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Ontario’s Pay Equity Act

with Selected Case References, 2022

Disclaimer: This Guide gives an overview of the minimum requirements of the Pay Equity Act as interpreted by the Pay Equity Office. The interpretations are drawn from our own experiences and by applying the key rulings of the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal and the courts and is current to the date ​of publication.

Value determination

5. (1) For the purposes of this Act, the criterion to be applied in determining value of work shall be a composite of the skill, effort and responsibility normally required in the performance of the work and the conditions under which it is normally performed.

MacKay v Brant Community Healthcare System, 2017 CanLll 22872 (ON PEHT) 2017-04-03 and MacKay et al v. Brant Community Healthcare System, 2017 CanLII 37589 (ON PEHT) 2017-06-12 — Employees alleged that the Union and Employer, when negotiating the pay equity plan, erroneously evaluated one of the job classes and thus violated the Act. The Tribunal disagreed. If the Union and Employer have made a reasonable effort to accurately capture job content then the Tribunal will not inquire further. Such reasonable efforts were made here. At para. 9 (and para. 13), the Tribunal notes that reasonable efforts to accurately capture job content include that important job information was not unreasonably excluded, the criteria were not ignored, and there was no failure to apply any of the criteria.

Bonnie E. MacLeod, Irene Hutton, and Linda Gemmell v Brockville General Hospital, 2019 CanLII 113536 (ON PEHT) 2019-11-20 — Applicant employees asserted the bargaining unit and the Employer did not act reasonably when evaluating their job classification during the pay equity maintenance process. The Tribunal notes that to establish a prima facie case of a violation of the Act, the applicants must set out facts that, if accepted as true, could lead the Tribunal to the conclusion that the job evaluation system either: ignored or failed to apply one of the statutory criteria or unreasonably excluded important information related to any of the statutory criteria. The Tribunal held they did not make out such a case and the fact that the applicants were not consulted during the maintenance review process is also not a prima facie violation of the Act.

Tina Lahtinen v Corporation of the City of Thunder Bay, 2020 CanLII 26465 (ON PEHT) 2020-04-09 — An employee alleged that her job was not evaluated properly, and that a different male comparator should have been chosen based on certain added job responsibilities. The employee argued she could not make a prima facie case without information regarding how the jobs were evaluated. The Tribunal directed this information be provided given the material was before Review Services and thus fell within the Tribunal’s jurisdiction.

Idem, disabled employees, etc.

(2) The fact that an employee’s needs have been accommodated for the purpose of complying with the Human Rights Code shall not be considered in determining the value of work performed. R.S.O. 1990, c. P.7, s. 5.

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