Ignatieff Disgraces the Liberal Party, Harper Helps

I know it takes some doing, but Iggy has disgraced the Liberal Party of Canada once again. By voting in favour of the budget, he and his party voted in favour of the roll back of pay equity for women. The Liberals are now against equal pay for work of equal value. It's a sad day.

Pay equity is not some frill that can be cut in hard economic times. It is the absolute right of all women. The Harper-Ignatieff proposal cuts off women's access to the courts. Their alternative? The collective bargaining table. Bzzzt, sorry, try again. This proposal leaves behind all the women who work in non-union workplaces, a staggering 41% of all women who work outside the home.

Obviously, it would be nice if all women worked in unionized work places, but even if they did, denying access to the courts is not an acceptable approach to pay equity.

The Conservative-Liberal attack on pay equity also plays the ostrich when looking at the history of pay equity at the bargaining table. Federal civil servants negotiated pay equity almost twenty years ago, but since then have had to fight tooth and nail in the courts to force successive Liberal and Conservative governments to honour that pledge. Why would anyone be taken in and believe that now will be different. The corporate world is no more friendly to pay equity than our corporate government. They will fight as hard as can be to avoid pay equity obligations.

When pay equity is something to be gained at the negotiating table, it becomes something that can be negotiated away. That is an unacceptable possibility. Further, when pay equity is the subject of negotiation, it loses its rights-based aspect. It occurs to me that this is precisely what the Conservatives and their Liberal lackeys want. They want to move the discussion of equal pay for work of equal value away from a rights discourse. Because they don't seem to favour women's rights at all. Oh, the Liberals mouth the words when the camera is on, but their actions belie them. If they had any positive principles at all, they would have refused to vote for a budget containing the attack on pay equity, especially when they could have had it excised in exchange for their support.

The Liberals are lying, hypocritical assholes, at least their party brass is. We should be ashamed that our country has vacillated between dumb and dumber for better part of 150 years.