Yes, you read that correctly – in Canada it is now legal to pay men less than women, but not the other way around. They have dubbed this ‘Equal Pay’…. for some reason.
Canada’s new GBA policy, or “Gender based analysis” is what is to blame here. As you might have guessed, male workers in Canada are secondary citizens under law.
How This Happened
Justin Trudeau passed the Pay Equity Act of 2018 earlier this year (based on a 1987 Ontario law of the same name). The original Ontario act was presented as being a measure that guarantees equal pay – but when the language of the bill is examined, that turns out to be untrue. Men are actually not protected by the 1987 act, and it is not illegal to pay men less. Take a look:
“The Act requires private sector employers with ten or more employees and all public sector employers to value and compare jobs usually done by women to those usually done by men in an objective and consistent way using factors of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions. A female job class must receive compensation that is at least equal to the compensation that is paid to a male job class of equal or comparable value.”
Notice how it states that payment for work must be at least equal – which means it can either be equal, or can be more. Notice that the wording here is specifically not gender neutral: the law says that a female worker must receive at least as much a male doing the same job. This law was in use in Ontario for over thirty years, and now it is being scaled up. This means that Canadian companies are completely free to pay men less than women – and there is nothing men can do about it, until they challenge the law.
It Gets Worse
Men in Canada are already in trouble, being the least employed gender in the country as a whole. Under the Employment Equity Act, the vast majority of men are (again) specifically left out, as the 4 designated classes are as follows:
- Women
- Disabled workers
- Visible minorities
- Aboriginal workers
The bottom three of these groups are small, and can be easily justified as they are minority populations who may be regularly discriminated against. Disabled workers in particular need extra protections because plenty of them have mental or physical disabilities that make them easy targets. These three groups are not a problem, and their protection is a good thing.
But being a woman is not a mental or physical disability. In fact, women are over half of the adult population. By including women as a protected class, they saying – outright – that over half the population needs the same protections as an autistic, an epileptic, or a wheelchair user. That doesn’t make any sense at all. More humorously, it also means that the people who are not in any kind of protected class are actually a legal minority!
Oh, Canada….
For the population not in one of those classes, finding a job that pays you a fair wage is now much more difficult. While this will affect white men the most, all male minorities can expect to earn less than able-bodied white women. That includes black, aboriginal, gay, and disabled men – and you should realise what the implications of that are immediately.
This law could very well be a back-door method for bigots to pay minorities less money – so long as they mainly target the men. As long as they employ lots of male minorities and white women, it should be possible (even easy) to juggle the other laws successfully. Since black and gay men were the main targets of lynch mobs, you should already be able to see that only being able to target males is absolutely not a problem for a bigot.
You should also not forget that there are plenty of anti-male bigots around – including the ones who wrote this law. And don’t forget:
- The male unemployment rate is already consistently higher in Canada.
- Men have problems getting an education in the first place.
- Crippling child support is an almost uniquely male problem.
- And many more problems besides.
And now, on top of that, men face renewed, legalized, discrimination in both hiring and pay – while the class most likely to be employed is given favoured status. Unless men rally behind an equal pay and equal work campaign, it is very likely that they (and their children, and society) face a very dark future.
Women should not cheer too hard at the thought of their brothers, husbands, and fathers being penalised however. Men make up the backbone of the economy, and a lot of the money women spend comes from them. Even worse – you may swiftly find yourself the most expensive kind of employee to hire, and one known for taking more time off work. By agreeing to be paid more than men, you may find yourself the most undesirable employees of all.
If companies can capitalise on this, they will.
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