TERRINE FRIDAY
The Link (Concordia University)

MONTREAL (CUP) — When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police caught flak in 1996 for imposing a freeze on hiring any more white males, then-RCMP spokesperson Gilles Moreau came quickly to the force’s defence.

“You cannot call it discrimination,” he said. “In my knowledge of United Nations declarations, you can have employment equity policies to make up for past discrimination.”

The RCMP is just one of many public and private-sector Canadian bodies that practice affirmative action, referred to officially as employment equity and also known as positive discrimination.

The programs actively target individuals for recruitment based on the Charter-protected characteristics of gender, race, (dis)ability and First Nations or Inuit status.

According to Barry Cooper, a University of Calgary political science professor, highlighting differences based on physical characteristics in lieu of merit is troublesome. Cooper is the author of “Bureaucrats in Uniform: The Politicization and Decline of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” a report for the Fraser Institute, a conservative Vancouver-based think tank.

“This is, of course, a problem with all employment equity hiring,” Cooper wrote in the 2006 report. “It harms the alleged beneficiaries by removing the element of pride and self-respect in order to promote what are seen by senior administrators as the interests of the ”˜disadvantaged.’ ”

Dean DiSpalatro, political science professor at Concordia University, called employment equity “a Band-Aid solution, a feel-good policy that satisfies the politically correct impulse and gives an appearance of genuine change.”

DiSpalatro argued that artificially injecting under-represented people into any workforce, despite their performance, could hurt any company.

“Let’s just get the best players,” he said. “We should look at merit and suitability to any job as the key determining factor, and then, if minorities are not filling the ranks as much as they should be, we should ask, ”˜Why is this the case?’

“I would argue that affirmative action, and this emphasis on difference, is completely against the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most famous utterance — you should judge someone by the content of their character rather than their skin colour,” he paraphrased. “We should be looking at the someone’s performance, not their visible exterior.”

Minimal employment equity guarantees were first introduced in Canada in the 1960s along with then-prime minister John Diefenbaker’s Canadian Bill Of Rights. In 1978, the Canadian government implemented the Affirmative Action Program, a pilot project that encouraged the active engagement in private and public sectors of Aboriginal people, black people, persons with disabilities and women. In 1985, employment equity programs made up part of the guaranteed equality rights that had been newly added to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

However, DiSpalatro said nothing much has changed in the past 40 years in terms of employment equity. In order to bring the share of disadvantaged groups in key sectors closer to their weight in terms of population, he said, the best solution is to target the real issues: assessing the needs of marginalized communities and re-evaluating a dysfunctional education system.

“Of course it will take longer; results won’t be evident in one year,” he explained. “This is a longer process because you’re talking about going right to the root of the problem by going into neighbourhoods, improving (the education system) and access to resources. The results of these actions don’t show up in a week or two weeks.”

Employment equity “is simply the appearance of results,” he continued, “but you have no real results at all.”

Fo Niemi, co-founder and executive director of the Centre for Research Action on Race Relations, said it’s naive to assume that all Canadians are afforded the same employment opportunities regardless of ethnicity, ability or gender.

“When we think about employment equity, we only think about hiring,” Niemi said. “We don’t look at the records of promotion and access to management positions, which affects women as well.

“Especially in the Francophone sector, anyone with an Arabic-sounding name, or an African non-Christian name, (has) a lot of problems getting even an answer to their job application. So, there (are) still obstacles.”

But even though rigid quotas for hiring minorities are not accepted in Canada, he said, objective-setting — a measure that effectively imposes soft quotas — is encouraged.

“Whoever in this country applies a rigid quota system and hires incompetent people just to meet the numbers, that’s reverse discrimination and we’d be the first to blast it,” he concluded.

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photo: Flickr