HUMA Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 1st SESSION

Standing Committee on Human Resources Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities

COMMITTEE EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Thursday, February 7, 2002

Á

1105

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques (Shefford, PC))

Ms. Monique Guay (Laurentides, BQ)

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Ms. Monique Guay

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mme Guay

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. John Crockett (Individual Presentation)

Á

1110

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Martin Loney (Individual Presentation)

Á

1115

Á

1120

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Robin Neill (Chair, Research Advisory Board, Atlantic Institute of Market Studies)

Á

1125

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Finn Poschmann (Policy Analyst, C.D. Howe Institute)

Á

1130

Á

1135

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson (Vice-President, Operations, Toronto Employment Equity Practitioners Association)

Á

1140

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Dan Hara (President, Hara Associates Inc.)

Á

1145

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Dan Hara

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Dan Hara

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Dale Johnston (Wetaskiwin, Canadian Alliance)

Â

1205

Mr. Martin Loney

Mr. Dan Hara

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Robin Neill

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. John Crockett

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Johnston

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Ms. Raymonde Folco (Laval West, Lib.)

Â

1210

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. John Crockett

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Â

1215

Ms. Monique Guay (Laurentides, BQ)

Mr. Dan Hara

Ms. Monique Guay

Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson

Â

1220

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Gurbax Malhi (Bramalea--Gore--Malton--Springdale, Lib.)

Mr. Finn Poschmann

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Finn Poschmann

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Dan Hara

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Robin Neill

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Gurbax Malhi

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Robin Neill

Â

1225

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Gurbax Malhi

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Martin Loney

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Gurbax Malhi

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP)

Mr. Dan Hara

Ms. Libby Davies

Â

1230

Mr. Dan Hara

Ms. Libby Davies

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Dan Hara

Mr. Eugène Bellemare (Ottawa--Orléans, Lib.)

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Dale Johnston

Mr. Eugène Bellemare

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Bellemare

Mr. Martin Loney

Â

1235

Mr. Eugène Bellemare

Mr. Martin Loney

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mrs. Carol Skelton (Saskatoon--Rosetown--Biggar, Canadian Alliance)

Mr. Finn Poschmann

Mrs. Carol Skelton

Mr. Finn Poschmann

Mrs. Carol Skelton

Mr. Finn Poschmann

Mrs. Carol Skelton

Mr. Martin Loney

Â

1240

Mrs. Carol Skelton

Mr. Dan Hara

Mrs. Carol Skelton

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Alan Tonks (York South--Weston, Lib.)

Mr. Martin Loney

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Alan Tonks

Â

1245

Mr. Finn Poschmann

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Ms. Monique Guay

Mr. Dan Hara

Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson

Mme Guay

Mr. Dan Hara

Â

1250

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Ms. Anita Neville (Winnipeg South Centre, Lib.)

Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson

Â

1255

Ms. Anita Neville

Mr. Dan Hara

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Mr. Robin Neill

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

Ms. Libby Davies

Mr. Dan Hara

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques)

---

CANADA

Standing Committee on Human Resources Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities

---

NUMBER 048

l

1st SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

---

COMMITTEE EVIDENCE

Thursday, February 7, 2002

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Á  (1105)  

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques (Shefford, PC)): Good day, everyone. I'd like to get things started right away because we have many witnesses to hear from and only two hours in which to do so. Just for your information, our proceedings will be televised from start to finish.

    Before I welcome the witnesses, I want to say that I was asked by the Canadian Alliance whether the witnesses could have a little more time to make their presentations. Normally, they get five minutes. We could extend that to eight or nine minutes, and shorten the time for questions accordingly.

    However, I would need the unanimous consent of committee members.

    Ms. Monique Guay (Laurentides, BQ): Are all of the witnesses planning to make presentations?

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): All four witnesses present will be addressing the committee. However, we expect others to be arriving. There's also Mr. Hara who is seated at the back.

    Ms. Monique Guay: Will we be meeting with them later one?

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Yes, and that would leave us less time for questions. It was Mr. Johnston who made the suggestion. I'm asking if there is unanimous consent to proceed in this fashion. The witnesses have a great deal to say to the committee and naturally, five minutes isn't a lot of time.

    A voice: [Editor's Note: inaudible]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): That's correct. I will try and hold the witnesses to eight or nine minutes.

    Ms. Monique Guay: Eight minutes.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Is everyone okay with this?

    Some Members: Yes.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Fine.

    The committee is meeting today to undertake the statutory review of the Employment Equity Act.

    At this time, I'd like to welcome our witnesses. Mr. John Crockett and Mr. Martin Loney are appearing as individual witnesses. Representing the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies is Mr. Robin Neill. Mr. Finn Poschmann is appearing on behalf of the C.D. Howe Institute. Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson represents the Toronto Employment Equity Practitioners Association. Finally, we have Mr. Dan Hara from Hara Associates Inc. who has already arrived.

    Welcome to all of you. As you can see, we've agreed to give you a little more time today to make your individual presentations. I'll proceed in the order listed. After all of who have had an opportunity to speak, we'll go to questions. We'll try to keep to the time allotted, because there any many of you and we have only two hours.

    Therefore, we'll begin with Mr. John Crockett. Go ahead, sir.

[English]

    Mr. John Crockett (Individual Presentation): Thank you very much.

    I am pleased to be given the opportunity to come to Ottawa to speak to you about employment equity. I understand that I was invited to participate on this panel because of my 13 plus years as an employment equity practitioner. For 11 of those 13 years, I was an employment equity manager and adviser for Imperial Oil Limited. Imperial Oil Limited is regulated as a federal employer for a portion of its business and a federal contractor for the balance. Also, the company is required to comply with the Quebec affirmative action program.

    Besides participating in a number of employment equity employer forums, I've been on the board of directors for the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work for the past seven years and the employers advisory council before that. I've been a member of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and I am past chair for the Toronto chapter. For the past two years I've been doing some diversity consulting work, mainly in the area of gender differences.

    Judge Rosalie Abella, in the October 1984 report of the Commission on Equality in Employment wrote:

Employment equity is a strategy designed to obliterate the present and residual effects of discrimination and to open equitably the competition for employment opportunities to those arbitrarily excluded. It requires a special blend of what is necessary, what is fair, and what is workable.

It has been over 15 years since legislation and a federal contractor program were introduced to deal with these barriers. Progress has been made, but far more progress is required for us to conclude that Canadians from all the designated groups experience fair and equitable treatment in all aspects of employment.

    I believe the original rationale for the legislation is still valid today. With this in mind, I have three recommendations to present to you today, and they are as follows. First, employment equity, whether it is the legislated program or the contractors program, must remain on the corporate agenda. Second, revisions to the act should be directed at minimizing the burden of reporting and audit requirements, so that more time and effort can be dedicated to making change. Third, the government must continue to provide the necessary support to bring about change.

    The first recommendation states that employment equity, whether it is the legislated program or the contractors program, must remain on the corporate agenda. If government legislation and contractor programs did not exist, other priorities would push equity measurement and initiatives well down on the list of priority items. Resources would not be dedicated to the area, even though employers generally want to do the right thing or be perceived as doing the right thing when it comes to equity.

    Without employment equity, women and visible minorities are likely to continue to progress, but at a slower pace. Aboriginal peoples would likely progress in communities where there is a critical social issue or they have economic power to influence employers into reaching out to these people. Otherwise, aboriginal people will continue to be marginalized. People with disabilities will likely not make any advances. Anecdotal evidence suggests that even if persons with disabilities are hired, promotion will be slow or not occur at all. The subtle barriers relating to attitude and cost of accommodation make it difficult for persons with disabilities to progress.

    While it may be argued that human rights legislation can deal with employers who discriminate, the legislation does not encourage employers to be proactive. Besides, human rights commissions are too overburdened with cases to effectively remedy situations that, in most instances, require immediate action.

    The second recommendation states that it's important to minimize the burden of reporting and audit requirements. Limited corporate resources need to spend time implementing change, rather than spending time responding to government information requests. Employers are required to submit numerical reports on an annual basis. Assigning NOC codes to each position, and then monitoring rates of recruitment, promotion, and turnover for the four designated groups by census metropolitan area, province, and nationally takes considerable time and resources. Most employers do not manage their businesses using Census Canada occupational classifications or geographic areas. If an employer is doing a thorough analysis and monitoring of progress, numerical reports will be developed along business unit lines, using employer-specific job classification systems. Additionally, long and detailed annual narrative reports on initiatives undertaken add to the burden, especially when all this information must be compiled for an audit. This is a duplication of effort. If any annual narrative reports are required, simplify the process with checklists or other means of collecting information.

