Canada’s Proactive Pay Equity Legislation: Implementation Challenges and Outcomes

In 2018, the Canadian government introduced the Pay Equity Act to address gender-based discrimination in compensation among public sector employees. Unlike the previous pay equity legislation that centred on a complaints-based system, the new legislation adopts a proactive model that places the onus on employers to correct gender wage gaps within their organizations. Similar legislation has been in place in Ontario since 1987, in both the public and private sectors. Although the proactive pay equity model represents an improvement over previous legislation, we argue that gains have been modest, uneven, and at times contradictory. While it is too early to evaluate the outcomes of the new legislation, we suggest its implementation may replicate some of the pitfalls in Ontario’s Pay Equity Act. The chapter examines how strategies adopted thus far in Canada have mostly benefitted workers in larger, unionized environments, doing little to tackle occupational gender segregation. They are based on methodologies of comparable worth that measure women’s wages and skills against men’s, and mirror organizational processes of larger, unionized work settings with established personnel procedures and job classification systems. This sidelines a large segment of the female workforce engaged in casual, part-time or temporary employment or who worked in smaller, unorganized places. Finally, the principles, prescriptions, and purpose of pay equity are continually renegotiated against a backdrop of changing economic and political conditions. In the end, the implementation of federal and provincial pay equity legislation has been limited in producing gender transformative change.