Today marks Equal Pay Day. It’s the day when we mark how far into the next year women have to work to catch up to what most men had earned the previous year. When you’re racialized, Indigenous, a member of the LQBTQ community, the wait for equal pay day is even longer. Women of all age groups, across the board, earn less than men.

So my question to the Premier is, will he commit to ensuring that every woman worker earns as much as her male counterparts?

Closing the gender pay gap and supporting women and gender-diverse peoples’ economic equality is a government responsibility.

Women frequently work in jobs taking care of people and the community—from the doctors, nurses and PSWs who keep our health care system going to the ECEs in our child care centres who care for our children while we’re at work.

Will the Premier commit to properly funding the strong public services that support women’s economic equality?

Interjections.

If we don’t have strong public services like affordable child care and health care and education, women will be left behind. If child care is so out of reach, you’re not going to be able to climb the corporate ladder. If you’re at home taking care of your aging parents, you can’t log those extra hours to get that promotion.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately: our mothers and our grandmothers who fought so hard for these rights and services so that we and our daughters—my daughters—our granddaughters, all of us women in this chamber can have a chance. In an increasingly hostile environment for women, we cannot take those rights and services for granted.

What is the Premier’s plan to protect the rights and services that women have fought so hard for?

Interjections.

We believe people doing the same work should be paid the same regardless of their gender; workers in the health care system expect the same. That’s why front-line health care workers belonging to SEIU and the Ontario Nurses’ Association have spent over a decade fighting for a gender-neutral wage under the Pay Equity Act. The Premier calls these working women heroes—he loves to call them heroes—but he has done nothing to improve their wages or work with them on the Pay Equity Act. Instead, he has repeatedly taken them to court.

Why is the Premier repeatedly taking hard-working women to court instead of giving them what they’re owed?

The minister is right; there always is something more we could do. We could stop trying to take them to court every five minutes.

I’m going to go back to the Premier again. The vast majority of long-term-care workers and home care workers in this province are women—but the CEOs of the three largest nursing home corporations? All men. Extendicare, Chartwell, Sienna—linked hand in glove with this government—are massive corporations, spending millions of dollars to take these women, their employees and members of SEIU and ONA to court to deny them pay equity. At the same time, those three companies alone are running a gravy train that has rolled out millions in executive compensation and over $500 million in shareholder profits—and I want to say, that was just since the pandemic—all while these women are struggling to pay rent.

On Equal Pay Day, whose side is this government on? The millionaire fat cats who profit from government contracts or the working women who simply want equal pay for equal work?

Interjections.

Monsieur le Premier Ministre, aujourd’hui, c’est la journée de l’équité salariale. Trouvez-vous sincèrement que ces femmes reçoivent leur juste part pour le fruit de leur travail ?