Á  (1110)  

    It's important to audit employers to determine what progress has been made. The audit process should be to help employers focus on taking action, rather than creating an adversarial relationship. As a former employee of a company whose major shareholder is a U.S.-based company, I have seen the difficult relationship that exists between many U.S. employers and government affirmative action auditors. I had the impression that more efforts were directed at defending one's position than at actually creating change.

    My third recommendation is really a corollary to my second, and it is to provide more government support to employers and other organizations to bring about change. The development of guides and Internet tools has been helpful. Continuing efforts in this area will give the practitioner more time to carry out diversity initiatives. HRDC does provide funding for not-for-profit organizations that support the hiring and development of aboriginal persons and persons with disabilities. These organizations provide employers with valuable means of recruiting members from these designated groups. While this is somewhat outside the scope of the Employment Equity Act, it is important that financial support continue for these organizations. In relation to the act, HRDC can play an important role in ensuring that employers are aware of their existence and even encourage partnering with these not-for-profit organizations.

    In closing, I can say that over the past 13 years I have seen change occur, albeit slowly, but it is important to stay the course with the initiatives behind employment equity.

    Thank you very much.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Crockett.

    Now, Mr. Loney, take around seven or eight minutes, if you will.

    Mr. Martin Loney (Individual Presentation): Okay.

    I'm here to pour cold water over the preferential hiring industry. I'm the author of a book called The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender and Preferential Hiring in Canada, which was published by McGill-Queen's University Press. The focus of my research was to look at the claims of preferential hirers, and then to look at the evidence. I have to tell you that the claims of preferential hirers are not consistent with the evidence, and what we have is an industry that depends on the cherry-picking of statistics to make its case.

    My own experience, I think, is quite interesting in casting some light on the degree of rationality of the preferential hiring industry. The book I wrote was favourably reviewed in the Globe and Mail by Sandra Martin, who had herself spent a year on an Atkinson fellowship studying the issue of employment equity, and was therefore in a good position to judge the quality of the arguments I was making. I raise this simply because my view is in such a minority that people might be excused for thinking I have simply landed from a different planet or made these things up as I go along. Sandra Martin described my study as a “cogent and lethal attack” on preferential policies. She went on to observe that the strength of the book lay in its intellectual rigour.

He studies identity politics and equity legislation intellectually, as a scholar. Others--far too many others--have endorsed preferential policies from the stand of unquestioning advocacy.

    In the three and half years since my book was published there have been many consultations within the government and organized by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, conferences, and so forth on the issue of employment equity. I provided three copies of my book at my own expense to the Privy Council Office in the hope that they would be distributed to senior officials with an employment equity function in the federal government. In the three and a half years since this book was published I have had contact with no civil servant, been invited to no conference, taken part in no consultation. You might excuse me if I think that what we are dealing with here has more in common with a religious cult than with the rational formation of public policy in a controversial area.

    I have repeatedly criticized the claims made by government reports in the National Post and elsewhere. The response from government officials who compile these reports is a deafening silence. Let me make it absolutely clear, what I am saying in public in these articles and elsewhere is that the figures being used are inaccurate, that the research being undertaken is incompetent, that the resulting legislation institutionalizes discrimination on the basis of race and sex in the name of actually challenging discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

    Let me give you a couple of recent instances. The book contains a very large number of cases of, if you like, critiques of government policy-making and the claims of government policy-making going right back to the Abella Report, which never demonstrated the existence of the pervasive discrimination that it alleged and forms the basis of the legislation.

    A more recent report by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, undertaken for the foundation by the Canadian Council for Social Development, both of these groups heavily dependent on taxpayers' money, illustrates the lengths to which preferential hirers will go in abusing data. The Canadian Race Relations Foundation report indicates that visible minorities born in Canada are actually quite successful. If you look at a key factor, for example, university graduation, 47.5% of Canadian-born visible minorities in the 25 to 34 age group had university education, compared to only 26.6% of other Canadian-born people. This is scarcely a figure that is consistent with the claims that we have a Eurocentric curriculum, that we have systemic discrimination in education, that we live in a society in which racism is pervasive.

    Let's look at occupation, which is another indicator of success. The reason we should focus on visible minorities born in Canada is that we are then comparing apples and apples, whereas the preferential hiring industry prefers to compare applies and oranges. Immigrants and the Canadian-born are not the same, the language capacities are not the same, the educational background is not the same. If race-based discrimination exists, it must exist also for the Canadian-born visible minorities.

Á  (1115)  

    What do we find, then? The 1996 census data indicated that Canadian-born visible minorities are disproportionately successful in securing employment in the top occupational status group: 22% are professionals, nearly 40% more than their Canadian-born counterparts.

    Obviously, this was troubling, but not troubling enough for it to be highlighted when the report was released. Instead, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation chose to use a statistic on earnings that suggested that visible minorities born in Canada experience an earnings penalty. How did they discover this? They looked at the earnings of the age group 25 to 64, and found that visible minorities earned less than other Canadians. This is a typical preferential hiring statistic. What it disguises is the fact that visible minorities born in Canada are significantly younger than other Canadians in the comparable group, so that the difference in income is an age-related difference, not a difference based on ethnicity or race.

    In concluding, I would draw your attention to the recent task force on visible minorities in the federal public service, which produced the outrageous conclusion that in future 20% of public service positions are to be filled by visible minorities, a figure far in excess of their labour force availability, and that 20% of promotions to the executive class are to be filled by visible minorities, again, a figure far in excess of their availability. What was the evidence on which this was based? We were told in the report that the task force was greatly troubled by the fact that although 30% of applicants to post-secondary public service recruitment and 20% of applicants to general recruitment were visible minorities, they secured, respectively, only 13.9% and 4.1% of appointments. If this is discrimination, it is, indeed, at a level one would expect in Alabama in 1960. You would think the task force might have paused, examined the figures, and asked some hard questions. No. The task force simply rushed forward and concluded, “the principle of merit is not being meaningfully applied.”

    It took enormous effort to get the figures from the Public Service Commission. It was assisted by the fact that I was subsequently on the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen, which perhaps prompted them to be a little more cooperative. When I obtained the figures on which these claims were based, they came from a Public Service Commission study of its 1998 post-secondary recruitment campaign, but that report found that the figure was not 13.9%, but 22%, and that indeed, the reason visible minorities were less successful was that many of them were non-citizens and ineligible for appointment. The figures on general recruitment were equally unimpressive.

    I conclude there.

Á  (1120)  

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Looney.

    Now we have Mr. Neill from the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies.

    Mr. Robin Neill (Chair, Research Advisory Board, Atlantic Institute of Market Studies): Thank you very much.

    Prejudice is a legal and institutional imposition on market forces, and to legislate against it is simply to impose a further legal constraint on market forces, that is to say, it is to lay on another layer of prejudice.

    Let me unpack this statement a little. I'm now citing a book by Brian Crowley, The Road to Equity. He makes the point that people are certainly equal, but they are not the same. Tasks to be performed in our society are not the same. It is not prejudice that brings about a situation in which different people do different things. Second, setting quotas to ensure that different people do the same thing puts round pegs in square holes. It inhibits specialization and exchange, it imposes a non-market value on resources, and so it reduces the efficiency of the functioning of our economy. Third, it creates a class of people who are segregated by their being employed where they are not fully competent. This both embodies and produces prejudice.

    The document I read was from 1995 and points up the problem of quotas in hiring. The legislation protests that there shall be no quotas. On the other hand, the legislator, having seen the problem, offered no alternative to using quotas as a device for achieving so-called equity in employment. So we have a paper by Jain and Hackett attempting to measure the success of employment equity. It concludes that it cannot be measured, because there's no way to designate “the unfair employment barriers that the law intends to eliminate.” That's the legislative language. As a result, all that can be measured is the program to eliminate inequity or arbitrarily set quotas.

    From this we have the comments of Mr. Furedy on the employment program at the University of Toronto--I believe he's at the University of Toronto. He states that “the status of women's equity officer sits on hiring committees and harasses the members with hostile questions.” I have no doubt that this is the case. What we are looking at here is something like the Cheka in the Bolshevik regime of the Soviet Union or the attacks of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China.

    We now have a new problem. According to Echevarria and Huq, the problem now is a decline in the participation rate of males in the labour force. Employment of women is going up and the proportion of men employed is going down. Here we have a problem of a quota. Should we then legislate to improve the position of men, placing yet one more constraint on market forces? I would say, what was not good for the gander is not good for the goose; we ought not to legislate advanced employment quotas of men in this country. What we ought to do is undo the legislation we now have on the books.

    Thank you.

Á  (1125)  

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you.

    Now we have Mr. Poschmann from the C.D. Howe Institute. Welcome.

