Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Human Rights
Issue 1 - Evidence, December 10, 2007
OTTAWA, Monday, December 10, 2007
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 4:04 p.m. to examine cases of alleged discrimination in the hiring and promotion practices of the Federal Public Service and to study the extent to which targets to achieve employment equity for minority groups are being met.
Senator A. Raynell Andreychuk (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, I see a quorum. We are here to continue to study our reference with respect to employment equity.
We started examining some time back cases of alleged discrimination in the hiring and promotion practices of the federal public service and to study the extent to which targets to achieve employment equity for minority groups are being met.
We have begun a dialogue with the Public Service Commission, and we have found there are many other agencies and responsibilities throughout the federal system. To ensure that we are doing a full and adequate study, we thought we should reach out to those employees that are beyond the Public Service Commission and look at how they relate with the commission. Are the rules the same? Are the difficulties the same? Are the targets that have been set by the government applied equally throughout these groups?
Therefore, we have asked Ms. Karen Ellis, Senior Vice-President, Workforce and Workplace Renewal of the Canada Public Service Agency to come forward today and tell us a little bit about the Canada Public Service Agency, so that we can be more acquainted with your role and responsibilities, and then target into the area of employment equity.
Karen Ellis, Senior Vice-President, Workforce and Workplace Renewal, Canada Public Service Agency: Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today. I should like to mention at the outset that my colleague Ms. Kami Ramcharan was to appear with me today. There was a sudden death in her family on Friday, and she had to leave the country to attend to those matters. I am very sorry about her situation, but that is why I am here today. I hope I will be able to answer your questions.
As mentioned by the chair, I am with the Canada Public Service Agency, formerly known as the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada. Our name change became effective earlier this year.
This agency was created in 2003, bringing together a number of units from the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Public Service Commission. It is a fairly new entity.
[Translation]
The agency's raison d'être is to modernize and foster continuing excellence in people management and leadership across the public service. It organizes its work around three program activities to achieve its strategic outcome and deliver results for Canadians: modernized human resource management and strengthened accountability; an effective, ethical leadership and a quality work environment; a representative and accessible public service.
The agency's legal mandate flows from powers delegated to it by the Treasury Board in the Financial Administration Act with respect to: human resources management; official languages; employment equity; and values and ethics.
My sector, Workforce and Workplace Renewal, focuses on programs, policies and values that shape the working environment in the public service. This sector brings together employment policies, values and ethics, official languages, diversity, functional communities and integrated human resources planning. Its mission is to advance public service renewal in helping our clients build and sustain a well managed, dynamic and engaged workforce that is representative of Canada's diverse population and that serves Canadians in our two official languages.
The agency, through the Diversity Division in my sector, provides policy advice and guidance to departments and assesses departmental performance through the people component of the Management Accountability Framework exercise.
We also produce the President's Annual Report on Employment Equity, which is tabled in Parliament.
[English]
Deputy heads have been delegated the responsibility to implement employment equity in their departments. It is important to note that departments are responsible for preparing their own employment equity plans, for conducting employment system reviews, for identifying and eliminating barriers to employment and for showing that they are making reasonable progress toward achieving employment equity objectives.
In 2006, the Clerk of the Privy Council initiated the public service renewal process, for which the Canada Public Service Agency provides policy and operational support. The agency promotes the integration of diversity and employment equity into all aspects of the renewal process.
There are four priorities in public service renewal — planning, recruitment, employee development and enabling infrastructure.
Integrated planning is the foundation and powerhouse of renewal, which links business and human resources planning. It is about enabling the use of flexibility for hiring under the Public Service Modernization Act. It is also about facilitating the achievement of both employment equity and official languages objectives.
Recruitment is critical to renewal in order to renew and sustain capacity at all levels.
Development is about fostering leadership at all levels and about ensuring that employees have meaningful work to do in a supportive environment.
Enabling infrastructure means having the right systems and processes in place to ensure effective planning, recruitment and development.
In essence, renewal is about building a strong and sustainable federal public service for the future. Integral to this is having a workforce that can draw upon a diversity of origins, cultures, views, ideas, experiences and perspectives from across Canada.
[Translation]
Since the federal public service first became subject to the Employment Equity Act in 1996, the representation of women, aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and visible minorities has steadily increased.
As of March 2006, the representation of women, aboriginal peoples and persons with disabilities exceeded their workforce availability. Initial results for 2007 based on preliminary data from departments which have not yet been published show that the representation rates for those groups are still above their workforce availability and that those for visible minorities have increased.
The advances made in employment equity have not only been related to representation. For example, designated group members are more evenly distributed across occupational groups and regions, and their salaries have increased.
[English]
You will know from your own report that you have pulled together and from other recent things that the representation of visible minorities is still below workforce availability. We have made progress, but we are still below that rate.
Ten years ago, with a workforce availability of 9 per cent, the representation of visible minorities in the public service was only 4.5 per cent. Today, the representation of visible minorities is approximately 8.6 per cent, with a workforce availability of 10.4 per cent as derived from the 2001 census. We are still not meeting targets, but we have made improvements.
From 2001 to 2006, almost 6,000 visible minorities were added to the core public administration, and the number of visible minority executives more than doubled. There are now more than 15,000 employees in the core public administration who have self-identified as members of a visible minority group. That includes more than 240 executives out of a population of 4,505 executives.
An analysis of the salary levels of visible minority employees compared to all employees is encouraging. The percentage of visible minority employees earning up to $75,000 is comparable to that of all employees. It is 80 per cent for visible minorities and 79 per cent for all employees in that range. In fact, visible minority employees compare most favourably of the four designated groups when comparing salary levels to the overall employee population.
This, in part, is attributable to the strong representation of visible minority employees in the scientific and professional category. Over 20 per cent of visible minority employees work in this category, which includes work in architecture, auditing, chemistry and mathematics.
[Translation]
The agency supports the three councils representing aboriginal employees, employees with disabilities and the visible minorities — the National Council of Aboriginal Federal Employees, the National Council of Federal Employees with Disabilities and the National Council of Visible Minorities, respectively — by providing the councils with secretariat and financial support in order that they can help us achieve a representative public service.
Several departments are very successful in terms of their representation of equity groups and their methods of achieving employment equity are being shared with other departments.
Some departments provide mentoring to employees with disabilities and are enabling employees with disabilities to overcome serious challenges in the workplace.
We also have success stories with respect to centrally administered development programs. In 2006-07, programs such as the Accelerated Economist Training Program, with 12.5 per cent of visible minorities, the Management Trainee Program, 43.4 per cent, and the Accelerated Executive Development Program, 24.4 per cent, had representation rates for visible minorities which far exceeded their workforce availability. In 2003, the last central intake for the Career Assignment Program had representation of 36 per cent. What the numbers tell us is that when we plan and recruit with employment equity in mind, we succeed.
[English]
The agency has developed two new policy instruments to help in creating a more inclusive and accessible workplace. We expect these policies to be effective April 1, 2008.
The employment equity policy will help departments achieve employment equity objectives across the core public administration. We are revising that policy to make it simpler, clearer and results-based to support the integration of employment equity goals into all aspects of human resources management business planning, as well as strengthening accountability for those results.
As part of the rollout of that policy, we will be conducting regional workshops and holding an employment equity conference. Such activities will strengthen the capacity of departments to become more representative.
It is very important for me to emphasize that our efforts are now targeting line managers, as well as human resources professionals. We believe that it is the line managers who do the hiring, planning and recruiting, and they are the ones that need to get as engaged in this issue as the human resources community has been in the past.
The new duty to accommodate policy will apply to all groups protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act. It will help to ensure the prevention of discrimination on all grounds, such as race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted.
The duty to accommodate policy requires deputy heads to incorporate accommodation principles into the design and planning of all policies, practices, procedures, systems, events and facilities to prevent discrimination on any prohibited ground.
These revised policy instruments, along with effective dialogue and training to support their implementation, will help foster a workplace that values and encourages the inclusion and full participation of equity groups and others needing accommodation.
[Translation]
In conclusion, employment equity in the core public administration is about excellence. We know that a representative and diverse workforce will contribute to better policy, programs and services for all Canadians. It is about more than just numbers — it is about our values. Making the public service as inclusive and accessible as possible is essential to renewal and an opportunity for leadership and excellent people management across the country.
