Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jun 30/99) - More than 10 years after the original complaint was filed, hearings in a pay-equity suit against the Government of the Northwest Territories opened at the Explorer Hotel this week.

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal made the trip up from Ottawa to preside over a case in which the Public Service Alliance of Canada charged, in 1989, that the government "has engaged in a discriminatory practice on the ground of sex (equal pay) in a matter related to employment."

The Union of Northern Workers, on whose behalf the alliance said it launched the suit, states that thousands of former and current Northern residents employed by the government in female-dominated positions are owed millions of dollars in compensation for unequal pay.

But the government and the unions have agreed on little over the years regarding pay equity -- and much of the legal wrangling has so far concerned preliminary objections.

UNW public relations officer Barb Wyness said the union even disputes who is due compensation. The government launched a campaign earlier this year to settle individually with affected workers -- and claimed an 80 per cent success rate. But Wyness said that the offers were both too low and failed to cover all relevant employees, including casuals.

Wyness said the only challenge the government is relying on in the hearing is that the union is partially liable for pay discrimination because it signed contracts containing unfair pay levels. But the union representative said it was the government's own job classifications that were discriminatory.

In the beginning

The setting at the Explorer's Katimavik Room on Monday saw the tribunal members seated facing three banks of lawyers -- representing the government, the alliance and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The tribunal recently ruled that opening and closing arguments would take place in Yellowknife while the bulk of the witnesses and evidence will be presented in Ottawa. Hearing dates have already been scheduled to the end of the year.

Indication of the length of proceedings were already evident Monday -- as alliance counsel Andrew Raven and the government's lawyers, Joy Noonan and Thomas Brady, debated the details of "disclosure," or advance warning of witnesses and evidence.

Brady explained, for example, that after the government began collecting all the documentation relevant to the case, it found it had close to 300,000 pages and so decided last December to covert them all to an accessible computerized form -- a process he said may yet take several months to complete.

But the alliance did manage to introduce its first witness Monday with Pat Armstrong, director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa and a recognized expert on women's employment and pay-equity issues. Armstrong was expected to comment on the NWT's situation in the coming days.