News release

August 26, 2003   

Union ’s pay equity complaint against Canada Post reaches final hearing after 20 years  

OTTAWA - No one has had to hold their breaths longer than members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) who are fighting for pay equity against Canada Post.

Twenty years after the complaint was filed with the Canada Human Rights Commission, the final hearing before the Human Rights Tribunal will take place on Wednesday, August 27. The case is now the longest-running complaint of its kind in the history of Canada .

“It has certainly been a test in endurance,” says Luc Guevremont, the president of the Union of Postal Communications Employees, a component of the PSAC. “But we’re determined to see this to the end. Our members must have justice and equity.”  

The complaint, which involves clerical workers, was filed in September 1983 and had taken the CHRC six years to investigate before it went to the Tribunal. It took about 10 years for the Tribunal to gather evidence which involved approximately 50 witnesses, 900 exhibits and more than 40,000 pages of transcripts.  

It will likely take at least another year after the end of the hearings before the Tribunal releases its decision. The PSAC members and former members are determined in their fight, as they prepare for a union-wide event in September to mark the 20th anniversary of the complaint.

This Wednesday, the Tribunal will hear arguments from the union and Canada Post on the impact on this case of the recent Supreme Court decision against Bell Canada . In June 2003, the Supreme Court dismissed a claim by Bell Canada that the Human Rights Tribunal hearing a long-standing pay equity complaint against Bell lacked the impartiality to rule on the complaint.  

“The Bell case was one example of the legal roadblocks that employers, including Canada Post, will put up to delay justice,” says Guevremont.   “But, in the end, they still have to pay.”

The PSAC’s most prominent pay-equity victory was in 1998 against the Treasury Board, when a Human Rights Tribunal determined that the federal government owed pay equity payments to more than 200,000 federal public service workers. That complaint process lasted over 15 years and resulted in the eventual payment of over $3-billion in retroactive pay equity adjustments and interest.

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For information: Luc Guevremont, UPCE President, (613) 560-4342