Renewal is the ongoing responsibility of deputy ministers, senior managers, line managers and employees across the public service. We know we have challenges in achieving equity in employment. We are making progress and we are committed to continual improvement.
I would be pleased to answer your questions.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Ellis. Before I turn to other senators, I should like a clarification. The Public Service Commission has testified before us that they educate, facilitate and encourage but have no ability to make managers or the system accountable. Your agency used to be called PSHRMAC; it is now Canada Public Service Agency, a much better title. You say you work together with the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Public Service Commission to encourage, facilitate and identify, all of which seems to be valuable work. Both you and the Public Service Commission have indicated that planning and putting intense resources and attention to a more systematic way will be the answer.
However, I am still left with the same problem of who is accountable? If all of these plans that you facilitate and encourage do not bear fruit, who is accountable?
Ms. Ellis: This is an important point, and I wish to spend a couple of minutes on it. I have been working intensively on public service renewal for the last year as well as on employment equity, and I am trying to show and want to explain to the committee why these must come together.
The accountability for employment equity and a department's performance on employment equity lies with the deputy head of that department. Central agencies, such as Treasury Board and the agency, issue policies, guidelines and give tools to do work and enable departments' implementation of the policies and guidelines. At the end of the day, the ownership for doing the planning and for getting and improving results on a departmental basis lies with the deputy head and the department.
We can bring things to bear that are helpful. You will have heard from other witnesses about the management accountability framework, where departments are assessed on a number of factors every year by central agencies, from planning to the way they do values and ethics to the way they perform on employment equity. Indeed, it is my team — to which there are three parts now — that will assess how a department is doing on employment equity, department by department, and will feed that assessment in to the Treasury Board. The Treasury Board will take all of the different factors that are assessed under that framework from different experts who assess how the department is doing and roll that up. There is a whole assessment of the department on all these angles of management.
In employment equity, we give our assessment, and that gives visibility to how a department is doing. One of the things that I would say about shining a light on performance by assessing it is that it then will draw attention to areas requiring attention. Any deputy minister who has an area identified in that assessment as something that needs attention or improvement will pay attention to that area, but they are accountable for continuously working to improve results. That certainly goes for employment equity.
The planning piece is crucial to renewal. I want to explain what we mean by planning. First and foremost, that deputy head in that department with their team must understand the business of that department. In looking at their business and what they have to deliver for their mandate, we are saying that they have to pull together the human resources needs to ensure there is the talent and the right kinds of skills and people to ensure delivery of that business mandate. That is what we mean by bringing the human resources and the business planning together.
In my statement, I was saying that when you do planning well and take some time as an organization to talk it through and think about what you need, you have to be looking at things like employment equity objectives and official languages objectives as an organization. Where you have gaps or needs, you need to plan in that upfront stage and say, "As an organizational need we have some gaps in this particular area and these are some of the strategies we will use this year in implementing our plan to address some of those."
I described planning as the foundation and the powerhouse of renewal. If you take time as an institution to sit down with your team and engage in conversation — I have heard certain deputy ministers say that the conversation in their department changed when they started to get that in-depth discussion on planning; they would find that each of their senior people had similar challenges and they could come together in a collective way to tackle it. That is what I mean by saying planning is so critical.
Every department must own their planning because every department has different kinds of business and business challenges. We say it is not a one-size-fits-all plan, in terms of their overall plan, but when it comes to things like employment equity and official languages, those are common, good policies for the entire public service that departments need to take ownership of in their own plan.
The Chair: Between what you and the Public Service Commission have said, we are persuaded that this planning is necessary and that you are providing the tools. You are providing the kinds of tools so that the deputy heads of departments and ministries cannot avoid their responsibilities. You have given them the tools so they cannot say, "We do not have the skills; we do not know what the plan is."
If it is all there for them and they do not put the plans in place and it does not bear fruit, what is the consequence? We are seriously concerned that the visible minorities target has dropped again rather than moved in the appropriate direction. If someone can say they did not have the tools, that is one excuse or justifiable reason; but if you have the tools — we have two central agencies, if not more, assisting — and there is no response from the department, what is the consequence?
Ms. Ellis: Because of the management accountability framework, deputy ministers are assessed every year, as we are all assessed on performance every year, but they would be assessed based on their performance in the ministry. Part of that assessment is how they have done on all the elements of the management accountability framework. It is factored in to how they are assessed for performance every year by the highest level public service assessment.
The point you make is very important. Let me make a critical linkage. I know in the report from this committee that you highlighted the issue of cultural change as being the key to driving change. You are right; you can have tools and policies, but the way the world changes is when people actually take hold of, understand, have the awareness and start working with them in effective ways. That is how you start to see changes in the numbers and performance on something like employment equity.
For example, I mentioned earlier that we are renewing the two policies on employment equity and duty to accommodate. When I presented those to a large group of 27 deputy ministers on the committee where I had to get their blessing, they gave me unanimously the same comment. They said: "We understand why this policy is important. We understand why employment equity and diversity is important. We get it. We approve the policies. However, what we need and what our line managers need is practical help to implement. It is not because we do not get it. We understand why it is important. However, we need hands-on assistance when you unroll these policies to sit down with people, talk to them, link it to planning, help them understand how to work with it in a way that has an impact on how they recruit and develop and plan."
The regional workshops and the outreach we are doing represent a new approach for us. Over the years, we have traditionally worked closely with the human resources department or employment equity coordinator within a department. The thing is, those folks are very much immersed in this and understand it and are working away at it. We needed to get this to the actual line managers who are hiring and developing employees, because they are the ones who need a deeper awareness. In most cases, it is not a lack of will. It is, "Give me some tools and advice and help me get rolling with this." That is why we are reaching out to a different kind of audience with the new policies release that is coming, because we know that when we sit down and spend time face to face with a group of managers there is a difference. There is a take up.
I experienced this myself about two months ago. I met with about 25 EX-1 level directors from across the country to discuss duty to accommodate. We manage a very complex and challenging workforce now. I talked with them for about two hours; we could have talked all day. They wanted to say, "What would I do in a case like this? How would I manage in a situation like this?"
The appetite is there for the managers to get more hands-on, become more comfortable and work with it. We cannot train every individual, but we can use a train-the-trainer approach and get to a core group of people in departments. The more people who understand it spend time with others — that will initiate the culture change.
There are consequences of visibility if results are not good that become known and are assessed. However, people understand that it takes time to build a comfort level and to get the results that come from changing the way you do day-to-day business.
Our work may sound unclear, but to me it is a passion and it is clear. When you spend the time, people come away changed and able to grab hold of it, try to apply what they learned back in the workplace. That is how change comes about. Change does not come about by endless emails. You do it by talking about and sharing what has worked for you. For me, it is about teaching the importance of the planning and starting to change culture.
With regard to the planning, every deputy minister has to post his or her integrated business and human resources plan by March 2008. I think all deputy ministers will post. They are working on it.
Senator Jaffer: What does core public administration mean?
Ms. Ellis: That means the employees for whom Treasury Board is the employer. We have some agencies that are separate employers, such as CSIS. Our core number is about 250,000 public servants.
Senator Jaffer: On page five of your presentation, you say that about 80 per cent of visible minorities earn up to $75,000 versus 79 per cent for all employees. Is it 80 per cent of 8.6 per cent of total visible minorities?
Angela Henry, Acting Director, Diversity Policy, Public Service Renewal and Diversity Branch, Canada Public Service Agency: Yes, that would be right, senator.
Senator Jaffer: It is a smaller group that you are comparing in comparison with the rest?
Ms. Ellis: Yes, 80 per cent of 15,000 people.
Senator Jaffer: That is 8.6 per cent; correct?
Ms. Ellis: That is right.
Senator Jaffer: You get my point, therefore, that the number is very small. Many visible minorities are working at very low paying jobs, but because of the scientific jobs it increases the number to 80 per cent. Is this right?
Ms. Henry: It is an average. The scientific and professional jobs increase the average.
There is a distribution of people with regard to their salary for each designated group. I do not have the figures for the proportion of visible minorities who work at the lowest levels. Generally, the salaries of visible minority employees are comparable to those of the entire population. The majority of federal public servants do not earn at the higher levels, and it is probably true that visible minorities do not either.
