Well I believe that when the government that is spending public funds to provide public services, knowing that they are receiving the service at a lower cost than if you were running it yourself, that is where the inequity is. You as a government know what the cost of running that program is. When you pay income support workers in communities $32,000 a year knowing the cost of that similar position in a larger centre is $55,000 there is definitely an inequity there. It is public funds being expended to provide a public service. For me, that is where the question of fairness is. It is government contracts that we as a government control. We as a government tell communities, well, we will download this program to you, but this is how much we are going to give you to run the program, all the while knowing that cost is less than what we would pay if we were running the program ourselves. So for me that is the grey area that has to be dealt with here.
I think as a government we have a responsibility to ensure that we do not find ourselves in the courts because we are breaking our own rules that we are trying to impose on other people. For me, this is exactly what this is going to do. I think that all those contractual arrangements we have that pay someone to provide a service at less cost than if we provide it as a government is breaking our own rules.
So we have talked about the question of parity and also the legislation clearly identified the right to equal pay for work of equal value. It is public contracts that we are talking about here. Contracts that this government has gotten themselves into knowing those public services are being provided with less value or less dignity to people in small communities knowing that if the government was doing it it would cost a lot more. Yet people providing the same service who may be part of the health board or part of the education board or part of the government itself are paid a heck of a lot more than those people that provide a public service by way of a contract.