Canada Gender Pay Gap Reporting: What You Need to Know

To find the full text, refer to Canada’s Pay Equity Act. The Act, Part II.1 of the Parliamentary Employment and Staff Relations Act and the Pay Equity Regulations came into force on August 31, 2021.

Federally regulated private employers are companies that fall under the jurisdiction of the Canada Labour Code. This includes employers in the following industries:

• Air transportation, including airlines, airports, aerodromes, and aircraft operations
• Banks, including authorized foreign banks
• Grain elevators, feed and seed mills, feed warehouses, and grain-seed cleaning plants
• First Nations band councils and Indigenous self-governments (for help determining jurisdiction of Indigenous organizations, refer to: Guide on jurisdiction of Indigenous organizations)
• Most federal Crown corporations (e.g., Canada Post Corporation)
• Port services, marine shipping, ferries, tunnels, canals, bridges and pipelines (oil and gas) that cross international or provincial borders
• Postal and courier services
• Radio and television broadcasting
• Railways that cross provincial or international borders and some short-line railways
• Road transportation services, including trucks and buses, that cross provincial or international borders
• Telecommunications, such as, telephone, Internet, telegraph, and cable systems
• Uranium mining and processing and atomic energy
• Any business that is vital, essential or integral to the operation of one of the above activities

Yes. Canada’s Federal law is not a “name and shame” law. The law in Canada requires employers to report and also fix gender pay gaps. Once the plan is established, employers will have to increase the compensation of any predominantly female job classes that are receiving less pay than their male counterparts, if there is not a legitimate reason for those gaps. 

The general rule is that any required remediation must be paid in full on the day after the final pay equity plan is posted. However, there’s an exception for larger pay adjustments that exceed 1% of the employer’s annual payroll. Where there are very large increases, the employer can phase in those increases over a few years. The exact timeline depends on the size of the company, the Syndio team can help you determine how this applies to you.

Canada’s Pay Equity Act mandates that medium/large employers (100+ employees) and any employer with unionized workers must establish a pay equity committee. This employer/employee committee is responsible for developing the pay equity plan and determining necessary compensation adjustments.

In unionized workplaces, the bargaining agent selects a committee representative. For non-unionized employees, a representative is chosen through a workplace vote.

Canada’s Federal Pay Equity Act focuses on gender. The reporting requirements and metrics are designed to assess and address the gender pay gaps within organizations. 

While the law doesn’t explicitly require reporting on race/ethnicity pay gaps, many organizations analyze race and ethnicity gaps as well as part of their pay transparency strategy, where it is permitted by law. And there are other laws in Canada that focus gaps beyond just gender.

Syndio’s PayEQ solution allows you to analyze pay equity and opportunity gaps across multiple dimensions, including race, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, and more. This provides a comprehensive understanding of how different groups are affected by your policies and practices.

Pay transparency is gaining momentum across Canada. While nothing is required at the federal level, several provinces like British Columbia and Ontario are enacting legislation that requires employers to include salary ranges in job postings, essentially making pay information more accessible to potential employees.

Under Canada’s federal law, any form of remuneration payable for work performed by an employee should be included in the gender pay equity plan. This includes data elements like salaries, commissions, vacation pay, severance pay and bonuses, payments in kind, and benefits.

For customers using Syndio’s Global Pay Reports, we offer a thorough breakdown of the data needed to simplify the preparation of your report.

Syndio provides software and expert professional services to help multinational organizations comply with pay equity, pay reporting, and pay transparency regulations. Syndio helps you analyze, remediate, explain, and report on gaps so you can stay on top of compliance in Canada. Learn more: https://synd.io/global-pay-reporting/.