Senator Jaffer: I respect and understand that.
Can you provide that distribution to the chair? How many of the 8.6 per cent are at the various levels, for example, scientific, entry level, deputy ministers, the executive level, et cetera? That would be very helpful.
Ms. Henry: Yes. We may not be able to provide you with the distribution. We can provide you with the six occupational categories but maybe not the different levels within those categories. We can also provide you with salary bands for those categories.
Senator Jaffer: Is it that from total workforce availability, the target is 10.4 per cent, but you have reached only 8.6 per cent?
Ms. Henry: That is right.
Senator Jaffer: What kind of recruitment do you do to encourage visible minorities?
Ms. Ellis: We will do the follow-up on the numbers you request.
In talking about recruitment, I return to the responsibility of departments for recruitment. I highlighted a few programs run centrally, such as the accelerated economist program, amongst others. We have excellent statistics for visible minority representation because a stream will be recruited, perhaps for visible minorities. When something explicit like that is done, they get good results. However, those are smaller-scale programs.
We share with departments and tell them to look at these best practices that get results when they develop recruitment strategies. We tell them that when they incorporate these strategies into their recruiting strategies, they can fill the gaps.
The new Public Service Modernization Act has flexibilities to address such gaps. If a department identifies a chronic gap with persons with disabilities or one of the equity groups, they can do targeted recruitment activity to fill that gap. For example, they might have a non-advertised process where they appoint people from that group.
If a good basic plan is in place, they have a rationale to say we have a gap on that equity group and have chosen to use these strategies to fill that. These are real tools that departments can use to meet equity objectives.
If a department has done the planning it needs to do, it should be looking strategically at its business lines and how much diversity can help it be better at doing its business. It will want to send that message to all hiring managers to be thoughtful about their plans, the public they are serving and how to meet those objectives to build a more diverse workforce. Some departments are doing quite well in terms of representation of all the groups while others are doing okay but need to improve.
We are trying to twin the different departments to learn what is making it work for them. Much of it is leadership, taking time to engage and to say we will do something and we will use these strategies to get those results. Recruiting can be targeted and specific if you have a good plan and can show you had a need.
Senator Jaffer: You say the agency supports three councils. What are these councils?
Ms. Ellis: They are grassroots, elected bodies.
Senator Jaffer: Are they from the public service?
Ms. Ellis: Yes; they are all public servants. They have come together in the last few years. The National Council on Visible Minorities is the longest standing; it is well established. The other two are more recent.
These are employees who elect a governance body to get a feel of the issues at the grassroots levels of challenges that are being faced by the different equity groups. They feed that into their governing body and work closely with us in terms of partnership and getting attention on the issues.
Therefore, it is another source of advice and pulse-taking that allows us to work on systemic issues or anything they may identify as needing attention.
Senator Munson: Thank you for appearing. I was thinking that if I were a visible minority watching this hearing on CPAC and listening to your presentation, which makes a lot of sense, what would make me excited about joining the public service? You have used the words "practical help" to get regional managers or workshops, et cetera.
It is my feeling that sometimes there must be an attitudinal change within the public service. You say you have policies that will be effective April 1, 2008, and you will be conducting regional workshops. That is not very much time.
Ms. Ellis: We have already done the workshops on duty to accommodate this past fall. Those workshops were very well attended and well received by the managers who attended them.
I myself reviewed all of the case scenarios that people worked through. We had four different cases of different accommodation issues. Groups of managers would sit down and say, "That is interesting. I have never faced that situation before. How would I tackle that?" We had a really good response from that hands-on help with people.
Senator Munson: Give me an example.
Ms. Ellis: Do you want an example of one of the scenarios?
Senator Munson: Yes.
Ms. Ellis: One scenario was of an employee who has classically been a very good performer but the manager begins to notice that the performance of the employee is slipping. For example, the person's briefing notes are not as good, the attitude seems to be changing and there seems to be something off about the behaviour. How would you as a manager go about determining whether this is a performance issue, which may lead you to take certain types of measures? Is there a need for an accommodation because this person may be experiencing some sort of personal issue or mental illness? There are different things covered under the duty to accommodate.
This was a popular scenario. People would ask, "How would you, as a manager, be equipped to identify issues like that and know how to handle them?" We were trying to bring people together about where to get advice and how to handle that type of situation. When you start to get into day-to-day issues around duty to accommodate or employment equity, you can just sit down and talk about how to be a good people manager and how to lead your team well. That is how you get people excited.
My passion comes in at renewal, employment equity, official languages, you name it. It is all about being an excellent leader and people manager in the public service, because that is how we build engagement, excitement and excellence, and we have to manage performance well to make all of that happen.
In my view, whatever piece we are working on, I link it to good people management and leadership. That is what renewal is all about for me.
Senator Munson: The employment equity policy you mentioned and the new duty to accommodate policy I assume applies to the figures you talked about — namely, the 6,000 visible minorities added between 2001 and 2006, about the more than 16,000 employees in the core public administration who have identified themselves as a visible minority and then the 240 executives out of a population of 4,505.
If you were projecting into the future, would these two policies rapidly increase that figure of entry of visible minorities into the public service? If so, how would it do it?
Ms. Ellis: The policies apply to everyone in the core public administration. They are broad policies that apply to how every department needs to operate.
For example, in employment equity, every deputy heads' accountabilities are laid out in that policy, which ensures they have a good plan, that they have identified any barriers or problems and that they have a plan for meeting employment equity objectives. It is that level of policy. It is telling the deputy heads what they need to do in order to fulfil the employment equity objectives under the act.
The policies are general to the public service. However, you are asking whether those should increase representation. If that is what you are asking, I can certainly speak to that.
Senator Munson: Yes.
Ms. Ellis: If we have departments doing excellent planning, thinking about employment equity in their planning and are therefore recruiting, over time you should see those numbers getting better.
Senator Munson: With respect to the question I asked previously and briefly on attitudes in these workshops — I do not know how to ask this, but is there a poor or lackadaisical attitude or not enough conviction in terms of attitude in hiring visible minorities in the public service?
Ms. Ellis: I would not venture to comment on individual attitudes or a generalized attitude in the Public Service Commission about that. Often I am hearing that there needs to be more education and time spent talking to people and helping them work with basic management tools in order to work on issues around employment equity. If there were any specific cases of difficulty, they would have to be handled on their own track.
In most cases, I find it is workload and not a lack of will. It is probably around getting people focused on how to bring this issue into their general management approach. That is why we need to do outreach and get people talking to each other.
I think there is a lot of goodwill there. It is a matter of getting the focus and energy going and bringing it into the planning in a deliberate way from the start. If the foundation is good, other results will start to flow from that.
Senator Dallaire: With respect to visible minorities — Aboriginals, in particular — we are 40 years down the road from a bilingualism act. To implement it, there were quotas and positions identified. The quotas were with regard to how many visible minorities we should have inside the system, and then there were quotas on recruitment and deliberate actions taken.
We seem to have grasped the gender scenario. However, there again we introduced quotas in recruitment and established quotas on how many visible minorities we want to see in different departments. We also introduced assessments made by gender to obtain the numbers and build a critical mass in order that, internally, policing, implementation and renewal could be done.
We are now here at "visible minorities," and we are looking at 10 per cent. With regard to the methodology and the priorities of the renewal, there is recruitment and development.
There is one way you can manage the problem, namely, by imposing what I have just described. Of course, you can reinforce that through leadership.
My question is this: Visible minorities are becoming the recruitment base of the future — not White Anglo or Franco Judeo-Christians. What are you doing to prepare for 25 per cent visible minorities? I understand the attitude. I question leadership because I have never captured how leadership is taught in the public service. There is a lot of management in the public service, but it is exceptionally weak on leadership, which creates atmosphere, attitude, et cetera.
You are number crunching now, but what about the reality in 2015 and 2020? Do you not think that we should go the same route we went with gender and francophones and start putting real quotas in recruitment — you can recruit from the outside at all levels — employment and evaluation for functions?
Ms. Ellis: Any decision on new programs or policies lies with the elected government. I cannot provide you an opinion on that.