    Mr. Finn Poschmann (Policy Analyst, C.D. Howe Institute): Thank you, Madam Chairman, and thank you, members of the committee, for inviting me.

    I would like to remind the committee, if I may, that my institute does not take institutional positions and that I'm here to express my own views, not those of my members or board of directors. This disclaimer always stands, but it's especially important today, because employment equity can be a touchy or emotional issue, and I don't want to convey the impression that I'm speaking for people for whom I am not.

    I decided the way to present my comments was to frame them around proposals that we already have on the table, to pick up on the issues I think need to be highlighted, and to point out a couple of things I think are missing and ought to be on the table. I'm referring to the Canadian Human Rights Commission's release last week, wherein the agency most directly concerned with ensuring compliance and enforcing the act spelled out their wish list for this review.

    The CHRC's recommendation 2 is the first that caught my eye--and if you don't have the report, I'll just summarize what their recommendations are. The CHRC would like covered employers to conduct a “concentration analysis” for all occupations by covered category, rather than restrict such review to situations where flags have been raised during the search for under-representation. It's easy to understand the agency's aims here, but the problem is that the proposal runs headlong into one repeated criticism of the act and its implementation--and this is something practitioners I'm sure have told you often enough before. The act, in its enforcement, is really about report writing, not about the business of ensuring that covered groups actually begin to be more fully represented in the workplace.

    It also raises value-for-money questions, as in whether additional reporting is likely to survive the cost-benefit test. Let's consider the compliance costs of the existing program. No one knows what they are, but my rough estimate puts a floor on the program of about $96 million in costs for the economy for the 400 currently covered employers, and that's leaving aside the many more under the federal contractors program. So on what basis might we assert to the public that further reporting is likely to contribute to a net positive gain to the economy? We might consider whether investment in skills or certification or otherwise improving the match between labour supply and labour demand would deliver better value for money. I hope we can talk more later about the labour supply questions, because they're important.

    Next on my list is the CHRC's recommendation 4, which is that the employers define, write, and publish their accommodation policy and procedures, and that these policies should be based on “a duty to accommodate to the point of undue hardship.” Leaving aside the content of these points, what I want to mention is that it's very much a double-barrelled recommendation, and each barrel ought to be inspected separately and very carefully before loading.

    Recommendations 6 and 8 would amend the regulations and the act to ensure that short-term and long-term goals were specified as targets that must be achieved and for which some specific or special hiring and promotion practices must be adopted, and in the particular case of long-term goals, there must be numerical targets defining full representation. These recommendations certainly do seem to mandate action, as opposed to report writing, and they also have the merit of clarity. What I want to point out is that what the CHRC wants is for firms to have quota targets that must be met by preferentially hiring from covered groups until those targets are met. It's all clear enough, but if these were adopted, Parliament would no longer be able to claim that the Employment Equity Act is not just about numbers, quotas, and preferential hiring.

    Similarly, recommendations 11 and 12 would permit the CHRC to quickly step out of its persuasion or coercion mode and, as it saw fit, wield a simple hammer of enforcement order or directive. Again, this is clear enough, but I wonder if Parliament should be quick to end the notion that employment equity is about cooperation in pursuit of agreed goals and make it instead an adversarial battle.

    I would just like to take a minute to point out what I don't think has been discussed enough in the context of the act. First is the long-run importance of profoundly changing demographics and workplaces. Second is what sort of idealized end-state we should be looking for, which I think is one where we would perceive the Employment Equity Act as irrelevant or even retrograde.

Á  (1130)  

    On the first point, population aging is the biggest factor. Employer surveys, including one survey that included many of our members, show that attracting and retaining talent remains an absolute top-of-the-mind issue in building businesses. In combination with aging, this suggests that employers will be falling all over themselves doing outreach in the next couple of decades, they will be looking everywhere to find, develop, and retain human capital, and they won't need much outside encouragement to do so. This will benefit all covered groups, but most particularly the disabled, because, for example, workplace changes that are aimed at accommodating the mobility problems associated with the elderly will also improve the workplace environment for those whose mobility is limited for reasons other than age.

    My second point is the end state. I think all of us would like to see a world where sex and ethnicity, for example, are attributes that have no independent impact on the hiring decision. For the present, however, we have an act that insists employers should manage hiring decisions and promotion decisions at all times with an eye to which race, sex, or ability category each employee should be boxed into. This feels wrong to me, and I expect it feels wrong to many Canadians. What I would like to see appear in the act, if not through this review, then through the next one, is evidence that the legislation's framers have contemplated a world where the act need not apply.

    Finally, I just want to point out one issue for discussion, the economy-wide importance of building social capital. This has been an emerging issue in the last few years, and I think it's an interesting one. It's a fuzzy concept, true enough, but social capital refers to the trust strangers extend to one another as they go about their daily business, permitting the exchange of goods, services, and ideas at a rate that wouldn't be possible without mutual trust. This trust depends in large part on people seeing others as individuals comparable to themselves in their relationship to the market place and in their relationship with society at large. It's hard to see how this trust, this community of interest, is enhanced when we are encouraged, or as employers required, to think of individuals first, foremost, and always as members of one or another sex or race category, not really as individuals at all.

    That's where I'll stop. Thank you.

Á  (1135)  

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you very much, Mr. Poschmann.

    I'd like to inform my colleagues that we are being called to the House for a vote. Apparently, we still have 20 minutes, because members are debating whether or not to defer the vote. We'll know what they decide in a few minutes' time. Therefore, we will continue with these proceedings and we will be kept apprised of the situation.

    I'd now like to welcome Ms. Robertson who represents the Toronto Employment Equity Practitioners Association.

[English]

    Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson (Vice-President, Operations, Toronto Employment Equity Practitioners Association): Thank you.

    Honourable members, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here today representing TEEPA, the Toronto Employment Equity Practitioners Association, but I speak from the perspective of a person with a disability. I'd like to thank my colleague Judy Jeager of Human Capital for her valuable input on the broader issues of employment equity. I work for Handidactis, and our mandate is to deliver sensitivity and awareness training and consulting, but exclusively on disability issues.

    The Employment Equity Act mandates that employers must assess their workplaces and remove barriers, but it does not provide the methodology for the process. I believe the act should require employers to contract experienced site auditors to survey the built environment to identify the barriers to access for employees with disabilities and members of other designated groups.

    Most people, even building designers and architects, do not have a clear perception of the extensive barriers that confront members of designated groups. Issues such as poorly developed signage can be a barrier for people who cannot read, through learning or intellectual disabilities, but are equally obstructionist for recent immigrants who cannot read in either of our national languages. A heavy, non-automated door is an obvious obstacle for a person who uses a wheelchair. It is equally a barrier for anyone, male or female, who is pushing a baby carriage, is pulling a luggage carrier, or is physically small and slight, without sufficient strength to operate the door.

    Many other barriers exist for people who have a variety of physical, hearing, vision, speech, learning, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities. Even the most sensitive and aware employer cannot be cognizant of every relevant parameter, and will be likely to look around the workplace and assume that barriers do not exist, because they are not readily apparent. The ability to identify barriers does not automatically bring with it the knowledge of the appropriate remedy. Employers should be encouraged to contract professional auditors and designers who are recognized experts in the area of barrier-free design.

    In our experience, the most significant barrier that exists in the vast majority of workplaces is the lack of training on disability issues. Because training is not required or even suggested, employers and staff do not have a great deal of awareness in this area. Often they do not understand the definition of the word disabled, and so they respond incorrectly to the survey questions. To clarify the issue at hand, a disability is a limitation in function that is consistently present, a handicap is situational and depends upon a specific environment. The confusion over these definitions significantly damages the validity of employers' surveys.

    In our consulting work we have met many employers who are afraid to ask their employees even the most basic of questions about their disabilities. The employer's discomfort is easily transmitted to the employee, and this causes the person with the disability to feel insecure about the longevity of the employment. The employees become afraid to ask for necessary accommodations, even when these have negligible attendant costs. Although the act clearly states that the presence of appropriate accommodations and a lack of barriers in the workplace does not mean that the employees are not disabled, many admit to answering no, even when their impairment is significant. This is often due to a sincere lack of understanding, but we frequently encounter people who are disabled who feel implicit pressure to hide or deny their disabilities to avoid discrimination.

    A different set of circumstances, still related to a lack of training, occurs when an employee has an invisible disability. Employees with invisible disabilities who have not self-identified are often reluctant to do so for a number reasons. Primarily, it's due to a fear of the employer's and co-workers' reactions. In our experience at Handidactis we find that people who are not familiar with the nature of invisible disabilities are most afraid of these conditions. Employees are justifiably cautious about exposing themselves to professional disadvantage when they are living with learning or psychiatric disabilities. There appears to be a widespread belief that anyone with a disability will be sophisticated about disability-related issues. This erroneous impression leads to gaps in information-sharing. In fact, many employees do not know much about the provisions of the Employment Equity Act and do not understand the purpose of the questions in an employee survey. Their fear of discrimination leads them to deny their disabilities.

