The Changes to the Federal Pay Equity Model

I  often open my Employment Law courses by showing a variety of statistics, including the fact that women earn about 70 percent of men and that even the university educated women in my courses will on average earn only 85% of what the men sitting next to them will earn.  This is a good entry to point for a discussion about the role of markets and regulation in employment law.  Should the state care if women earn less than men?  Do women earn less than men because they are less productive than men?  If they are not less productive, then what explains the persistent pay gap?  And what sort of regulation might close the gap?
The Federal government uses a model that requires “equal pay for work of equal value”.  That system requires employers to assess male and female dominated jobs, and then to ensure that female jobs and male jobs with similar scores are paid similarly.   The Feds have had to pay out millions of dollars in pay equity settlements under this scheme, and the current government doesn’t like this.  So it has attempted to change it in the current budget.  It has done this by requiring, among other things, that pay equity be simply another matter for collective bargaining and that, in assessing the value of a job, ‘market forces’ must be considered.  
The new model employs some odd reasoning, I’d think, given that a central premise underlying the equal pay legislation is that ‘the market’ is what has produced the wage gap in the first place.  In other words, either the market rates are appropriate and should not be regulated at all, or they are inappropriate, and therefore should not be a factor in assessing the value of a job.  I suspect the Tories believe the former, but have had to compromise since repealing equal pay legislation would not fly for a minority government already on the brink.  What do you think of the idea of allowing equal pay (a human right) being left to a bargaining model that determines priorities based on majority rules?  For example, should a majority of union members be permitted to drop equal pay from the bargaining table in exchange for more holidays? 
Here is how the Federal explains the need for equal pay for equal work legislation.  University of Calgary professor (and former Conservative Party manager) Tom Flanagan argued in favour of these changes in this Globe and Mail opinion piece.   Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star set out some of the arguments against the reforms in this piece.
What do you think of these changes?