The target we do have is that workforce availability number — the 10.4 per cent that we are not meeting. We know what the number is that we should be meeting to say that we are hiring at a rate that equals what is available out there in the workforce.
Your comments about the changing demographics in Canada and the percentage of visible minorities in the population are well taken. However, there is a concentration of those populations in our biggest cities. That also has an effect in terms of the pool of labour available to bring in for certain types of jobs in certain departments. You will have some higher representation in some places because the labour market availability is there.
Regarding your point about the need for critical mass in the system, one thing that is positive is one of the programs that I mentioned earlier, the Accelerated Executive Development Program. I am a graduate of that. The statistics for the latest round are very high for visible minorities.
What is important about that in terms of leadership is that those people are coming in at the director general level. They will be the future assistant deputy ministers and deputy ministers in the system. In terms of a concrete, critical mass at the senior level, that will start to bear fruit. In fact, already because of that cohort, we have a much higher number than we have had before at the director general level. That is a very good step. If we can continue with some of that in the leadership roles, it will be very important for building that critical mass in the future.
Senator Dallaire: With regard to leadership development and with assisting immigrants coming in to have accreditation of their skills, how much money and concrete person years is devoted to that? Also, what are you possibly doing with Immigration Canada and with the provinces to accelerate the processes of accreditation so that you can fill a lot of these jobs with the immigrant population?
Ms. Ellis: In terms of leadership development and training, there is a whole section in my agency led by a colleague that is devoted to leadership development in the public service of the executive levels.
Senator Dallaire: We start leadership at the private level where I come from. Leadership does not truly exist. How can you bring in attitudinal changes and atmospheres in which people can be influenced versus simply resource management?
Ms. Ellis: You talked about management. When I talked about good people management being core to renewal, it does link directly to what you are saying. A lot of the training that is being done for managers now is starting to become mandatory in some cases. However, in many cases, we are trying to push for giving people some good basic things, including things around diversity training and understanding employment equity, and people have to take those courses. It is not just theory, as I said earlier. They also have to have the practical, hands-on management of a team and have the mentoring and coaching above them to teach them how to engage on that and expect different results from them.
You are right, it must happen at every level, but this means that we must build the awareness, understanding, true engagement and ownership of these issues in order to teach younger people as they come up.
Senator Dallaire: When we looked at the employment of three-star generals and above — the ADM level and above — from the period 1968 to 1987, the average time that any one of them was in their job was 1.68 years.
The whole program is built on leadership at the deputy minister level. How many of these ladies and gentlemen really see any of the stuff moving forward? What is the average time that DMs and ADMs actually stay in their jobs to see these implementations and directives being put through the system? Do you have a statistic on that?
Ms. Ellis: I do have everything at my fingertips, but I know it is a mix. There have been some reports lately around a lot of turnover and fast movement of some members of the deputy minister community, but there are also deputies who have been in place for a number of years in other departments. There are different reasons for those different lengths of tenure.
The key thing is that the whole community of deputies now is engaged in renewal, including these issues around diversity. Even if they were to move departments, the policy applies to everyone. They will still be accountable for the results in their department if they are there for one, two or five years. The system takes very seriously what they expect of deputy heads.
[Translation]
Senator Dawson: First of all, I would like to make a comment. If we make a judgment about the future based on the experience of the past, we should not forget that a few years ago, when the federal public service decided it was important to have francophone Quebecers in the public service, efforts were made and recruitment took place.
But also, still looking at the past, it is obvious that as soon as we stopped complaining, these efforts stopped. For example, if you look at the French presence in the federal public service in the seventies and early eighties, there was a good proportion of francophone employees from Quebec. But when Quebecers stopped playing the watchdog over this file and stopped making it a priority, the machinery ceased to deal with the issue. It is still the same story today.
I have two questions. The first is how progress for visible minorities in Ottawa compares to that in the regions. How does the federal government compare its performance in Ottawa regarding visible minorities, and all minorities for that matter, to its performance at the regional level?
I am not asking you to provide an answer today.
Here is my second question. How does the federal government compare to Ontario? I see here a title: "The new duty to accommodate policy". In French, we could talk about a "politique d'accommodement," but I see in your text you rather opted for "la nouvelle politique sur l'obligation de prendre des mesures".
Quebec is certainly lagging behind, especially in terms of the public service — and I find it funny that it should be translated in this way — and I believe that if we do not act quickly, things are going to worsen.
I would like to have these comparisons between Ottawa and the regions and between Ontario and Quebec regarding the share of visible minorities and progress and sensitivity in this regard.
Ms. Ellis: We took note of your questions and will do everything possible to find the answers and get back to you.
[English]
Senator Jaffer: How does the public service compare to the private sector?
Ms. Ellis: In terms of our numbers?
Senator Jaffer: Yes.
Ms. Ellis: I can give you a general response. If we have any specific case that we can send follow-up material on, we will.
What is often cited to us is that the financial sector does very well in terms of visible minority representation. Obviously, a lot of attention is paid to that as they have gotten a result.
I attended a round table a few months ago with several fairly senior vice-presidents of human resources from the private sector. They talked about having had varying degrees of success in recruiting visible minorities, but several of them admitted that a lot of the senior executive tables still needed to become more reflective of visible minority representation.
That is a challenge we have talked about in the public service. We are starting to get more people into the public service but we have to really focus on the development of those employees to enable them to make a full contribution and be able to advance in the ranks and move into leadership. The private sector has some similar challenges, but some sectors have better numbers at this point. I will have to follow up with you on specifics.
Senator Jaffer: Generally, are they doing better than the public service?
Ms. Ellis: I cannot make a definitive statement.
With respect to visible minorities in the private sector, many are doing better, but not with respect to Aboriginal employees. We will follow up to confirm, but that is our understanding. I want to put a caveat that we would need to follow up.
Senator Munson: I notice you did not produce an annual report this year. Why is that?
Ms. Ellis: We did. We are in the process of getting that through the system, sir.
Senator Munson: Is there a delay for some reason?
Ms. Ellis: There is no particular reason for delay, other than we are going through the process.
Senator Munson: That is a good public servant answer.
Ms. Ellis: We cannot talk about the results until they are tabled. There is a process in Parliament for that. We do have a report under way.
The Chair: Are they annual reports due at the end of the year?
Ms. Ellis: Technically, yes, they are. Often, they are a bit later than that. We do eventually get them tabled but they sometimes are a bit delayed.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Ellis, for explaining the new title and some of the work you are doing in this field. As I indicated in the first remarks, we are now going beyond the Public Service Commission trying to get a full picture of all employees under the federal system. Thank you for attending here and indicating your part of it. We will continue to pursue the question of accountability and consequences, which underpin a lot of what we are doing. We thank you for your part in that puzzle.
The panel we now have before us from the Department of Justice Canada is comprised of Ms. Camille Therriault-Power, Ms. Zina Glinski and Ms. Pamela Woods.
We were interested, after meeting with the Public Service Commission and the Canada Public Service Agency, in learning that each department is now tasked with putting together a plan. Since the issues of employment equity lie squarely with issues of justice and fairness for Canadians, we are starting with the Department of Justice to get an understanding of how this department is approaching this mandate, being assisted by the Public Service Commission and the Canada Public Service Agency. We should like your update on the status of the department in relation to these important issues.
Welcome. Please proceed with you introductory statement, which I trust will not be too long so that we can go to questions. Thank you.
Camille Therriault-Power, Director General, Director General's Office, Department of Justice Canada: Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be with you here this evening, and I thank you for inviting me to speak to you about Justice Canada's efforts as it relates to employment equity representation and various initiatives we have under way at the department.
[Translation]
The mission of the Department of Justice is to support the government in working to ensure that Canada is a just and law abiding society with an accessible, efficient and fair system of justice; to provide high quality legal services and counsel to the government and to client departments and agencies; and to promote respect for our rights and freedoms, the law and the Constitution.
