Taxpayers are now closer than ever to being accosted for a $5 billion shakedown from federal civil servants. The latest battle in the pay equity war between Ottawa and its largest union ( PSAC) occurred recently when a Federal Court dismissed the government's attempt to argue that, yes - federal civil servants had been historically underpaid, but just not quite as underpaid as their union claimed.

Unless the federal government appeals this case, taxpayers will soon be faced with a bill that results from a conspiratorial view of discrimination and rotten logic.

Pay equity has garnered some public sympathy (though less as more Canadians understand the concept) because it appeals to our basic sense of fairness. After all, who would oppose equality Problem is, pay equity is not about equality -- paying men and women the same wage for the exact same job. Pay equity is about the nebulous concept of equal pay for work of equal 'value'.

Pay equity advocates argue that different jobs can be measured according to some incomprehensible formulae and value ratings can then be assigned to these jobs. They look at pay in two professions and find, for example, that the salary for clerical work - a largely dominated female occupation - is lower than the average wage in a mainly male occupation like trucking. Since both professions are deemed to have the same "value", they conclude that hidden discrimination against women is the reason.

But if we argue that the nursing profession - largely female - is of the same value with professional soldiers - mostly male - and find that soldiers are paid much less than nurses, is hidden discrimination against men the reason Hardly. Or how about comparing the pay scales of the Pope versus the Queen. The whole debate is absurd. Such comparisons ignore historical conditions of supply and demand in various professions and personal choices that drive people to certain career choices.

What we should be doing is comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges, or apples to corn. StatsCan data shows that university-educated single women earned $40,787 in 1996, almost $600 more on average than university-educated single men who received $40,182. (Unlike married men to married women comparisons, where on average, more women than men take time out of the workforce to raise children, thus affecting their career experience and future average earnings vis-à-vis men, the above statistic compares apple to apple choices and qualifications: singleness and a university degree.)

By writing in a vaguely-worded commitment to "pay equity" into 1978 human rights legislation, the federal government virtually invited human rights tribunals and courts to interpret it in as generous a manner as possible. Now the feds worry that the Pandora's box they created 21 years ago might be further abused by federal unions than originally expected - yet Ottawa still defends this "bogus" pay equity concept as legitimate. It's absolutely mind-boggling.

This is an extremely risky field of public policy and it is compounded by the fact that the government has poorly argued this case before both the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal last year and Federal Court this year. One has to wonder if they're trying to blow this case on purpose

Still, the government should appeal this ruling on behalf of taxpayers. Then, the law should be changed to reflect exact job to exact job comparisons only, instead of easily abused, conspiratorial, and imprecise notions of "value."

This would prevent future fights, since the core problem is the concept of pay equity itself. Everything else is a question of how many angels dance on the head of a pin.