    It is my experience that the entire workforce benefits when appropriate training is implemented and when detailed site surveys are performed by experienced auditors. The act should provide direction in these areas to assist employers in reaching their goals.

Á  (1140)  

    To further the aims of the Employment Equity Act, it would be beneficial if there were a fund to support employers who create entry-level jobs for low-skilled people with disabilities. Apprenticeships are very difficult to obtain and have high academic requirements that may be unachievable for some people who have not had access to advanced education. Through a variety of federal programs, employers can sometimes obtain short-term income support for some disabled employees. This money runs out relatively quickly, leaving the employer with an employee who may not be ready to work and contribute to the progress of the organization.

    More monetary resources should be available to agencies that focus on finding employment for people with disabilities and members of designated groups. Funding is often short-term and linked to other federal projects, such as employment insurance or welfare eligibility. I previously worked for an HRDC-funded agency that contracts training for people with disabilities and helps them find employment. There was constant frustration with the limitations of the various programs. They require significant upgrading and additional financial support in order to create real change for all the members of designated groups, including people with disabilities, who want to work.

    Thank you.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mrs. Robertson.

    Now we have Mr. Hara from Hara Associates Incorporated.

    Mr. Dan Hara (President, Hara Associates Inc.): Thank you.

    I'm Canadian-Japanese. I've a firm of economists--that's orientation--with a variety of practices, a major one of which concerns the Employment Equity Act as applied to the public service; we advise departments and agencies. We've done 11 employment systems reviews and workforce analyses for departments, and we're principal authors of a couple of Treasury Board manuals in the area. So we're bringing a public sector application point of view to this, as well as, perhaps, a little experience with the hard numbers in general.

    I'd like to focus on what works and what doesn't work. First, I'd like to say that the act, as a whole, works. It fills a need at a reasonable cost. There is a justice issue, and the numbers show that. You can question someof the data, but the gaps are big enough to say that even after controlling for Canadian citizenship, there are real issues there. And on top of justice to individuals, if it wasn't apparent before September 11, it is now that social cohesion is a value in itself that we need to be concerned about.

    So the act is a right choice of tool. When you have a pervasive injustice happening and individual enforcement through courts or the Human Rights Commission on individual cases, it is expensive for society. So if you resolve to deal with these issues, you need a different policy tool. The Employment Equity Act is working on a effective and reasonable basis.

    What works? Workforce availability is a standard employers are asked to meet. I would say it's a fair standard and, in my experience, very consistent with the merit principles, something we still have enshrined in our public service. If only 10% of mechanical engineers are women, the act only expects 10% of those hired to be women, on average; there's also allowance for random variation. I would say that if an employer is consistently not hiring or keeping that 10%, they probably have some biases unrelated to merit in their hiring systems, and that's costing them; they're missing some good female hires. So I think merit and employment equity are highly complementary.

    The employer also has the freedom to define the workforce they draw from appropriately. So they can compare themselves to the appropriate region or where they happen to draw their employees from. Even when a shortfall is significant in a numerical sense, that's not a conclusion, because this is not a quota system. It begins a process of investigation of the employment systems review and where barriers are found, the employment equity plan. So workforce availability is a fair, good, and Canadian kind of approach that seems to work well.

    Data can always be improved, but the data we have now work. What we have now provides a workable picture for women and members of visible minorities and aboriginal peoples. When we find a significant gap there, it is usually real. We attempt to find causes, but as I'll comment, we don't always. With persons with disabilities, we anxiously await the new survey that's going on. There is an issue there, but the gaps we see for persons with disabilities are so large, that's not an issue, especially when I look at hiring instead of representation. I come across departments constantly with zero hiring. So I don't care how bad your data are, if all your persons with disabilities are people who have become disabled through age, there's an issue here.

    The exceptions prove the rule in the effectiveness of data. We don't take the numbers as God-given, we recognize the problem. Three times we have found significant gaps that didn't make sense in checking with the department and reviewing their files and applicants. And when we went back and checked how it was done, often not our work, of course, we found an error in the occupational matching that explained the gap and in the end, when corrected, matched the real world experience of departments.

    I'll stick to one example. In the case of economists and statisticians, one department was showing a huge gap in women. As it happens, they were seeing about 30%, not 50%. When we checked, if you narrowed, and correctly narrowed in their case, the job matching not to all social sciences, as they were only hiring hard economists, then 30% was the right number and it matched their experience. That confirms for me the reliability of the kinds of data we're using, because it's matching up the other stories.

    As for finding employment barriers, the definition in the act is working. We'd like to believe that competitive markets could eliminate barriers, but there's a vast economic literature showing that's not true in a variety of possible ways.

Á  (1145)  

    Barriers are more than prejudice or racism. I'm glad to say we don't have much of that in the public service, but we do have an unfortunate outcome of many people trying to grapple unsuccessfully with the changing workforce. In the end, we benefit the employer.

    I'll give one of example of those listed here. It's fine to ask, why do want this job? That's a standard kind of interview question. But when reviewing files, I have scoring sheets--

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Mr. Hara, I'm going to give you only one more minute, because they're calling us to the House. We're will have to move for maybe half an hour, and we're going to be back after. So please try to wrap up in one minute.

    Mr. Dan Hara: I'm certainly glad you have what's here in front of me. I'll finish the example, because it is important to understand how this really works. It's not necessarily evil in the heart.

    People have had a scoring sheet where they were scoring that question based on how aggressive that person was. So if you followed the classic model of the young, aggressive, “want this job” kind of person, you got a good score. If you were respectful of your elders as an aboriginal, if you were displaying your aggression in a different way as an Indo-Canadian, or your ambition in a different way, you didn't get the score and you didn't get the job.

    To hit the highlights in my 30 seconds, we find many ways of barrier removal that don't interfere at all with the merit principle. When stronger medicine is required, that's usually because there's a big non-merit problem out there already.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Mr. Hara, we're going to suspend the proceedings at this time. We'll have to leave for a minutes, and then we'll return. I apologize for the inconvenience.

    The meeting is suspended. We will reconvene in 30 minutes.

Á  (1150)  

---

  (1201)  

[English]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Okay. I'm going to start over again, so if you have some comments, you could take a minute or two to come to your conclusion.

    Mr. Dan Hara: Thank you very much. In the interests of time, I'll omit some of the examples. I'm happy to answer your questions.

    Audits by the CHRC are working very well for the public sector in finally getting them to comply. That was a major change in the last act, and it's having a huge impact in getting departments to do something. I could give an example of two departments in an almost identical situation where the audit made the difference.

    As an overview, I think it pays for itself in the side benefits. You've heard other gross numbers and calculations. Coming at it from a micro-perspective, because we're working with the merit principle, in effect, in helping it, if we manage to get one better hire or help a department avoid one bad hire... That hire is expensive; more than the cost of the person are the mistakes that can be made. So if we just save one bad decision, it would pay for the study.

    There are things that don't work and need improvement. The big problem is resourcing. The CHRC audits aren't well supported, because unlike the Auditor General, they don't get to use enough support for the quality of the net results; sometimes they get some bad results, depending on the auditor, not personal bad results, but things that make work that shouldn't happen.

    The Public Service Commission split with the Treasury Board is correct in the act, in my view, but the public service, which is responsible for half of it, never has been funded to carry out its obligations. That has had huge implications for departments.

    One final flag deals with area selection. This really speaks to the public service. The new act should acknowledge that if somebody changes the area of selection to improve the representation, such as being located in Ottawa and then reaching out to Toronto for visible minorities, that shouldn't up the bar they have to meet. They shouldn't suddenly have a different experience. That's going to be a real issue for the public service itself, because if you go national, you don't want to suddenly have the numbers saying that because you're hiring nationally, as opposed to in the National Capital Region, everything is under-represented. There should be some phasing in of that kind of thing, so that the reports don't become meaningless.

    That would be my final comment.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you very much, Mr. Hara. Again, I apologize for the disruption.

    We'll now go to questions and as much as possible, I would like us to stick to five minutes for the first round of questions.

    Go ahead, Mr. Johnston.

[English]

    Mr. Dale Johnston (Wetaskiwin, Canadian Alliance): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I want to thank all of you for your presentations today.

    The purpose of the committee's work is to review the present act, and the purpose of the review is to see whether or not the act needs to be changed in any way. So I'll just give the floor over to you, because I feel you've been kind of shortchanged in your presentation today, to see individually whether you feel the act, first of all, needs changing. If so, how would you change it?

