Five years on, Trudeau's vow to build a diverse public service still unfulfilled

When they took power in 2015, the Trudeau Liberalspromised to "build a government that looks like Canada."

But their government, now in itssecond mandate, still hasn't hiredenough minority seniorstaff members totruly reflect the country's diverse makeup.

Only four chiefs of staff to 37 ministers are people of colour roughly 11 per cent of the total while they constitutemore than 22 per cent of the nationalpopulation, according to the last census in 2016.

As protests against anti-Black racism triggered by George Floyd's police custodykillingin Minneapolis have grown in size and spread around the globe,Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been talkingmore about "systemic" racism in Canadian institutions.The prime minister also kneeled in a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Ottawa last Friday as a symbolic gesture of support for their calls for change.

"Systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all our institutions, including in all our police forces, including in the RCMP. That's what systemic racism is," Trudeau said Thursday morning.

"Here are the facts in Canada. Anti-Black racism is real, unconscious bias is real, systemic discrimination is real," the prime minister said in a speech in the House of Commons last week, vowingthat his government is committed to breaking down barriers and providing opportunities for marginalized communities.

The lack of diversity among Liberal staffers was keenly felt by Omer Aziz, who worked briefly as an adviser to Chrystia Freelandwhen she was foreign affairs minister.

"I would go into meetings and I'm the only non-white person there. I felt that when I would raise my voice and give my advice, that it wasn't taken seriously," Aziz told CBC.

"That is eventually why I left what was my dream job."

Getting better ... slowly

Other senior staffers toldCBC that while being one of just a few people of colour around the table may not be an ideal job situation,diversity in the higher ranks of the federal public servicehas come a long way in the past decade.

The government is also responsible for appointingpeople to hundreds of bodies outside the core public service,such as agency boards,foreign missions and Crown corporations.

The Trudeau Liberals reformed that hiring process early in its first mandate to serve its goal of attracting diverse applicants. The result: a dramatically improved ratio of people of colourto other hires,from 4.3 per cent when the Liberals were elected in 2015 to 8.2 per cent as of June 2020.

As for the most senior civil servants (deputy and associate deputy ministers),the number coming from diverse backgrounds is still less than 10 per cent of the total so lowthat the Privy Council Office won't release the figure, arguing it would compromise privacy rights because it would be easy to work out who these senior civil servants are.

Higher ranks in Canadian government still lacking diversity

4 years ago

Duration 2:01

A look at what progress the Trudeau government has made in living up to its pledge that the racial mix of the civil service would line up more closely with Canada's population.

'You have to represent'

"We are in 2020. How come it took so long? It shouldn't have," said Caroline Xavier, the only Black person serving as an associate deputy minister in the federal government. She wasappointed to the post at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canadaback inFebruary.

"Sometimes the burden is heavy because you have to represent.It's a burden I'm prepared to take on because it's my job to open more doors for others."

Xavier said there's no easy solution, but conversations about breaking down barriers "are happening" within government.

"There is a recognition at the most senior levels that this has got to be rectified."

The federal government fares far better when it comes to appointing women; the ranks ofdeputy ministers and other high-level positionsare close to gender parity now.

The Trudeau government isn't the first to pursue greater diversity in the upper ranks of the public service.

In 2000, a task force struck to look into the participation of people of colour in the federal public service citedan "urgent imperative to shape a federal public service that is representative of its citizenry."

Seven years later, the Senatepublished a report on employment equity in the public servicewiththe title: "Not There Yet." Ten years after that, in 2017, a Treasury Board of Canada Secretariattask force reportedthat "many gaps in representation persist in the executive category the very leaders who shape and influence the culture of federal organizations are not sufficiently diverse."

'People don't want to admit that's going on'

Since 2000, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number ofCanadians of colour in the public service from just under six per cent of the total then,to more than 16 per cent today.

But annual employment equity reports and the censusshowthat Black civil servants, along with Filipinos and Latinos, are still grouped at the lower end of the salary ladder.

Liberal MP Greg Fergus,chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, told CBC Newsthis week that he wants to see the governmentaddressthat disparity.

"It doesn't make sense that there's been no Black deputy ministers you can't convince me that there aren't Black people who are competent," he said. "But there's something that went into the calculation over time, that that person didn't make the right fit, or didn't get that promotion. We can justify any individual decision, but when you aggregate all these decisions, you end up with a biased result.

"Those are the things that we've got to take a look at. But it's hard to do the things which are hard to do. And it's hard to see bias. People don't want to admit that's going on."

Trudeau has tasked his parliamentary secretary, Ontario MP Omar Alghabra, with looking at public service renewal. While the Black Lives Matter protests have given thefilemore urgency, the government has no clear plan yet.

Sharon DeSousa has suggestions.A regional executivevice president with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, she served on the 2017 task force on diversity in the public service. She points out that only one recommendation out of 43 was implemented.

"We keep having committees and reports and, to be honest, we're coming up with the same data," DeSousa said.

"We've got systemic barriers and we need to address them," she said, adding that if the Liberals were serious about going after unconscious bias, they would take a hard look at how data on hiring are being collected, and the problems baked into legislation like the Employment Equity Act.

A 'hornet's nest'

The Employment EquityAct hasn't been updated in nearly two decades and still uses the broad term "visible minorities" a phrase the United Nations has called discriminatory because it lacks nuance and assumes the experience of a Black employee is the same as that of a South Asian one.

Former head of the privy council Michael Wernick said he believes now is the time to look at changing legislation.

"I think to get at issues in the 2020s, you're going to want to dig down into each of those communities and have more precise strategies for them," Wernick said, adding that employment equity laws are still an important tool for promoting diversity.

Still, he said, opening the act up for debate could be like turning over a "hornet's nest" and coming to aconsensus won't be easy.

The Liberals also haveflirted with the concept of "name blind" recruitment for the public service the practice of concealing a candidate's name to protect those with moreethnic-sounding names from conscious or unconscious bias in the hiring process.

A pilot project in 2017 produced a report suggesting name blind recruitment made no difference to outcomes, which prompted former Treasury Board president Scott Brison to declare that "the project did not uncover bias."

CBC News: The House6:29Segment - CBC's Salimah Shivji on diversity and equity in the federal public service

The CBCs Salimah Shivji provides this special report about who is getting hired and promoted within Canada's public service.

But it turned out the methodology was flawed. Departments had volunteered to take part in the pilot and knew their hiring decisions would be evaluated.

The Public Service Commission is still examining other random recruitment processes.

Some factors that serve to prevent people of colourfrom being hired by the federal government the country's largest single employer are harder to work around, said Andrew Griffith, a former director-general with Citizenship and Immigration Canada who haswritten extensively about the issue.

"There's a preference in the public service to hire Canadian citizens and not all visible minorities have become citizens yet," Griffith said. He said hebelieves that factornarrows the gap between the diversityof the general population and that of the federal public service.

Other factors that could be frustrating the push for a more diverse public service, he said,arelanguage requirements and a need for regional representationin parts of Canada that are not so diverse.

That second factorcould be less of a problemin the longer term, with a pandemiccrisis forcing many civil servants to work from home. But Griffith said getting into government work is "just a long convoluted process."