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Thread ID: 7045 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-06-01
2003-06-01 04:54 | User Profile
By MARGARET WENTE Thursday, May 29, 2003 - Page A21
A few days ago, Marc Gage, a self-employed communications consultant, saw a job ad that caught his eye. The federal Department of Fisheries was seeking a regional communications director in Vancouver. It sounded right up his alley. The pay also wasn't bad -- up to $99,700 a year.
Mr. Gage wanted to apply, but one fatal flaw disqualified him: He's white.
The ad, which was posted on the federal government's Web site, was explicit. Under the heading "Who can apply," it said: "Persons working or residing in Canada and Canadian citizens living abroad, WHO ARE MEMBERS OF VISIBLE MINORITY GROUPS." The Employment Equity Act, it explained, defines members of visible minorities as being "persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour."
Mr. Gage says he's a pretty liberal-minded guy. But the ad sent him into orbit. "I don't care what colour you are," he told me. "You've got a right to be judged on merit."
Nurjehan Mawani is commissioner of the Public Service Commission of Canada, the body responsible for government hiring practices. She explains that the merit principle is not undermined by excluding certain people from applying. And she explains that "equality" is not the same as "equity." In other words, you can't always treat people equally if you want employment equity. "Treating people in the same way does not always lead to equitable results," she told me.
Some people might call these ads "race-based recruiting." But that would be uncharitable. Sometimes, Ms. Mawani says, "special measures" are required to reach out to the target groups. The Employment Equity Act permits and even encourages "special measures," of which exclusionary job ads are one example.
The federal government has resorted to special measures because it's desperate for its vast work force to look more like Canada. Just under 14 per cent of Canadians are identified as visible minorities. They make up 9 per cent of the labour pool, but only 6.9 per cent of the public service.
Three years ago, the government announced an action plan called "Embracing Change." It decreed that, by the spring of 2003, the public service would be hiring visible minorities for one in every five jobs -- twice the rate of their numbers in the labour pool. But despite an intensive recruiting campaign and millions of dollars devoted to management diversity training, it hasn't happened. The current hiring rate is only one in 10 (about the proportion of their numbers in the labour pool). And visible minorities (or vizmins) still make up only 6.8 per cent of the civil service.
Canada's top bureaucrats, including Alex Himelfarb, Clerk of the Privy Council, have decided that's not good enough. Progress, they insist, must come faster.
If you're one of the folks in charge of running, say, the Department of Fisheries, this is not an academic issue. This affects your bonus, your raise and your career prospects if you don't deliver.
Even so, everyone in the bureaucracy rejects the word "quotas." Instead, they say "benchmarks," "targets" and "guidelines." "When we did this," Lewis Perinbaum, one of the authors of Embracing Change, said a couple of years ago, "we were trying to reassure people that this wasn't about grabbing their jobs but rather fairness and justice in the system. So benchmarks were to take us to that fairness and justice."
Not everyone is so sure that discrimination is the right way to achieve fairness and justice. Janet Smith is another former bureaucrat who helped launch Embracing Change. But this isn't quite what she had in mind. "When you do it this way," she told The Vancouver Sun, "what you're hiring is the skin, not the content."
Ms. Mawani says "restricted competitions" are relatively rare -- perhaps 3 per cent of all job ads. They're more likely to be used for executive jobs such as the one Mr. Gage had his eye on, because vizmins are even scarcer among management. Ms. Mawani doesn't know why this particular job was restricted, but you can bet someone's bonus was in danger.
As for Mr. Gage, a 50-year-old single father, he says that all he wanted was to "sit down and have a chat." After all, $90,000 positions with a decent pension aren't all that thick on the ground, even in Vancouver. Too bad he's out of luck.
Personally, I'd be thrilled if our public service looked more like Canada. I'd be even more thrilled if all our children grow up colour-blind. But how can we expect them to if we keep flogging them with the politics of identity? How can we expect them to be colour-blind when our own government insists on racial profiling as the basis for its hiring policy?
Racial quotas are ugly things, or so I was brought up to believe. No matter how lofty the goals that are invoked in their name, I haven't changed my mind.
Whites needn't apply
National Post
Thursday, May 29, 2003 ADVERTISEMENT
The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is looking for someone to fill the post of regional director of communications for its Pacific headquarters. It's a great job: The annual salary is up to $100,000, and it is one of only about 100 executive-level federal positions in British Columbia.
Jobs like this are typically open only to the best and brightest. But in this case you have to be the right colour as well: The employment listing clearly specifies that it is available only to those "who are members of visible minority groups." The goal, of course, is to further Ottawa's long-standing campaign for a more "diverse" public service. But the government has long insisted that this goal would not be pursued by turning to hiring quotas. Certainly, one wonders what to make of Nurjehan Mawani, commissioner of the Public Service Commission of Canada, who recently pledged her faith in the merit principle, and declared that "[hiring] benchmarks are not about lowering standards or about excluding anybody. They are about casting a wider net." Memo to Ms. Mawani: The "net" for this particular job will exclude 87% of the Canadian population.
Given the concern that has been expressed in recent years that our civil service is not attracting enough qualified candidates, one would think the last thing Ottawa's bureaucrats would do is restricting their recruiting on the basis of skin colour. But we also sympathize with the unfortunate applicant who wins the esteemed post at issue. Every time he (or she) screws up, his colleagues will remind themselves that he was not the best candidate for the job -- but the best non-white candidate. No doubt, they will look around at other minority colleagues and wonder, unfairly in most cases, how those people got their jobs.
If stigma and institutional racism really do have an appreciable effect in keeping minorities out of the federal workforce, as the government's corps of equity officers keeps telling us, is this really the best way to eradicate it?
2003-06-01 07:40 | User Profile
How long until we see "Whites Need Not Exist?" Or have we reached that point already?
2003-06-01 18:52 | User Profile
Originally posted by Kurt@Jun 1 2003, 07:40 ** How long until we see "Whites Need Not Exist?" Or have we reached that point already? **
Sho' nuff. Theze already have.
**"The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race," says Dr. Ignatiev.
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=6&t=3273&hl=]Mugabe or Harvard - Who Hates Whites More?[/url]**
2003-06-02 17:44 | User Profile
Northern America is the bastion of capitalism, right? That's why you have a free labour market.
2003-06-02 19:07 | User Profile
Himelfarb.
Perinbaum.