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Do you want to answer, Mr. Loney?

  (1205)  

    Mr. Martin Loney: I think the act should be repealed. I think the act has institutionalized discrimination in employment. Contrary to the information that has been provided saying merit is the principle that guides employment, you can find quite easily on the Public Service Commission website that there are an increasing number of jobs that are, in fact, racially specific. There is a job, for example, at Public Works that pays a salary of up to $81,000 a year. No university degree is required for this position, which is in communications, but you do have to be a member of a visible minority to be eligible to apply. If you look at universities, the legislation has been used by radical feminists to favour women in employment. The data are quite clear. Women with a PhD are twice as likely to secure academic employment as their male counterparts. There's no dispute about these data, so I would suggest the act be repealed.

    Mr. Dan Hara: find that the act proper is well constructed, both conceptually and in detail. There are technical improvements that occur in the regulations.

    As for CHRC powers, I haven't reviewed their request, but I think the main thing is that CHRC needs the resources to do its current job better, as opposed to more powers for an under-resourced unit. Things might get more arbitrary.

    It's also important in assessing the act to distinguish between other situations and other things that are not part of the act. The one-in-five policy, while it's obviously a visible minority policy, is a policy I support, but it's not the act driving that so much as the government policy in a broader sense and concern in this area. So it's a policy of the government that's at issue there.

    As for other venues in other legislation and academic appointments, I don't think that's relevant to the workings of this act.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Hara.

    Mr. Neill.

[English]

    Mr. Robin Neill: I have two things. As it stands now, it's hard to implement this act without dealing with quota, and the problem with that is the same problem as that with the body count in Vietnam. You don't deal with the substance, you're just dealing with numbers.

    The second thing--and you will forgive me for being a little emotional about this--is that there is a certain element of hypocrisy in having an equity act in a country that tolerates compulsory retirement at age 65. That is iniquitous. That is ageism. And as my colleague says, who's going to have sympathy for a retired university professor? This is a matter of sympathy, not of justice. Add that to the act--no age discrimination.

    Thank you.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): We have one minute remaining, Mr. Crockett.

[English]

    Mr. John Crockett: I would specifically suggest that the definition of person with disability be changed. Right now it only includes persons whose functional limitations due to their impairment have been accommodated in the current job and workplace, and I believe the consultation process has identified this as an issue. I think it should include “or”, as opposed to “and”.

    I think also there's a funding issue with respect to the auditors or HRDC for the contractors program, which I understand will be dealt with later, and I'd like to see more funding provided for resources to support employers.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): We have a few seconds left. Would anyone like to make a brief comment?

    Have you anything further to add, Ms. Robertson or Mr. Poschmann?

[English]

    Is that okay, Mr. Johnston?

    Mr. Dale Johnston: Is my time up?

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Oui.

    Ms. Folco is next, followed by Ms. Guay.

[English]

    Ms. Raymonde Folco (Laval West, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    I have a question, but before I get to it, I feel very strongly that I have to reply to some of the language that has been used by some of the witnesses here this afternoon.

    I take strong exception to using the word Cheka when we talk about any of the Canadian institutions, although I respect anyone's right to say whatever he likes to say. I think the objectives of the Cheka, to disseminate terror in the country, are very different from what anybody does, including CHRC, and that's the reason I'm expressing myself in English right now.

    Regarding the study on visible minorities, I can see that there are problems in interpretations of the numbers, but what I don't understand is why that particular presentation looked at visible minorities only and did not look at the other designated categories. Certainly, you can talk about visible minorities and say there are different generations of people who have arrived in Canada, and so the factors are not exactly the same, and we can discuss that at length, but if you look at women, if you look at the first nations, if you look at people with disabilities, that factor does not enter into view. I don't understand why that factor was not brought into that gentleman's presentation, which omission brings a great deal of weakness to his presentation.

    I would like to make a comment also on what my view of society is, as opposed to what seems to be the view of some other people around this table this morning. My view of society is that we try, as citizens, and particularly as people in government, to make it so that every individual, no matter when he came to Canada, no matter what his colour, his disability, whatever, realizes his full potential. One gentleman mentioned that it was putting round pegs in square holes. I differ with that very strongly, because in a society, certainly, you need different people to do different jobs, but what you also need is to have people in one job being able to go to, or have their children or another generation go to, a different status in this country. We've always enjoyed a great deal of social and professional mobility in Canada, and this is something we want to continue. My understanding of the equity program is that it is to help those people who have the potential and who have competence--and I'd like to underline this--to get the job their competence fits.

    That's the comment I would like to make. I once again respect the right these people have of saying this, but I think the language was much too strong for the kind of situation that presents itself to us.

  (1210)  

[Translation]

    I have a question. If time is a problem, Madam Chair, I would appreciate one of the witnesses answering the question at some other time.

    Based on what I've heard this morning, would it be possible for one of the witnesses to describe for us a Canadian firm that has successfully implemented employment equity in the workplace and to tell us what benefits this has brought to the company?

    The data I have shows that companies with an employment equity program in place come out on the winning end. Therefore, I would appreciate it if one or more of our witnesses could describe for us how private companies in fact benefit from this type of initiative.

    Thank you.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Would someone care to respond? We likely have time for one answer, because we have only a minute or so remaining.

    Mr. Crockett.

[English]

    Mr. John Crockett: The question is how a company such as Imperial Oil would have benefited from employment equity, and it was mentioned to me at the break that we fell under four employment equity programs at one time. The bottom line would be that we are preparing the workplace for the diversity that is coming in. I know we struggled with gender differences back in the seventies, and I think we have made great strides. Being able to integrate people in what's going to become a labour-short market, if it isn't already in some areas, is where I think the biggest payoff will be. I don't think we've ever done any analysis to determine what that payoff is, but that's primarily it.

    There are also, I think, social costs not having to be picked up by governments that would have ended up in either personal income taxes, which, of course, is a problem for people wanting to migrate to the United States, because they perceive it's better to work there, as well as corporate taxes. So there is a benefit, and I haven't personally tried to calculate it.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Crockett.

    We'll now go to Ms. Guay, followed by Mr. Malhi and Ms. Davies.

  (1215)  

    Ms. Monique Guay (Laurentides, BQ): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    I have to say that I disagree with many of the witnesses this morning. As you know, I'm from Quebec and that province's own employment equity legislation works very well. The federal government would do well to look to certain provisions in Quebec's act to improve its own legislation.

    I have to disagree with the witnesses because this legislation was adopted out of necessity. It was important to ensure that all Canadians benefited from employment equity. Businesses seek to hire persons of equal ability, whether it be aboriginals, women or persons with disabilities. A position cannot be filled by a person lacking the necessary qualifications, because that person would stand to lose the most. The same criteria must be applied to everyone. I think that's the aim of this legislation.

    Moreover, our purpose here is to recommend improvements to the act, not, as Mr. Loney and Mr. Neill requested, to recommend that it be repealed. That is out of the question. We're trying to suggest ways of improving the legislation and of making it more cost-effective. Current statistics clearly show that persons with disabilities and aboriginals have not made much progress in this area. Therefore, we need to consider ways of turning this situation around.

    Finally, our witnesses have been saying from the outset that the federal government has made no effort to reach out and promote the legislation. My question is for Mr. Hara. Should the government... Quebec launched a major public awareness campaign in an effort to increase the number of visible minority and women applying for jobs in the provincial public service, working through Quebec's employment equity legislation and taking into account equal abilities. An effort is being made to reach out to these persons and have them apply. This isn't always easy because of the different lifestyles they lead.

[English]

    Mr. Dan Hara: If I may answer, I agree that outreach is one of the things we commonly recommend in various forms as a solution, and the public service of previous years has not been very good at doing outreach. An extreme example is one case where we found a department that was extremely under-represented in visible minorities in a big occupation. On investigation, it turned out not only was there no outreach, but in fact, because they had special delegation, only the current employees' relatives and friends knew where to apply for the job. So there's an example of outreach and also general payback to everybody of application of the act. It's on the way to being fixed, so I'd prefer not to name it.

[Translation]

    Ms. Monique Guay: Clearly, there is still room for improvement.

    Mr. Malhi himself said that he often meets with constituents, taxi drivers with trunk loads of diplomas who do not have access to public service jobs. It is still difficult for them to gain a foothold in the public service. Clearly then, there is still room for improvement. Any positive suggestion will be favourably received.

    Ms. Robertson, would you care to share with me you views on the employment situation of persons with disabilities? Have you observed any progress on this front? How do you suggest the legislation be improved so that persons with disabilities have access to jobs and truly benefit from employment equity?

