OTTAWA — A new report on Tuesday offers the first-ever cost estimate for a Liberal policy that aims to ensure men and women receive equal pay, after Ottawa declined to provide details on the legislation in 2018.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that the Liberal government’s equal pay policy will cost taxpayers $621 million per year, covering about 390,000 pubic servants in Canada. That estimate does not include the additional 900,000 workers who fall under federally-regulated industries like airlines, telecoms, banking, and broadcasting, among other things.
Crown corporations including Canada Post, Bank of Canada and the newly-formed Trans Mountain Corporation will also fall under the new equal pay provisions. The $621-million hike amounts to a roughly one per cent increase on the $45 billion Ottawa spends every year on wages and pensions for public employees.
Yves Giroux, the PBO, said his office pulled together the estimates without the help of Treasury Board officials, who declined to provide any internal data for the program, citing Cabinet confidence.
Tt’s probably bureaucrats being overly risk averse
He said he was unsure of the merit of those claims, but warned that the Liberal government should avoid using Cabinet confidence as a catch-all to withhold information that would useful to the public.
“If the data exists, and it’s been used internally or in other formats, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should remain a secret just because it was discussed at Cabinet,” Giroux said in an interview.
The Treasury Board did not immediately respond to questions about why it declined to provide cost estimates on the program.
“It’s probably bureaucrats being overly risk averse,” Giroux said. “But there’s no way for me to be sure of that, because we haven’t seen the data.”
The Pay Equity Act was ultimately tucked inside the Liberal government’s 2018 omnibus budget bill, which passed the House of Commons on a 163-113 vote in late December, with most opposition parties voting against. It received royal assent without associated costs ever being supplied by government.
The changes under the act seek to achieve pay equity by “redressing the systemic gender-based discrimination” faced by women, the legislation says. Employers under the new regime must “calculate the compensation, expressed in dollars per hour, associated with each job class,” and pay employees a set amount according to the value ascribed to those classes.
The new legislation also calls for the appointment of a “pay equity commissioner” to audit public sector pay, resolve pay disputes, and impose financial penalties on agencies and corporations that fail to meet the new guidelines.
Various studies have claimed that women tend to receive only a portion of the wages of men occupying the same roles, prompting calls from advocacy groups for regulations that would enforce gender parity.
Of the $621 million in higher pay associated with the changes, the PBO estimates that by 2023-24, $477 million more would go toward wages while the remaining $144 million would go toward public pensions.
Ongoing costs for regulatory oversight of the program is expected to be $5 million per year. Administrative costs will be $9 million annually, according to the PBO report.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