[English]
Justice has a workforce of some 4,500 employees with over half employed as lawyers in the law group. Our programs are delivered from our headquarters in Ottawa and through a network of legal services units, departments and agencies and regional offices and sub-offices across Canada. The law group is the Department of Justice's primary business delivery workforce. Consequently, and unique from any other department across the public service, Justice Canada's management cadre is primarily comprised of lawyers with few executives, just over 30, who are mainly responsible for the management of corporate functions and some programs, for people like myself. All of the department's assistant deputy ministers are members of the law group and are not classified in the executive ranks. Over and above the need to meet the commitment of the Employment Equity Act, the Department of Justice has long realized that we must recruit from a diverse labour pool if we are to ensure that Canada continues to have a strong, dynamic and innovative justice system geared to excellence, capable of addressing future needs and delivering its mission and priorities.
We at Justice Canada are experiencing the same tightening labour market for legal professionals as other employers in the public and private sectors in Canada. This means that we need to develop new ways to recruit, develop, retain and nurture employees and leverage the talented and skilled people who are already part of our workforce. To succeed, we need to ensure that our employment brand promotes an inclusive workplace to provide us with the competitive advantage in competing for and retaining legal talent today.
Employment equity has been a long-standing commitment of the Department of Justice. Gains have been made in terms of overall representation of designated group members, and we are one of the few departments that currently exceed the overall labour market availability rates for all of our designated groups. The Department of Justice employment equity workforce analysis for March 31, 2007, indicated that the department's workforce was representative overall with all employment equity designated groups exceeding workforce availabilities, as I just mentioned.
Without going into all of the statistics in terms of representation, we are exceeding in all groups based on labour market availability statistics. For example, for visible minorities, we have representation of 10.6 per cent compared with workforce availability of 7.9 per cent. In all of our other employment equity groups, we exceed.
In fact, the Treasury Board Management Accountability Framework, or the MAF as we fondly refer to it in the public service circle, assessment for our department for 2006-07 gave us an acceptable rating in all indicators relating to employment equity, including those of employment equity representation, recruitment, promotions, HR and business planning. The assessment further stated under the MAF element of fairness of employment and workplace practices and effective labour relation practices that Justice Canada has performed well in creating a fair workplace, as evidenced by its performance related to staffing practices and recruitment, its Public Service Modernization Act implementation and its employment equity efforts.
During fiscal 2006-07, we recruited 581 individuals to the department, of which 70.7 per cent were women and 3.8 per cent for Aboriginal peoples. That recruitment exceeded the labour market availability in both these categories and with visible minorities as well. The only employment equity group for which we did not exceed was for persons with disabilities, and the gap was 0.3 per cent.
During the same period, looking at promotions within the department, women were promoted at a rate of 69.3 per cent, which was higher than the representation rate of 67.6 per cent. For all groups, we exceeded with the exception of Aboriginal peoples, where 3.1 per cent were promoted while representation within the department is 3.2 per cent.
Advances have been made in Embracing Change benchmarks. For visible minorities, that is notable in the increase of representation in the executive theatre groups and their participation in the Department of Justice Leaders of Tomorrow Program. I will talk about that later. It is a leadership program that we have developed in-house for feeder populations.
We still have to achieve the Embracing Change benchmark for acting appointments and for appointments to the EX group. While we have a high representation of females in the senior cadres within the department, both in our law group and executive group, we still have to make improvement as it relates to visible minorities, Aboriginal persons and persons with disabilities.
How has the Department of Justice been able to achieve the gains made overall in the area of employment equity? We have a strong commitment from our senior management cadre within the department. We have a champion that is one of our associate deputy ministers and various governance committees for each of the employment equity groups headed by senior officials within the department. The department has demonstrated leadership, a strong employment equity governance structure, an employment equity three-year action plan, a human resources management plan with strong employment equity linkages in integrated human resources and a strategic business planning process.
These are new initiatives undertaken to become more refined and sophisticated as we move through different planning process. Every year, linkages are made between employment equity programming and actual recruitment practices within the department. We are making headway in that regard.
Monitoring, evaluating and assessing employment equity progress by region and portfolio for each direct report to the deputy minister is done. This is included in our performance management process. You are evaluated on the basis of your performance in terms of recruitment and creating a culture for inclusiveness within the organization. Tools and programs are provided to support managers in their efforts to create a diverse workforce reflective of Canadian society.
In addition to the leadership provided by our department's employment equity advisory committees and the employees who volunteer as their members, we continue to ensure that issues affecting their designated group remain at the forefront in the achievement of the Department of Justice's employment equity goals. This includes those that impact on hiring and promotional practices.
For example, our advisory committee on visible minorities did a cultural audit. The audit identified the need to provide members of designated groups with the skills required to move into senior-level positions. This resulted in a comprehensive analysis of our departmental designated groups and the subsequent creation of the Justice Leaders of Tomorrow pilot program currently under way with designated group representation of over 50 per cent.
This is a group of 20 dynamic young participants, mostly lawyers, working for the department who are undertaking both management and leadership development training to enhance their skills and make them ready for the executive cadre when opportunities are available. We are a career organization that grows its leaders.
We have also been an active participant in a program the Privy Council Office runs called Career on the Move. This program recruits visible minority group officer-level employees on assignment to the Privy Council Office for a period of two years to acquire the experience relating to the machinery of governance. We have four participants in that program currently.
Most recently, the Advisory Committee on Visible Minorities identified the need for a mentoring program for visible minorities providing the impetus to the employment equity steering committee to create a committee to examine mentoring programming options. We will be reintroducing a mentoring program within the department before the end of the fiscal year.
[Translation]
The implementation of our employment equity plan for 2006-09 and the progressive steps we have taken over the last few years allowed us to enhance our objectives in the area of employment equity.
[English]
Mandatory numerical goals were established to address gaps in representation within occupational groups where there are gaps in representation, as required by the Employment Equity Act. We have established numerical goals in areas not under-represented to ensure that the departmental representation is maintained and where possible increased. We are sensitive that there will be new Statistics Canada survey information coming out next year. Labour market availability will be better reflecting the 2001 data and we want to maintain our representativeness and improve as we move forward.
The Department of Justice also developed a human resources plan that takes into account the key priorities of the department and how it will respond to the current and future challenges it is facing in human resources management. This includes those of employment equity as articulated in our 2006 to 2009 plan. This plan will be integrated with the department's business plan and will assist to strengthen its management practices and support of the people component of the management accountability framework.
We can make that plan available to this committee if it wishes.
As Ms. Ellis mentioned in her presentation, our plan has been posted on our website and we are undertaking an aggressive engagement strategy to inform the employees that it is something we are trying to do to improve the workplace for them.
[Translation]
The goals established in our employment equity and human resources management plans are aligned with the short and medium term renewal priorities which have been set for the public service as a whole, in terms of recruitment planning, employee development and empowering infrastructure as described in the 14th report of the Clerk of the Privy Council and the Advisory Committee on the Public Service.
[English]
We are verifying progress with respect to representation on a quarterly basis with our direct reports in meeting with them to discuss that. The department has made good progress in its recruitment efforts and continues to ensure that it is representative of Canadian society. We use such tools as the flexibilities afforded by the Public Service Employment Act, the integration of the employment equity and duty to accommodate in appointment tools and appointment-related policies, as well as the review of employment equity goals on a semi-annual basis.
Given that we are Canada's largest public law firm, we undertake extensive outreach to law schools and law faculties in our efforts to recruit designated group members into our legal excellence articling program on a regional and national basis.
An example of this is the department's financial support in the establishment in 2001 of the Akitsiraq Law School, an innovative four-year program created to address the need for and the under-representation of Inuit lawyers in private practice and public administration in Nunavut. It is a program of the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria in partnership with Nunavut Arctic College and the Akitsiraq Law School Society to any Inuit in their own territory. Three of the new graduates from the law school are now articling as Crown prosecutors with the Public Prosecution Service of Canada in Iqaluit.
We have a tool kit that assists managers in their recruitment efforts, providing them with information on recruitment, retention and the development of persons from the employment equity designated groups. This was launched parallel to our 2006 to 2009 employment equity plan.
We have our managers undertaking training in the area of recruitment, in terms of recruitment practices and interviewing skills. There is a tool — entitled the Objective Eye — that was developed by Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the Canada School of the Public Service. This is a tool we are promoting that our clients use in recruitment to ensure as much as possible we have a bias-free selection process in place.
In conclusion, as the department has many more programs and initiatives under way or being developed, you have been provided with two documents that will provide a more comprehensive picture of the gains the Department of Justice has made in its hiring and promotion practices and the programs and initiatives as they apply to the representation of designated groups in our workforce.
