Court’s decision revives hope of payout for workers

Female Nav Canada employees have been challenging case since 2002

A Federal Court of Appeal decision has brought female Nav Canada workers a step closer to a wage-discrimination settlement that could be worth thousands of dollars for each employee involved.

The new decision comes more than 15 years after female employees at the agency lost out when the federal government and the Public Service Alliance of Canada reached a historic, $3.6 billion pay equity deal in 1999. That settlement ended decades of wage discrimination and put money in the pockets of thousands of federal workers in female-dominated jobs.

Female employees of Nav Canada — almost all classified as CRs, a female-dominated clerical category — received pay equity cheques for the years between 1985 and 1996 that they worked at Transport Canada, which operated Canada’s civil air navigation system prior to the creation of Nav Canada in 1996.

But they got no wage adjustment for their work at Nav Canada, even though the Crown corporation continued to use allegedly discriminatory pay categories until 2011, when it adopted a new, gender-neutral classification system.

The PSAC has been challenging that since 2002, when it filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission alleging that Treasury Board and Nav Canada discriminated against the female employees by not extending pay equity adjustments to them.

In 2012, the human rights commission dismissed the PSAC’s complaint without an investigation, ruling that it fell outside of its jurisdiction — a finding later deemed reasonable by the Federal Court.

But in a July 28 decision, the Federal Court of Appeal has revived hope that the female Nav Canada workers might yet receive compensation. The appeal court rejected the human rights commission’s conclusion that the PSAC’s complaint against Nav Canada as an individual employer lacked reasonable grounds.

“It was not reasonable for the commission to conclude that PSAC’s complaint plainly and obviously did not contain reasonable grounds to suggest that wages at NAV are discriminatory,” the court found.

PSAC lawyer Andrew Raven said the appeal court decision “has important implications for all pay equity complainants.”

In the Nav Canada case, “what it means, in our view, is that the (human rights) commission is going to have to do a proper investigation now.”

The commission will now have to consider the PSAC’s evidence that Nav Canada’s classification system was discriminatory, which could

PSAC’s complaint plainly and obviously did not contain reasonable grounds to suggest that wages at NAV are discriminatory.

lead to a formal hearing by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

That raises the possibility that female Nav Canada employees could be in line for retroactive wage adjustments covering the years 1997 to 2011.

The amounts could be substantial, Raven said. For example, federal workers classified as CR4s got wage adjustments of about $2,500 a year between 1997 and 2000.

At any one time, as many as 100 Nav Canada employees worked in female-dominated classifications, Raven said.

But because female employees at Nav Canada came and went during the period when retroactive payments would apply, the number of people affected is “substantially higher,” Raven said. “It could be several hundred.”