Wynne Announces New ‘Pay Transparency’ Bill

Mar 6, 2018 | Biz/Tech, News

Premier Kathleen Wynne Speaking at a Women’s empowering summit

 Rachel Dosant

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has announced a new legislation to improve pay equity and aim to close in on gender gaps.

Wynne made the announcement Tuesday at a woman’s empowerment summit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) downtown Toronto.

“We will use the power of government buying power to encourage firms to meet our goals of at least 30 percent woman on corporate boards,” Wynne said in a statement.

The new legislation will force companies to include salary range and bar employers to from asking about past compensation in order to improve pay transparency.

The bill made will ensure compensation is based on job requirements and qualifications of the candidate. It would create a framework that would require large employers to track and report compensation gaps based on gender and disclose the information to the province.

” It’s been more than 30 years since Ontario first passed pay equity legislation, but we are still working to close the gap.” Wynne added in a statement.

Gender-based wage discrimination has been an ongoing discussion for a number of years.

The Ontario government said it looked at other jurisdictions with similar laws in place like Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Speaking at the Woman Empowerment Summit in Toronto, Wynne said the government will be following these countries in collecting and publishing hard data on the gender pay gap.

”It is hard to solve a problem when you don’t have all the data.’ Wynne said.

According to government statistics, [payequity.gov.on.ca,] the gender wage gap in 2011 in Ontario was about 26 percent for full-time workers, which means every dollar earned by a male worker, female workers earn 74 cents.