Professors co-author paper on Equality Rights and Pay Equity

“Equality Rights and Pay Equity: Déjá Vu in the Supreme Court of Canada”, a paper co-authored by Professors Jonnette Watson Hamilton and Jennifer Koshan, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Law & Equality, a peer-reviewed journal at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (and is available on SSRN). The paper – their 13th co-authored venture – analyzes the Supreme Court of Canada’s two recent pay equity decisions made under the equality guarantee in section 15(1) of the Charter. One of those cases – Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux – marks the first successful claim brought by women and decided by the Supreme Court of Canada on Charter gender equality issues. The Court also confirmed, for the first time in fifteen years, that legislated social benefits must be granted in a non-discriminatory manner. However, caution is warranted. Although these important cases were decided by a majority on the basis of section 15’s guarantee of substantive gender equality, the Court was as badly split in its analysis as it was in the mid-1990s, with the dissents in both of the pay equity cases pointing to a troubling future for equality jurisprudence.