[English]

    Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson: As I said in my initial presentation, certainly awareness is the biggest thing, because people look at those with disabilities and they are scared. So if they're not aware of what the disability means and what it entails, they're afraid to make a commitment to hire. I've had people say to me--and, mind you, this hasn't happened recently, because I have worked for Handidactis now for six years--what should we do if you faint or throw up at work? For God's sake, what would you do for anybody else? You call a doctor or something. I'm no more likely to do that than anyone else. And I've heard just ridiculous stories of employers who are afraid to hire somebody with a disability because they think it's going to cost a lot of money. One of my clients, before I became involved with them, actually spent about $5,000 building a big wheelchair-accessible washroom because they had hired a disabled man to work in their factory. The guy was deaf. The disabled washroom was completely unnecessary, but they spent all this money because they assumed that if they hired somebody with a disability, he had to have a big toilet.

    So it's awareness, that's what it is. It's training to make people not be afraid of us. That's the biggest thing. If people understood that any job can be done by a person with a disability, depending on the disability.... I don't want my pilot to be blind, but he could have other disabilities--there are famous pilots who had no legs. So there are lots of things that people could be doing, but if people are aware and understand our capabilities, we'd be able to work in a lot more places.

  (1220)  

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Ms. Robertson. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Mahli, followed by Ms. Davies.

[English]

    Mr. Gurbax Malhi (Bramalea--Gore--Malton--Springdale, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    Highly qualified professionals, doctors and engineers, cannot work in their field because their foreign credentials are not recognized. Is there anything the federal government can do to establish standards to recognize foreign credentials? Can the professional associations, which are often under provincial jurisdiction, be monitored by a federal institution, such as the Canadian Human Rights Commission?

    Mr. Finn Poschmann: May I take that question?

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): By all means, Mr. Poschmann.

[English]

    Mr. Finn Poschmann: think it's a very good point. I have a lot of sympathy for the certification question, because this gets directly to the issue I raised of matching people with capabilities and with the correct certification to their jobs. You have quite rightly recognized that it is not an employment equity question, it is a coordination question. What makes it very difficult for Parliament is that it's largely a provincial issue, and what we need to do more than anything else is find ways to encourage the provinces to establish standards and portability of certification. It's not something that's particularly accessible from an employment equity standpoint or from a federal standpoint, but it does go to the heart of the job-matching question. That's an important economic issue and something on which it's possible to get some traction.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): I believe you wanted to respond, Mr. Hara.

[English]

    Mr. Dan Hara: One is always struggling with whether it's the legislation that's the issue or resourcing that's the issue. I think, in part, there is a legislative angle to this. The main way it works now--and very few people know how to work it, it's one of the things we check for--the federal government relies on the university system's own certification equivalency processes. Very few people know or get informed that they have a right to claim equivalency. There are a couple of institutes that will do this for a fee, but not necessarily for all possible designations. There's room in the act somewhere to create an obligation, perhaps, for a department that would end up providing federal participation and resourcing for these kinds of institutes to do their job better and to expand the scope.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Hara. Mr. Neill.

[English]

    Mr. Robin Neill: It's noticeable in this case--I have great sympathy with that--that it is legislation for licensing, certification, and that sort of thing that prevents these people who are qualified from functioning in our country. It's not the market, it's legislation that creates this prejudice. Legislation and institutions are what cause prejudice. The less we have that in the marketplace, the better.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Neill.

    You have two minutes remaining, Mr. Malhi.

[English]

    Mr. Gurbax Malhi: What do you suggest to the federal government that will help them discuss that with the provincial government?

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Mr. Neill.

[English]

    Mr. Robin Neill: Is this a federal-provincial affair? Welcome to Canada.

  (1225)  

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Is that okay, Mr. Malhi?

    Mr. Gurbax Malhi: No, I'm not satisfied, but I'm going to another question.

    According to my understanding, Martin Loney believes the agenda is coloured, is what holds people back in their opportunity for employment. If this were true, would employment equity law and programs be necessary? Again, if this were true, how would we deal with that problem?

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): You're going to have only half a minute.

    Mr. Martin Loney: That's a very succinct summary of my view. We need measures that are inclusive directed to the improvement of the positions and opportunities of poor Canadians, irrespective of race and gender.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Is that okay, Mr. Malhi?

    Mr. Gurbax Malhi: Can I ask another question?

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): No, your time is up.

[Translation]

    We'll now go to Ms. Davies, followed by Mr. Bellemare.

[English]

    Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP): Thank you very much, Madam Chairperson.

    I think it's worth repeating that there is a lot of misinformation that the Employment Equity Act and program is based on merit and there is not a quota system. We've heard misinformation about this so many times that I think it's very important that we point this out as a matter of fact, not just of opinion.

    I'm actually not going to waste my time taking on the witnesses who obviously don't agree with the act, other than to note that it's interesting that when someone does have direct experience, for example, an older worker or someone who's been forced into retirement, you can see that someone understands what discrimination is about, but obviously, there's a lack of understanding about applying that to women, or visible minorities, or aboriginal people, or people with disabilities. I thought your own experiences very illuminating of what it is we're actually trying to deal with here.

    The question I have is for Mr. Hara. In speaking about what actually needs some improvement, you made a reference--and I actually have some confusion about this--to the Public Service Commission and the Treasury Board. You're saying the way it's laid out in the act is okay in your mind. But the PSC has never been properly funded for any of the duties. This has had a big impact on how they perform or the fact that they lose staff. First, in your experience, what are the differences in their roles, and what kind of support or resources do you think the PSC requires for them to fulfil their responsibilities under the Employment Equity Act?

    Mr. Dan Hara: The Treasury Board and Public Service Commission in the act are mutually responsible, each according to their responsibilities under their own acts. The Public Service Commission is responsible for appointments, which makes it a big part of employment equity. However, the money they use ultimately comes from Treasury Board. Treasury Board has a stake in being considered the employer. I'm afraid, out of the politics of the situation, any funding that has been received by the Public Service Commission has been temporary and directed as a Treasury Board program. As a result, they have never had the resourcing to adequately police their delegated authorities in some of these areas. I think I gave an example of one completely outrageous problem with access. Even on those other programs with five-year mandates, one of which just came up, people leave, and they lose all capacity on a continuing basis to carry out their duties. Right now there's a office half-filled with new directors. All the old folks, who became very experienced, got jobs elsewhere when the deadline came rather than risk their jobs. So there's a bit of an empty hall there for the job they are able to do.

    Ms. Libby Davies: To follow that up, if a case can be made that the Public Service Commission actually requires resources to carry out their responsibilities, what about within individual departments--this is something I've been very concerned about--so that each department is required to make sure they are meeting the act, to go through the audit, to carry on with the program? We heard from the Canadian Human Rights Commission it can take about three years. Are there also issues in your mind, from having worked with different departments, that within a department there aren't adequate personnel, resources, or training, whatever, to actually make sure this process is having successful outcomes in meeting the targets?

  (1230)  

    Mr. Dan Hara: I may surprise you with this answer, but this is not an expensive act. At the departmental level, the barrier is getting the attention and motivation of senior management. The amount of money we're talking about for an individual department to run through the compliance exercise is small for them. What's big is following up with correction, but those corrections, I would say, do pay for themselves. It's getting folk's attention, and the act, I think, has been quite successful in using CHRC to achieve that. So at the departmental level, I don't view resources as the biggest barrier, but attention.

    Ms. Libby Davies: So does that come back to an issue of compliance? I think we heard that there were 20 directions the commission had put out. I think that included the public sector and the private sector. One of the questions that we've had overall is whether there should be more emphasis on compliance. When an audit has been done and a program is meant to be under way, and obviously the department isn't following through, how do you get the attention of the senior management, so as to put that into action? Is it through compliance?

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Could you make it a short answer, because we don't have a lot of time.

    Mr. Dan Hara: I think this is one of the areas where, technical competence aside, the CHRC is doing the correct thing. They're taking their time in the enforcement process, but they're following through the whole process in the act and they're dragging departments down the road. So as a result, they're a bit behind on their schedule, but I'm seeing the effect very strongly, and things are moving forward.

[Translation]

    Mr. Eugène Bellemare (Ottawa--Orléans, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

[English]

    I know Mr. Loney. He is a very likeable guy, he has a nice smile, and I like him, but I wish he'd shut up, because what he says is bloody awful. He has a sense of humour, so he can take this. I was going to ask him if he could spell the word compassion for me, but obviously, since he wrote a 400-page book, he knows how to spell. So, jokingly, I would ask him what the “ss“ means in the word compassion, but I won't let him answer that.

    You seem to give definitions as either white or black--no pun intended--and your definitions seem to be a throw-back to the Mein Kampf era.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Hara.

    Go ahead, Mr. Bellemare.

[English]

    Mr. Dale Johnston: Madam Chairman, , is it the purpose of the committee to harass people who come here?

