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The federal Pay Equity Act applies to federally regulated employers with an average of ten or more employees, across the federal private sector, the federal public service and parliamentary workplaces. Its stated purpose is to achieve pay equity proactively by redressing systemic gender-based discrimination in compensation practices. Covered employers must create and post a pay equity plan within three years of becoming subject to the Act, pay any resulting increases, report through annual statements, and update the plan at least every five years. Some employers may phase increases in over a period set by the Act. The Office of the Pay Equity Commissioner, within the Canadian Human Rights Commission, administers and enforces it.

Ontario's Pay Equity Act covers provincially regulated employers: all public sector employers, and private sector employers with ten or more employees. The Pay Equity Office describes the principle as equal pay for work of equal value, which is a different and broader idea than equal pay for the same job, since it compares different jobs of comparable value. Employers must achieve and maintain pay equity, and certain employers have specific plan obligations under the Act.

Quebec's Pay Equity Act applies to employers with an average of ten or more employees, unionised or not, and regardless of employment status. Those employers must complete an initial pay equity exercise and post the results, conduct a pay equity audit every five years and post those results, and file the employer's pay equity statement. The CNESST administers the Act and runs an audit program to check that employers have met their obligations.

These three get used interchangeably in conversation and mean quite different things in practice. Pay equity is the statutory comparison of predominantly female job classes with predominantly male job classes doing work of comparable value, using an evaluation method the legislation contemplates. It can require a nurse's role to be compared with a technician's role, because the test is the value of the work rather than its similarity.

Equal pay for equal work is the narrower proposition that two people doing substantially the same job should not be paid differently on a prohibited basis. Market benchmarking is not a legal concept at all: it is the exercise of comparing your pay against what other employers pay, and a structure that is perfectly aligned to the market can still fail a pay equity test, because the market itself may carry the historical undervaluation the legislation exists to correct.

That last point is the one worth holding on to. Benchmarking answers whether you can recruit and retain. Pay equity answers whether your compensation practice complies with a statute. A consultant who conflates them is selling you the first and calling it the second.

Every one of these regimes treats pay equity as an ongoing obligation. The federal Act requires the pay equity plan to be updated at least every five years and annual statements to be filed. Quebec requires an audit every five years, with the results posted and the employer's statement filed. Ontario requires employers to achieve and maintain pay equity rather than to reach it once.

Organisations drift out of compliance through ordinary activity rather than neglect: new roles are created, titles change, teams reorganise, acquisitions bring in different structures, and the job classes the exercise was built on stop matching reality. The structure that was defensible at completion quietly stops describing the organisation.

The practical answer is to make maintenance routine. Diarise the statutory cycle, re-examine job classes whenever roles are materially redesigned, keep the evaluation documentation where the next person can find it, and check coverage again whenever headcount crosses a threshold. Employers who keep the working papers find the next cycle straightforward; those who do not usually pay to rebuild the analysis from scratch.