The Royal Canadian Mounted Police pension plan discriminates against women. That’s the ruling of the Supreme Court.
Three women who were RCMP officers, had children in the 1990s. When they went back to work, they found it hard to juggle work with their childcare responsibilities. The RCMP wouldn’t let them work part-time. One retired and the other two took more unpaid leave.
In December 1997, the RCMP began to allow job-sharing as an option. The three women joined the program and came back to work.
In the RCMP pension plan, full-time members could “buy back” pension credit if they were suspended from duty or took unpaid leave. But if they job-shared, they weren’t allowed to buy back any pension credit.
The three women said the pension plan treated job-sharers, who were mostly women with children, worse than other members.
The majority of judges at the Supreme Court agreed they were discriminated against because they were women.