    Mr. Eugène Bellemare: I'm not harassing him, we're having fun! He had his day, and I'm just going to ask him a question or two.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): If you could put your questions to the witness then, Mr. Bellemare...

[English]

    Mr. Eugène Bellemare: It's not meant to be belittling Mr. Loney. Mr. Loney is a very powerful thinker, and he can handle himself--I know him, he's okay.

    It's very important for me to know how the people in the community in this area think. We have a new Canada, multiculturalism, and you challenge a lot of the figures. Do you have the figures on how many blacks there are, how many women there are, how many men there are, how many people are disabled, and so on? Do you have these figures? Because you challenged all of the figures before.

    Mr. Martin Loney: That's a kind of umbrella question. I have a very large number of figures in the book, all of them with references; many of them are government data or academic research.

    I don't know if this is the opportunity to reply on the issue of compassion. I actually have worked in the area of race relations for most of my life, including in Southern Africa with World University Service. I also wrote a book on Rhodesia published by the Penguin African Library, which condemned the British government's failure to end the unilateral declaration of independence, minority rule, etc.

    The point I'm trying to make to the committee, and the point I'm trying to make more broadly, is that we are buried in mythology in this area. When the legislation came into existence, a survey by Monica Boyd, a university professor, a feminist, an advocate of preferential hiring, looking at census data, found that visible minority women, the famous doubly disadvantaged women, born in Canada were actually more successful than their white counterparts. So unless we're prepared to examine data honestly and draw honest conclusions, the debate can go nowhere.

  (1235)  

    Mr. Eugène Bellemare: In Canada it's not like other countries. You go to Hungary, you see Hungarians, you go to Japan, you see Japanese. You come here and it's a mixture of everything. How do you administer a country like this if you only have a certain group, like males of a certain age, who run the whole show?

    Let's focus on the banks, for example. I think there are more women who have bank accounts and women have more money in the banks than men. I don't know the figures, maybe you do. What I do observe is that it's 16 to 1, I think, membership on boards of directors of banks-one woman, 16 men. When you just walk into the bank as a depositor, you only see women around and you hardly see any men in the front. You see them in the back if you want to make a loan. What are your views on that?

    Mr. Martin Loney: I frankly don't spend a lot of time worrying about bank directors. If we look at more broad population statistics, women are 40% more likely to graduate from Canadian universities than men. This is obviously a predictor of the future of the labour force. It does not suggest that women are disadvantaged educationally. It does not suggest any legislative protection in order to progress. And yet there is a curious absence of debate about the under-representation of men in universities. Let me make it clear, I want no regulation, but if we're to have an honest debate about outcomes, let's at least recognize that there are a number of indicators that suggests that men are doing rather badly.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Unfortunately, Mr. Bellemare, your time is up. However, you can have another go at it during the second round. We'll begin with Ms. Skelton, followed by Mr. Tonks.

    Ms. Skelton.

[English]

    Mrs. Carol Skelton (Saskatoon--Rosetown--Biggar, Canadian Alliance): Mr. Poschmann, I believe you made the statement that compliance has cost about $96 million.

    Mr. Finn Poschmann: Yes, I said that.

    Mrs. Carol Skelton: For 400 employers, is that right?

    Mr. Finn Poschmann: For the covered employers, of which I think there are 427 right now.

    Mrs. Carol Skelton: Then Mr. Hara talked about a small cost at department levels and the cost of corrections. Where are we going with these numbers?

    Mr. Finn Poschmann: A small cost is in the eye of the beholder, and Mr. Hara, to be fair to him, did qualify that the cost to the departments is small relative to their budgets, and with that I agree. I was making the point, though, that if compliance for each employer, say, required two full-time equivalents--and I'm talking about reporting compliance only--then we're talking about a fair amount of money. For the larger employers, especially where we've gone a little way down the path towards the tribunal, and we've got a few extra diversity consultants and lawyers involved, two full-time equivalents is going to be a wild under-estimate. For the many smaller employers, it's probably an over-estimate. So I'm really just making a guess there.

    The way I see it is that we're looking at about $8 annually per taxpayer for report writing. That might be a good investment, it might not, but that's Parliament's call to make, not mine.

    Mrs. Carol Skelton: Mr. Loney, you spoke on the use of Canadian-born visible minority statistics, and that's piqued my curiosity. Can you explain a little further what you were speaking of?

    Mr. Martin Loney: The point I'm trying to make is that if we want to compare like and like, we can't compare groups who are predominantly born overseas and may not have English or French as a first language with groups who were predominantly born in Canada. We should compare the Canadian-born. If the systemic discrimination that is claimed to exist is there and it's widespread, we will find the evidence of it when we compare the Canadian-born visible minorities with other Canadians.

    What I am saying is that on a number of indicators, contrary to the assertions of preferential hirers, visible minorities born in Canada actually do better than their white counterparts. If you look at the population group as a whole--and there's recent research from the University of Manitoba, Hum and Simpson--you'll find there is no significant difference in earnings between visible minorities born in Canada and other Canadians, a finding that is totally inconsistent with the claim that there is widespread systemic discrimination. That's the point I'm making.

    By the way, there are parallel arguments that can be made about women in the legislation. Aboriginals have largely not benefited from this legislation. If you're living in northern Canada, it's irrelevant.

  (1240)  

    Mrs. Carol Skelton: Mr. Hara, could you give me some figures on the costs of this per department, per employee?

    Mr. Dan Hara: The cost--and this is not an annual expense, but maybe a one-time expense, or one time every five years--for us to run the gamut, depending on the size of the department, is between $50,000 and $100,000.

    Mrs. Carol Skelton: Okay.

    Thank you very much.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Before we continue, I'd like to remind members that they are limited to four minutes during the second round of questioning so that everyone has an opportunity to put questions to the witnesses.

    We'll now go to Mr. Tonks, and then to Ms. Guay.

[English]

    Mr. Alan Tonks (York South--Weston, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chairman.

    I'm intrigued by this notion of how, in a very complex society, we achieve social cohesiveness. Mr. Poschmann referred to that to some extent. I'd like to ask this, and it isn't in the spirit of argumentative or adversarial positioning at all. Mr. Loney, you used the term preferential hirers, and you gave the impression, through your language, that you characterized the extent to which these preferential hirers will go. And then you started to talk about the percentages of unskilled workers, visible minorities, and so on, and you used some statistics to back this thesis up. You've listened to Mr. Crockett, and it's my feeling that for social cohesiveness, the equity programs are, in fact, viewed quite positively in this country. So could you please explain to me how you see this equity program as a conspiracy that is working against the kinds of goals and advantages we will achieve as a community?

    Mr. Martin Loney: I didn't intend to describe it as a conspiracy. When you bring into being a constituency of people who make a living out of a regulatory framework, you create an incentive for that constituency to push for an ever more intensive regulatory framework. They make a living out of doing so. When you bring into being preferential treatment, you bring into being constituencies who will benefit from that preferential treatment, who have an interest in providing statistical data, however inaccurate, that will purport to demonstrate the need for ever more stringent measures to assist the constituency.

    My own view is that Canada is a remarkably successful multi-racial society, much more so, I think, than practically any other country one can think of. But legislation like this does not help, it hinders. If you look at the situation in Canada when the legislation was introduced, there was already ample evidence that visible minorities born in Canada were doing well. Not that Canada does not have an unfortunate history of racism, as do many other countries, but by the time the 1980s and 1990s arrived, public opinion had very much shifted and changed; there is much evidence for that. And when one talks about visible minorities in a city like Toronto, where some 50% of the population in the centre of the city are visible minorities, it ceases to make any sense.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): You still have a minute.

    Mr. Alan Tonks: That sounds like a fairly elaborate conspiracy theory to me, though, Mr. Loney, with great respect. Having been a metropolitan chairman and having seen the cohesiveness that comes in a positive way, I would disagree with the outputs you have talked about.

    Mr. Poschmann, you said--and I really liked the way you phrased this--the framers of the Employment Equity Act envisaged--and I think it was you who agreed with it--a world where the act would not need to be in existence. You talked about your philosophy of building larger communities of interest. Do you think the equity programs we have are working towards the kind of a society that you have attempted to enunciate?

  (1245)  

    Mr. Finn Poschmann: I frankly have no idea. There's nothing in the reporting from HRDC or CHRC that would give me any measurement to allow me to make a judgment on that score. I think, though, what I was getting at is that if we believe in what we say, for example, that employers are much better off when they have a diverse workforce, in the context of the changing workplace, it's unarguable that employers who make the best possible use of the human resources available to them will succeed. I think we are going to see some of these issues drop away. In other words, if it's all true, if there are profitable opportunities available to be exploited, if Mr. Hara is correct that there are employment decisions that can be made better, then employers will make them in time.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): I'm sorry, Mr. Poschmann, but that's all the time we have. Maybe if we have time after, you could continue your answer.

