Ottawa October 31, 2016 – Instead of initiating fresh new ideas, Trudeau seems to be reluctant to disconnect his government from the past. He continuously lives out the 1993 Groundhog Day movie in which a weather man repeats Groundhog Day again and again. In this case, Trudeau meets the same people who urge the same thing such as reintroducing the tired policies of the 1980’s.
The most recent example of this is the announcement that the government will be re-introducing the costly, cumbersome and inaccurate feminist policy of equal pay for work of equal value for all federal employees by the end of the year 2018. This policy is not to be confused with the reasonable policy of equal pay for equal work that was established in most Canadian jurisdictions in the 1950’s.
The outdated equal pay policy provides that bureaucrats subjectively determine whether two different occupations are of equal “value” in regard to skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions, and as a result deserve the same pay. Such an undertaking is a colossal waste of time and taxpayers’ money and has been proven in practice to be ineffective and very costly. Employment should be determined on the basis of the best qualified person for the position, not on this flawed ideologically based program proposed by Trudeau.
At the core of the equal value concept is a desire to replace market mechanisms which determine the value of a particular job with governmentally-designed and enforced mechanisms. It involves a government re-evaluation of the marketplace and the economy. In effect, under the guise of equal opportunity, the concept of “equal value” is an attempt to achieve economic redistribution to provide for an undeserved female advantage.
In view of the complexities and divisiveness of this issue of “equal value”, it is a mistake for the government of Canada to push it on this country. To do so is to ignore the interests of business, the economy and the majority of Canadian women whose views and aspirations are not those of the feminists, who are the major advocates for this “equal value” legislation.