in its constitution, and painfully slow in its proposed enactment. Here we are just days from Equal Pay Day (April 10) and it would be so much jollier to champion the bill as being a match for what Britain is doing, as documented in this space last week. U.K. companies with more than 250 employees have until Wednesday to submit gender pay reports to the government. Those reports are publicly disclosed on a government database and reveal mean and median gaps in pay and bonuses between men and women. So, we can see that the median bonus gender pay gap at RBC Investor Services Trust is 62 per cent. This is good work and will set in stone year-over-year measurements of progress (or lack thereof).

Ontario Labour Minister Kevin Flynn, who tabled Ontario’s version in early March, wants us to see our localized version do just as good work, too. Who could argue that getting the wage gap on the legislative agenda is a bad thing? “As minister of labour I was very, very surprised to find out what the gender wage gap still is today,” Flynn said in an interview this week. “The fact that it isn’t trending down, that it doesn’t show any signs of changing on its own.”

Those who have been fighting in the trenches for decades on this may be surprised by the minister’s admission of surprise.

What matters, as Flynn told the legislature, is that the wage gap in Ontario remains stuck at 30 per cent on average “and over the past 10 years has remained largely unchanged.” Averages always conceal. In this case what you don’t see is the 57-per-cent wage gap for Indigenous women; the 39-per-cent wage gap for immigrant women.

We know that the barriers preventing women from reaching their full economic potential reach across education, the challenge of finding affordable elder and child care, systemic bias, the stereotype of what constitutes “leadership” qualities and so on.

We also know that setting targets and measuring outcomes are essential to getting more women on boards, to increasing their representation on senior positions, and to paying women and men equally for work of equal value.

Those objectives were supposed to be met decades ago. Yet 30 years after the Pay Equity Act came into force, the gap remains intractable and the gender discrimination in compensation systemic. “Behaviourally and culturally we’ve had a business system that has allowed a gender wage gap to exist,” Flynn says. “It’s been part of the culture. It’s been part of the barriers women have faced. It’s that business culture that needs to change.”

Agreed. But there are tripwires. The first is the proposed staggered introduction of disclosures, with the Ontario Public Service to report first, followed by companies with more than 500 employees in 2019 and companies with more than 250 employees roped in “we think around 2020, ’21. If we can do it earlier that wouldn’t be a bad thing at all,” Flynn says.

A better thing would have been to set the first target at 250 employees and a deadline of next year for first report. “We’re going to look at ourselves first,” says Flynn, in defence of the step-by-step approach. “The OPS is a pretty big employer and I think any time you try to change cultures, you try to change behaviour, you’ve got to set the example as an employer yourself.”

But that behaviour, that culture, with the public service should have been enforced through the existing decades-old legislation.

Which brings us to tripwire number two. In addressing the legislature, Flynn said this: “The exact reporting requirements for employers, such as what, how and when to report, will be determined with consultations with the various stakeholders themselves.”

Let’s take a moment to recall that the premier mandated the Ministry of Labour to lead the development of a strategy to mend the wage gap in the spring of 2015, that public consultations were held, that the gender wage gap steering committee produced its report on the matter in June, 2016.

So, there’s been time enough for consultation.

And then there’s the transparency piece. There’s no commitment to create a government database, accessible to all. “That’s not something that is outside the realm of possibility,” Flynn says. “The idea is we’re going to start the discussion now with these companies and if that is seen as the best vehicle, the best model that’s going to make the biggest difference the most quickly, I’m all for that. But we do want to make sure that we’re allowing business to be part of this.”

Flynn has heard all the criticisms before. Late. Vague. Insubstantial. “I don’t want anyone to mistake that for lack of resolve,” he says of the government’s approach. “It’s not that at all. What we want to do is we want to do it right. I would hope that in two or three years we’ve made some significant progress on this.”

Three years sounds like forever. Especially when one considers the speed and alacrity in other jurisdictions.

The mystery is why has the government taken this long to come forward with a plan that has no clear framework. “There’s nothing we should be proud of right now when it comes to the gender wage gap and the magnitude of the gender wage gap,” Flynn says. That is very, very true.

https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2018/03/31/the-long-slow-drive-to-equal-gender-pay-in-ontario.html