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VICTORIA NEWS - Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Drawn-out battle worth the wait: local nurse but the final tally could prove higher, in part because all CPP nurses are eligible for compensation, even those who didn’t register as official complainants. That means hundreds more nurses may step forward to claim their due.
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“While the agreement reached with our employer doesn’t compensate us for all our losses, I’m very happy that it will compensate all victims of the discriminatory practice.” The payout could be life changing for CPP nurses employed across the country, including for many of the roughly 65 employed in the Victoria office. ■
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The CPP disability benefits program launched in 1966. At first, the program director only hired doctors to assess applicant files, but soon began hiring registered nurses as ‘medical adjudicators’ to keep up with the mounting workload. In the years that followed, the doctors sometimes played a supervisory role, but typically, their work differed little from the program’s nurses. Each reviewed applications and had authority to reject or approve claims. Their job classification in the public service classification system, however, differed greatly. The doctors were classified as health professionals; the nurses were classified as program administrators – a designation that did not recognize the nurses’ professional expertise. The consequences of this distinction were far-reaching for the nurses, whose careers were mostly stuck at entry level. They received little funding to update their medical knowledge in a field that demands keeping up to speed on the latest research and practices. As a result, their salary, pension, advancement and other benefits suffered. By the time Ruth Walden joined their ranks in 1993, CPP nurses had been working to be reclassified as medical professionals for several years. “I fully believed that there was just some sort of misunderstanding,” she said. “Our employer depends on us every day to use our knowledge, skills and experience to make really tough decisions that affect people’s lives.” ■
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In 2001, the nurses started to organize themselves to form a united front. Despite being scattered in regional offices across the country, they connected through word of mouth, finding employees willing to speak out in each office. “Gradually we built a nationwide network,” said Walden. “We were pretty much on call 24-7.” Through late-night and early-morning emails, they shared information, co-ordinated their approach and
Photo credit: Professional Institute of the Public Service Of Canada
Heather Wellman, left, a partner is Laurence Armstrong’s Victoria-based law firm, attends a press conference in Ottawa announcing a settlement between Canada Pension Plan nurses and the federal government. Also shown are nurse Ruth Walden, in white, and union president Gary Corbett, right. supported each other – all without ever meeting in person. In 2004, Walden filed her complaint, without the backing of her union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Undeterred, she and her team hired their own lawyer, at their own expense. Walden heard of Armstrong through a gender-discrimination complaint he launched on his own behalf, seeking free prostate cancer screening tests for men. He later lost that case. But in representing the nurses, Armstrong took a different tack than most of the big genderdiscrimination cases won before. Instead of arguing equal pay for work of equal value, he argued different sections of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Section 7 and 10 forbid employers from treating different groups of employees differently on the basis of discrimination. His 2007 victory in the tribunal was precedent-setting. “It really is another way at looking at human rights,” said Philippe Dufresne, director and senior counsel of the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s Litigation Services Division. “It goes beyond pay equity because it talks about classification. It talks about opportunities for career advancement. It talks about training and professional recognition.” ■
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But that landmark ruling was far from the end of the story. Since 2007, Walden and her team have fought to uphold the original decision through three tribunal hearings, two
judicial reviews in federal court and one appeal. “It’s been quite a struggle every step of the way,” she said. “My daughter, she knows everything about this case,” said Adele McLean, one of the CPP nurses representing the Victoria office. “She’s grown up, literally, hearing about this.” Her co-representative in Victoria, greyhaired Chuck Morris, joked he had brown hair when he signed up for the job. Morris, the token male in this fight for women’s rights, helped to keep discussions light by sending jokes over email. At critical junctions in the case, Morris would consult his “voodoo chicken.” The silly digital persona served as a barometer of who’s happy or not happy, explained Morris, a former military nurse who took a $21,000 cut in pay when he was hired on by the CPP disability benefits program. The Victoria office is the second-largest in the country. The group made a point of celebrating the small victories along the way, McLean said. When they were finally reclassified as health professionals in November 2010, they sculpted pigs of papier-mâché, attached pipe-stem cleaner wings, and decorated the office. They called it the “Pigs have Flown” party. The tribunal’s July 3 order prescribes $16,500 in payment for every year worked between 1999 and 2011, as well as smaller lump sums for nurses who worked between 1978 and 1999. Many nurses can expect more than $200,000 from the settlement. Estimates peg the value of the total compensation at more than $160 million,
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This big payout was an outcome the federal government has fought hard to avoid – in part because of its potential to rally other groups of employees. It could trigger a similar change in other departments, causing significant increase in the Public Service payroll, argued a representative of the Treasury Board during the original 2007 hearing. Ramifications of the Walden decision could also extend to the private sector. That’s because it proved individuals such as Walden, rather than powerful unions, can file complaints involving systemic issues that extend beyond the individual. “This is one of the reasons we said this could be precedent setting,” said Dufresne. Walden’s case is likely the largest gender discrimination case won without union representation. “They really did this themselves,” said Gary Corbett, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service Of Canada. “They had to become their own union, to a certain extent,” he explained, shortly after winning representation over the nurses in 2011. “It’s not easy in this day and age to organize everybody to pull in the same direction. I can tell you that as a union boss … I run an organization of 60,000 people and I would love to see that level of solidarity.” ■
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Whether Walden’s case will open the floodgates to new gender discrimination complaints is yet to be seen, however. In 2009, the federal government changed the rules of complaint resolution through the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act. With a stated goal of speeding up the process, the Act requires that complaints about compensation be directed to the Public Service Labour Relations Board. The change leaves human rights watchdogs and academics skeptical. “They’re not a human rights tribunal,” said Armstrong. As he recovered in hospital, Armstrong said he got “rock star” treatment from the nurses, who caught wind of his win for their CPP nursing colleagues. “I’ve never had so much fun,” he said of the case. “I don’t think I’ve ever had such worthy clients. It’s been an honour to represent them.” rholmen@vicnews.com