Specifically, these are the Department of Justice's Employment Equity Plan — which we have provided to you today in both official languages — as well as the Employment Equity Report on Progress, which measures our report on representation as of March 31 of this year.
[Translation]
To conclude, the Department of Justice continues with its efforts to reach the prescribed targets in the Employment Equity Act and to ensure that discrimination and barriers to employment will be eliminated from our employment policies and practices.
[English]
We continue to review and assess the measures that we are taking to ensure our legal obligations are met, to work collaboratively with our designated group advisory committees and bargaining agents — our law group unionized a year ago — to address areas of concern in order to have a workforce that is not only representative overall of Canadian society but at all levels within our organization.
Senator Munson: Thank you for your presentation. We have heard a lot today. Last week, we heard from the president of the Public Service Commission. You talked about equity programs. She said last week that the Department of Justice was not on the list of the 12 organizations that provided her with staffing strategies that dealt with employment equity. Is this the plan today?
Ms. Therriault-Power: The department had various planning processes that were not aligned.
Senator Munson: Aligned with what?
Ms. Therriault-Power: You would have planned staffing related to your salary budgets, for example, your employment equity plans, a business plan through your DPR and reports on plans and priorities processes. We had a lot of planning happening that was not necessarily aligned in supporting us in meeting our employment equity targets.
We have developed a human resources plan that covers a three-year period and that speaks to employment equity programming and objectives that we want to help in dealing with representation and cultural issues at our organization.
Also, for 2007-08, we have refined our HR planning process so that we are mining from clients exactly what their plans are as they relate to staffing activity. We are looking at projected retirements or program areas that are increasing in resource bases, as well as at our employment equity targets, and we are working proactively on specific staffing positions in order to meet those targets.
We are aligning recruitment with employment equity, which sounds obvious, but it has not necessarily been obvious in the past.
Senator Munson: Do you have to submit this to the president of the Public Service Commission so you can get on the list?
Pamela Woods, Manager, Staffing, Official Languages and Awards, Staffing, Official Languages and Recognition Section, Department of Justice Canada: We do not actually have to submit a report until the end of the fiscal year. The request has not come in yet.
The Chair: I think that is the question. We were told that the plans should be in place by April 1 of next year. To date, only 12 have filed, if I recall.
Will you be in a position to have yours filed with the Public Service Commission before April 1, 2008?
Ms. Therriault-Power: I can quite confidently tell you, yes, that will be the case.
Senator Munson: There are two other issues for me. You mentioned that the Advisory Committee on Visible Minorities identified the need for a mentoring program for visible minorities, which provided the impetus to the employment equity steering committee to create a subcommittee on mentoring, which has just tabled recommendations for a national mentoring program. The department will introduce a mentoring program this year. What kind of mentoring is being spoken about?
Ms. Therriault-Power: The department had a mentoring program a few years ago, but because of funding cuts and other things the program ended. There was quite a groundswell of interest from all of our employment equity group steering committees to reintroduce the program, so they tasked a group with doing that and came up with recommendations. Last Thursday, I believe, one of the recommendations was accepted, and that was to reintroduce the program. Funding will be allocated, and we will get on with having a mentoring program within Justice Canada.
Senator Munson: Who is doing what? What does mentoring mean in this context?
Ms. Therriault-Power: It is matching an employee — in our case most likely a legal counsel, just by virtue of population — with a more seasoned senior official within the department to discuss strategies, culture and other things in support of them advancing in their careers.
What we did in the past, and I expect we will do in the future, is provide some training as well, in terms of talking about what that mentoring relationship is and how things begin and end. There is a life cycle to these mentoring relationships.
Senator Munson: You described yourself as Canada's largest public law firm. This may be the most naive question you will hear from a senator, but does a visible minority person arriving in this country have an opportunity to get directly into the Department of Justice as a lawyer?
Ms. Therriault-Power: No. When we post positions for external recruitment, which would be the case here, preference is given to Canadian citizens.
Senator Munson: Is that person not a Canadian citizen or a landed immigrant once he or she arrives? I am just curious.
There seems to be so many impediments to visible minorities arriving here from every country and with every degree imaginable, and once he or she gets off the plane, whoops, you will have to drive a taxi or something else for a little while, and maybe in two or three years when you understand our legal system you may be able to work either in the private sector or the public service, or you may even be a dentist or a doctor.
Ms. Woods: With respect to the issue as it relates to lawyers, there is an occupational certification required to be a lawyer in the federal government, which means you must be a member in good standing of the law society in the area in which you work. We do not set the requirements to be a member of that law society; the law society does.
Therefore, we are not the ones putting the barrier in place. We have to wait until these individuals have met the requirements of the law society before we are allowed to accept them into our department as lawyers.
Senator Munson: I sort of understand that, but it seems to me that in terms of every society in this country, whether we are talking about doctors or lawyers or architects, you name it, we are saying that we have the greatest standards in the world and, therefore, you have to pay a price for that and your academic and professional life is delayed.
As the Department of Justice, you simply accept that role from the law society?
Ms. Woods: Intuitively, it makes sense to me, and maybe it is because I work in the Department of Justice and I have gotten used to the idea.
Given that Department of Justice lawyer must have in-depth knowledge of the laws of Canada, it seems that that would take a person some time to acquire.
Senator Munson: Would there be any room for a mentoring program working with people coming in, a program that would work within the system?
Ms. Therriault-Power: When dealing with foreign credentials, it steps beyond the scope of the Department of Justice as an employer themselves. When Ms. Barrados spoke with you, she spoke about foreign credentials as something the Public Service Commission is looking at. We have worked closely with them in that regard.
In Canada right now, this is a huge issue for industry. When we recruit externally, there is a lot of demand for positions within the department because of the issues we deal with. That is not to say, however, that it is not something that in time we will not feel the crunch on, just as much as other industries in Canada, and want to tackle this or encourage the Public Service Commission to deal with it as well.
The Chair: Senator Munson, there is the whole difficulty of recognizing credentials for people who come to Canada. Within the Public Service Commission, there is also the indication that we accept Canadian citizens first, before landed immigrants. Are you questioning that part of it?
Senator Munson: No. I am just curious about the process and why it takes this period of time. I understand there must be an understanding of our judicial system in order to practice in it, but I find that things move incredibly slowly for people that we all know and meet, whether it is the public service or the private sector.
Ms. Woods: One other point to clarify as well is that it is the Canada Public Service Agency, which Ms. Ellis was here representing, that establishes qualification standards for all the occupational groups within the federal government. We have no choice but to meet those. That is considered to be an essential requirement to get a job, and the CPSA sets those standards.
With respect to lawyers, they are the ones that set the occupational requirement standard that you must be a member of a law society. Departments have to follow those qualification standards.
Senator Munson: I do not want to go off the beaten path, but with those standards, is the requirement two years in this country practising law before an individual would even think of serving his or her nation within the Department of Justice?
The Chair: Provincially; this is a problem of even changing from province to province in Canada, which compounds the difficulty. If you reside in Vancouver, for example, and then you want to apply for a job that may get you into the Ontario courts, you have to reapply in Ontario. It is a provincial responsibility. We could, perhaps, follow that up with other witnesses.
Senator Dallaire: Let me push this a little farther. Of course, the client departments have an influence on the agency and what criteria they will establish. You do have a word to say there.
Second, you indicated that you grow your own or you develop your own. If I understand the criteria for a legal person, you have to be a Canadian citizen to be a lawyer, is that correct?
Ms. Therriault-Power: No.
Ms. Woods: No, the Public Service Employment Act requires us to give preference to Canadian citizens when we hire externally.
Senator Dallaire: We have all the words, but let us take an example. Let us take the example immigrants coming into this country, particularly visible minorities. If you said, we will hire a bunch of them, assist them in going through law school, or we will assist them in getting their accreditation and then we will hire them, to me, that is concrete action — not words. It also would be a great exercise in pushing the envelope on the agency that says that you have to prefer Canadians before immigrants, which I think is erroneous. It is not a strong statement. If the person is a landed immigrant, then that argument would be worthwhile.