[Translation]

    Next up is Ms. Guay, followed by Ms. Neville.

    Ms. Monique Guay: Thank you, Madam Chair.

    I'd like to comment briefly.

    Mr. Hara, you mentioned earlier that it can cost a company anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 to comply with the act. As I see it, this represents a tremendous investment for the community and for Canadian society. A $50,000 investment by a firm, particularly a large firm, is a very sound investment in our society of the future. I'm talking about companies with 100, 200 or more employees.

    My questions are directed more specifically to Mr. Hara and Ms. Robertson, as they seem to be especially concerned with how the act's provisions are applied.

    Without this legislation which, in my estimation, has been working well for the past several years, do you honestly believe that employment equity would be a reality, that people would have endeavoured to hire persons with disabilities, that people would really be concerned about this issue and that women would have taken their rightful place in society?

[English]

    Mr. Dan Hara: We would definitely not, in the public sector, have made the progress that has been made without this act, particularly without the changes in the act. In fact, all you have to do is compare the act before the last revision and this one. The major difference in the public service was simply bringing in enforcement with the CHRC. Then the representation takes right off. It's because people do have good will, and most of this problem, at least on the public sector side, is not evil, but actual practices and institutional problems. So the act produces a better result.

    Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson: Obviously, we need more from the act than we've been getting, but certainly, society is much better off with it than we would be if we didn't have it. If you need any evidence that the act is needed, look around this room: how many visible minorities do you see? How many other people do you see with visible disabilities? We don't have many people here from the designated groups. In a society where there are a lot of us, you'd think we would be more represented, but we're not, and that's the reason we need this act, and we need it stronger than ever, because it serves an extremely important, worthwhile purpose in our society.

[Translation]

    Ms. Monique Guay: I have one final question.

    According to recently published figures, representation by women has improved in the federal public service. Some progress has been made, although men and women are not yet equally represented. However, there are very few women occupying positions in the $45,000 to $100,000 range. Would you care to comment on this statistic? What kind of improvements do we still need to make?

    Finally, when it takes a company three years to apply the legislation, wouldn't you say that that's a little too much time? Shouldn't companies be moving far more quickly on this front?

[English]

    Mr. Dan Hara: I think I'll answer the second part of the question, because it's a quick answer. Three years is a fine time, because it's only asking for reasonable progress, not a total solution. So it's a good short-term focus.

    On women in the public service, I consider who's in the executive. What we're seeing now, and it's partly attributable to the act, as well as other combined social pressures, is that women are being recruited more, although still not representatively, and the bigger problem is retention in the executive. There are still many cultural barriers. You may get into the executive, but then you aren't talked to, you don't get the same royal jelly to move up. Then there's the expectation that you'll work 100 hours a week, while you may have elder care or child care issues, all of which is another lifestyle issue for the public service as well.

    Again to relate it back to the act, the structure of the act is such that it forces you to look at that. You have to look at why you don't have retention--what's going on? So the mechanisms are there, and the act is very helpful in forcing confrontation and ultimately leading to a better-managed public service.

  (1250)  

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Thank you, Mr. Hara.

    Next up is Ms. Neville, and then Ms. Davies.

[English]

    Ms. Anita Neville (Winnipeg South Centre, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, all, for your presentations.

    I would like to focus on the area of persons with disabilities. We heard from the Canadian Human Rights Commission that we are, within both the private and public sector, far from meeting goals based on availability. Mr. Crockett, in your brief--I'm sorry I wasn't here for the presentation--you indicated that anecdotal evidence suggests that even if persons with disabilities are hired, promotion will be slower or non-existent. You also mentioned, Mr. Crockett, that employers need more support. Mr. Hara, you have the experience in the public sector, you, Ms. Robertson, as a member of the community and in your own work. What do we do to increase the hiring of persons with disabilities? What do we do to retain people? What do we do to ensure that they have the opportunities to move through the workforce, to achieve whatever they wish, if it's a managerial or executive position?

    My own experience in Manitoba is that the various disability groups are coalescing in a much more aggressive manner to promote their interests, and it's probably true across the country, but we have to make this a priority, in my mind. How does it happen?

    Ms. Lauri Sue Robertson: I can answer that. It's barrier removal, pure and simple. The barriers are physical in some cases, they're also very much things employers don't think of. When I do site audits and I go to an employer's office, I say, what format do you advertise your jobs in? Oh, well, we put them in the newspaper or we put them on the Internet. That's not accessible to a lot of people. Do you allow your applications to be done audibly or verbally, or does everything have to be written down? Can you have your job applications available on a disk, so that somebody can listen to it? This is very rare, so that people who maybe can't read and write, for whatever reason--and it might just be a visual disability--have very little access to a lot of things that are out there.

    There are physical barriers, there are barriers in the things Mr. Hara was talking about, like the number of hours some jobs expect you to put in, which maybe somebody can't do because of attendant care. If you need attendant care, you're at the mercy of the providers of the attendant care. I don't know if you know how it works, but you apply for the attendant care, somebody comes to your house maybe to feed you and bathe you and dress you in the morning, and then reverse the process at night. You can only do this stuff when they've got somebody to send, and it's not always on your own schedule. Then you're relying on the para-transit system to get you where you need to be. So if you have a job where they may want you to do a lot of overtime, after you stand up the transit system a few times, they boot you off, and you lose your way of getting around town.

    So there are a lot of barriers, and many of them are systemic, things people don't even think of, like the hours of work or the kind of environment. I know of a person who applied for a job and he was very qualified for it; he didn't get it, because they said, we do a lot of our business on the golf course, and this guy can't play golf, because he's blind. In fact, he could play golf, but they didn't offer him the job, because they made an assumption and they didn't have the nerve to say, we do a lot of work on the golf course--can you play golf?

    So it's barriers, physical, hearing, vision barriers, mostly attitudinal--those are the biggest ones. People don't get promoted because the employer says, I know she knows what she's doing where she is, but if I give her something else, oh my God, what if she can't do it? And they're afraid to ask.

  (1255)  

    Ms. Anita Neville: Mr. Hara, I'm interested from the public sector perspective.

    Mr. Dan Hara: There are three things the public sector could do. The first is to get buildings fixed to the standard that's already in the policy of Treasury Board, but that doesn't happen; I've had departments with 80% exemptions--they just exempted all their buildings. The second thing is to have a Treasury Board policy not only for accommodation of existing employees; there really isn't one for new employees, and that means that the manager pays the cost. Third, department managers need better support in knowing what's reasonable accommodation. They are left to judge for themselves when someone comes to them, and that's hard on both the employee and the manager.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Mr. Neill, very quickly.

    Mr. Robin Neill: he public sector and the private sector are very different. There is no bottom line, no profit motive in the public sector, and you cannot apply the same rules. The public sector is all legislation, and it may be that you have to use legislation in the public sector, but the private sector has market forces, and legislation is anathema.

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): Madam Davies.

    Ms. Libby Davies: There are basically two groups we're talking about, people who are brought into the public service, and so there's the whole issue of outreach and all of that, and employees who are already within the public service and are members of the designated groups. Mr. Hara, can you identify what some of the key barriers are to promotions or further training for the latter? Is this actually something that is a fairly major issue for some groups in particular, or for all the designated groups, what happens once they're in the public service, and whether or not they're getting promotions in particular?

    Mr. Dan Hara: The barriers differ for each group. I think we touched on one of them already in one of the answers, retention, particularly at the executive level. For visible minorities, there are attitudinal problems--you can be Science Officer Spock, but you can't be Captain Kirk. That also works against the natural convenience of the current cadre of managers in hiring their friends because they may know they're competent; there may be a more competent visible minority, but that's not part of the preceding network. That perpetuates things and it loses the department opportunities.

    As for aboriginal peoples, I think they share much the same barriers, but even more do they experience the cultural barriers in some of the scoring of competitions--the aggressiveness example mentioned earlier.

    For persons with disabilities, I think the reference here to hours is important. There are many invisible disabilities. I think they have, in fact, the same retention problems as women at the executive level.

[Translation]

    The Vice-Chair (Ms. Diane St-Jacques): We'll conclude on that note. I want to thank all of our witnesses for joining us today. Again, we apologize for the disruption caused by the vote as well as for the time constraints we cannot control.

    I remind my colleagues that our next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday February 19 when we will welcome union representatives. It will most likely be a long meeting. Therefore, I'd like you to arrive on time, if possible, so that we can begin on schedule and wrap up before Question Period.

    Have a good week and a wonderful weekend everyone.

    The meeting is adjourned.