Why not create your own school of developing your people? My question is not as dumb as it seems. If you look at the pool of people that are coming into the workforce, by the year 2015 or 2020 — and no one has told me yet, on any of these things from the human resource side, that they have actually looked out there concretely — the bulk of the people will not be White Judeo-Christians. If you are having a hard time hitting the targets now, imagine what will happen 10 years down the road. What innovative idea you have punched out, perhaps like creating your own? Would that be something to look at?
Ms. Therriault-Power: The funding of the Akitsiraq Law School was an example of supporting the training and grooming of Inuit to be able to practise practice law in the North.
One thing that many in our senior legal community are doing as well is very proactively hiring law students, grooming them with a view to joining our articling program and, once graduated from the articling program, being recruited indeterminately into the department. There has been quite a bit of proactive action going out into law faculties.
We are discovering now that the labour market for legal talent is getting so tight that unless we begin a relationship with a law student before he or she graduates, it is almost too difficult to attract them. We obviously cannot compete on wages.
Senator Dallaire: However, you have not targeted the immigrant or visible minority specifically in that exercise, have you?
Ms. Therriault-Power: We would be looking to target employment equity group members, but I admit that these people have already been admitted into a law faculty.
Senator Dallaire: We still have the other side of the house.
Am I correct that you said that one of the things you insist of your managers is that they meet quotas with regard to visible minorities? I am talking about specific quotas, for example, that in your directorate or in your section we want to see four visible minorities by such and such a date? Do you actually establish that?
Ms. Therriault-Power: We set targets, I guess. I will ask Ms. Glinski to answer that question.
Senator Dallaire: I am in the artillery and I set a lot of targets but I do not hit that many. As we did with francophones and bilingualism, and as we did with gender, is that same enthusiasm there for visible minorities to do that type of thing?
Zina Glinski, Senior Policy Advisor, Employment Equity, Human Resources Planning, Employment Equity and HR Systems, Department of Justice Canada: Every department is to establish goals — not quotas — to comply with the Employment Equity Act in areas of under-representation. Those are our mandatory goals, goals that we are to achieve as a department if we are to be compliant with the act.
For visible minorities, we have two mandatory goals that we have set and we monitor those goals semi-annually. We have gone over and above that, though, and have established voluntary goals for each direct report to the deputy minister — this is by portfolio and region — so that we can do better to maintain our representation or increase it. Those are monitored semi-annually. Also, the direct reports are assessed on an annual basis on their performance, through their performance management agreement.
Yes, we do have goals; we do monitor departments. Deputy heads are accountable, but we do not really call them quotas. There are shares of recruitment promotion activity.
Senator Dallaire: When you are recruiting into the ministry, you will see 10 per cent visible minorities or you will not see 100 per recruitment — you will see less, right? You are not filling it up or backfilling it with White Anglo-Saxons or francophones or something like that, right?
Ms. Glinski: We are trying to have a fair share of recruitment.
Senator Dallaire: I am not trying to put you on the spot. Essentially, the atmosphere coming out is that there is not the same enthusiasm to hit the targets of diversity as there was with gender or with bilingualism — originally, francophones. Unless I see the same discipline that was brought in for those two, not only are you not necessarily going to meet your targets, but you will not meet them at different rank levels, that is for sure. Then how do you handle the future?
Ms. Therriault-Power: As Ms. Ellis mentioned earlier, the notion of leadership really comes into play here. As an example of success, one of our direct report positions to the deputy became vacant earlier this year. With collaboration with the associate deputy minister that I was referring to you earlier, we said that we will work hard now to fill that position with an employment equity group member and we were successful in doing that.
It was a question of all the stars being aligned and everybody working together toward meeting that objective together. Historically, I think we have not been aligned. It is a question of maturity. We are maturing as an organization.
Senator Dallaire: We went through the francophone exercise and God knows how many people went catastrophic on that. We have gone through the gender exercise and are still working our way through that one. Again, look what has happened today.
Is the diversity exercise the same? Look around the table. I do not see that coming. I do not see that same discipline for diversity, which will set you up for failure in the future with the number crunching.
Are you recruiting visible minorities at the director level and the DG level before promoting from within?
Ms. Therriault-Power: Because of the nature of law practised within the organization, we tend to recruit at more junior levels and promote within the organization based on experience. We recruit very few mid-career.
However, the demographic crunch we are facing will force us to look at a very different recruitment strategy. If that is the case, we will absolutely look at recruiting employment equity group members there. Our past practice has been to grow our counsel from within the organization.
Senator Dallaire: I am not pushing for that, of course. However, your concept of development has to take some radical positions, not "Let us all get together and agree on something." If we had done that, we would not be where we are with gender and certainly not where we are with bilingualism.
The Chair: Senator Dallaire, thank you. This is the second time you say that we have reached our targets in gender and francophones. I think it is an ongoing issue. We have met the targets by numbers, but we need more women in higher positions. I would remind you that we will struggle in all four target areas. We are not quite there. We have a particularly difficult problem in the visible minorities because the numbers have regressed rather than progressed. Remember, women are 50 per cent of the population.
Senator Dallaire: Yes, Madam Chair. Please remember that I am speaking in my second language here. I am trying to say that a minority must be vigilant every day. We have come a huge way, but we are not even at first base on the visible minority issue. Certainly, I think the initiative on the Inuit is superb. Throw it out to the First Nations, and so on, and beat up on the provincial governments, absolutely.
Thank you very much.
Senator Jaffer: First, I wish to talk about the disabled. What specific accommodations is your department putting in place to encourage more people from the disability groups, physically challenged people, to work in your department?
Ms. Glinski: Specifically for persons with disabilities, we do have a policy on accommodating differences in the workplace. It covers more than persons with disabilities. It covers all groups covered under the Canadian Human Rights Act.
With respect to your question, in terms of persons with disabilities, we have a central accommodation fund so that no person with a disability is put at a disadvantage upon hiring because they need expensive technical equipment, for instance, or, perhaps, a personal support worker — salary coverage in terms of hiring the person. A manager can rely on the department for assistance in expenses that exceed what normally could be afforded by a manager. This fund has been recognized as a best practice in the public service. Our policy is also looked upon by other departments in terms of our process and our roles and responsibilities for managers in the accommodation process.
The growth in persons with disabilities since our policy has been in place and communicated has been significant. Also, technological changes in equipping persons with disabilities in the workplace have significantly increased our pool of people we can hire. We have done very well in terms of persons with disabilities in the departments.
As Ms. Ellis said, the Canada Public Service Agency will be introducing their new policy on April 1, and the policy for Department of Justice has covered all the groups. We will adopt their policy but make it clear in terms of our own department's rules and responsibilities in the accommodation process.
Senator Jaffer: I may have misunderstood, but the total number working for Justice Canada is 4,500?
Ms. Glinski: Yes.
Senator Jaffer: Of the 4,500 employees, how many are physically challenged?
Ms. Glinski: Persons with disabilities, 226.
Senator Jaffer: What is the number for visible minorities?
Ms. Glinski: The number for visible minorities is 483. Did you want percentages or a number? For persons with disabilities, it is 5 per cent of the 4,500; and for visible minorities, it is 10.6 per cent.
Senator Jaffer: What about the percentage of women?
Ms. Glinski: Women are 67.6 per cent.
Senator Jaffer: How many women would that be?
Ms. Glinski: There are 3,069.
Senator Jaffer: What about Aboriginal people?
Ms. Glinski: Aboriginal people are 146, which is 3.2 per cent of the departmental population.
Senator Jaffer: Can you explain what workforce availability is?
Ms. Glinski: It is the pool of available —
Senator Jaffer: Pool of available lawyers in the Aboriginal community? Is that what it means?
Ms. Glinski: Available, yes, in the outside community.
Senator Jaffer: "Available" meaning looking for a job or how many lawyers? I do not understand that.
Ms. Glinski: Each job classification is geared to the availability. Yes, it would be geared to lawyers available outside the department who have the credentials to work in the Department of Justice.
Senator Jaffer: How do you arrive at that number?
Ms. Therriault-Power: The Statistics Canada survey census data of 2001. Next year, that data will be for the survey conducted last year. Statistics Canada issues that data, and it is against that data that we measure our representativeness on this.
Senator Jaffer: Does that mean that there are 7.9 per cent of visible minority lawyers in our population, or is it that of all the lawyers only 7.9 per cent are in the visible minorities category?
Ms. Glinski: For visible minority lawyers, our representation is 231. That is 9.6 per cent of all lawyers in the department. The availability weighted to our department is 6.2 per cent. We are above availability for visible minorities.
Senator Jaffer: What does "availability" mean?
Ms. Glinski: Those peoples in the Canadian population who have all the credentials to work in the Department of Justice as a lawyer.
Senator Jaffer: At the executive level, how many visible minorities do you have?
Ms. Glinski: None, but our executive category is very small. As of March 31, we have only 35 employees in the executive category. As Ms. Therriault-Power noted, most of our senior executives in the department are in the law group. We have levels in the law group, and they are in the senior levels of our law group.
Senator Jaffer: How many women are in the 35?
Ms. Glinski: There are 19; 54.3 per cent of executives are women.
Senator Jaffer: How many Aboriginal people?
Ms. Glinski: One.
Senator Jaffer: Physically challenged?
Ms. Glinski: One.
Senator Jaffer: And no visible minorities?
Ms. Glinski: No.
Senator Jaffer: Any explanation for that?
Ms. Glinski: One is the very small cadre of executives in the department.
Ms. Therriault-Power: The executive group is generally performing corporate management functions within the organization. It is not necessarily an organization that attracts a lot of the executive cadre because the rules are very specific. A lot of the senior executive roles are played by lawyers. We have had difficulty in attracting employment equity group members, specifically Aboriginal and visible minorities, to those jobs. It is something that we have to work on.
Senator Jaffer: What do you mean you have had difficulties? What efforts have you made?
Ms. Therriault-Power: We have advertised positions and based on that we have selected candidates. I have only been with the department for two years. Therefore, I do not know if a concerted effort was made, as we did with one of our senior legal direct-report jobs, to work together to ensure that our first direct report to the deputy minister is a member of the employment equity group. I do not know that we have done that for executive jobs in the department, but we will have to undertake to do that in order to increase representation.
Senator Jaffer: Earlier in your remarks, you spoke about you being the biggest law firm. I also know that you farm out a lot of work. When you farm out the work, do you ask the firms that your employment equity policies be followed?
Ms. Therriault-Power: I do not know the answer to that question. We are subject to the same contracting policies that Public Works and Government Services Canada issues for the rest of the public service. There are a number of rules that have to be respected, but whether or not employment equity is included, I am not certain.
Senator Jaffer: May I ask you to find out, please?
Ms. Therriault-Power: Yes, I shall find out.
Senator Jaffer: When you say the biggest law firm, do you mean the 4,500 or 4,500 plus the work you farm out?
Ms. Therriault-Power: As the head of human resources, I am focusing on my workforce. The consultants or agents engaged to prosecute and do civil litigation and provide advisory support to the government are part of our workforce strategy, but I am not targeting them when I am working on our human resources strategies.
Senator Jaffer: You have contract workers in addition to the 4,500.
Ms. Therriault-Power: Yes.
Senator Jaffer: There is not necessarily an employment equity policy there. If you look at it, would the visible minorities, Aboriginals and women be represented even less?
Ms. Therriault-Power: I do not know the numbers. We will see if we can look into that and provide you with some information.
With the Federal Accountability Act, the prosecution service was hived off and became its own department on December 12, 2006. A large part of our agents population are the prosecutors that are engaged by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada to prosecute files across Canada. Now it is more in the litigation and advisory support area that we see contractors being used. However, I will look into that to see if any filtering is done on that basis and provide that information to the chair.
The Chair: In earlier testimony, we were told that 80 per cent of the people come in by contracts and then go on to be permanent positions throughout the public service.
Ms. Therriault-Power: Right; yes.
The Chair: If you are already known to a department, you get that three-month contract and maybe then another and another. Then you are there applying for that permanent job. About 80 per cent of the people who are permanent come out of the contract pool. Therefore, we are very interested in the contracts.
Ms. Therriault-Power: There is a distinction to be made here. I was assuming that Senator Jaffer was speaking, for example, of a legal agent from one of Canada's law firms like McCarthy Tétrault or Lang Michener. We occasionally recruit from that population, but because of the wage differential, I can count on my hand how often that occurs.
We also hire a number of term employees into our articling program. We do that because you cannot be appointed indeterminately as a lawyer until you are a member of a law society and have passed the bar. We have a high representation of term employees on the recruitment side, but those are actually employees of the Department of Justice whereas legal agents are not. Those are people we have hired on contract work to do legal work for us.
Senator Jaffer: I am from British Columbia. For example, in Nanaimo, you may have legal agents doing your drug work. I want to know whether you have this policy for them, or whether there is none.
Ms. Therriault-Power: No. I do not believe we have considered this in our contracting decision with legal agents, but I will confirm that and report back to the chair.
The Chair: Many lawyers from the Aboriginal community have told me that they knew if they obtained a law degree they could make a difference in their community and a difference for themselves. There is a natural pool of people. I think visible minorities, Aboriginals, et cetera, fight to get a law degree, fight for justice issues and, therefore, one would hope that the Department of Justice was one of the leading departments in filling these positions.
While you have met your targets, it is not so far above it that we can rest on our laurels.
For example, 30 years ago there were almost no Aboriginal lawyers. We now have specialized law programs and we have more Aboriginal people completing their education, but they are either opening their own firms, going to work on First Nations issues or being recruited by INAC, et cetera.
Do you think the Department of Justice should be doing better with this, or is it because you are sharing lawyers with a greater need from these areas throughout our communities?
Ms. Therriault-Power: We have a very large Aboriginal law portfolio dealing with a number of complex Aboriginal issues. There is a legal services unit at Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and a policy and litigation section in our headquarters.
I do not know the answer to why people make choices. However, as we see competitiveness for legal talent becoming greater, we would like to be more inclusive, reaching out and recruiting more members of employment equity groups, including Aboriginal people, into the department. The question is that of availability. Looking at law faculties across Canada, they are very representative — women are over 50 per cent and other employment equity groups are high as well. We need to be an organization recruiting that professional talent.
The Chair: The Department of Justice is the lead agency on justice issues for Canada on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and all of the other issues that are applied across Canada. Is there any role the department plays with the other departments to translate that message, that it is not only the Department of Justice that is responsible for the Charter and for equity and justice? Do you do it from a legal perspective as well? Is there any specific program or responsibility that tasks the Department of Justice to play that role?
Ms. Therriault-Power: Yes. We have counsel working at the Canada Public Service Agency, the Public Service Commission and at the Treasury Board Secretariat. We have counsel working in these respective policy areas providing advice to government. In our public law area, we also have legal practice groups that come together to discuss various issues in order to share knowledge and to promote Charter values, et cetera. In our own leadership, it is there in how we manage our own workforce.
Our legal services units are present in almost every government department. Often, our senior legal people are sitting on the executive committee of a department. With respect to our leadership and how we conduct ourselves in our representativeness, these are all things we want to promote.
With respect to our public law area, obviously through legal practice and practice groups, we are trying to promote better Charter understanding, both within the legal community in government as well as within our client population.
Senator Jaffer: I have a supplementary. The chair said I may have my own reasons for asking you these questions. My reasons are only as a senator. I have no other reasons.
The Chair: I meant to say that we had obtained it from our study, and I was not sure whether you were coming from that point of view or from a broader perspective.
Senator Jaffer: I have two questions. On your website, you say that in civil matters the Department of Justice fully supports employment equity and is committed to undertaking special measures where necessary to eliminate any disadvantages that may be experienced.
I did not hear anything about special measures. Perhaps I missed it, because I did leave the room for a few minutes. What special measures are you employing with respect to visible minorities?
The reason I asked you about your agents is that it is the policy of the Department of Justice to encourage and respect commitment to the implementation principles of employment equity by lawyers and law firms appointed as agents of the Attorney General. To this end, agents must, as a condition of their appointment, comply with the requirements set out in this policy. I did not hear the issue of agents addressed in your presentation.
Ms. Therriault-Power: I will have to follow up on that information and report back to the committee.
Senator Jaffer: Could you also provide what specific measures have been taken by the Department of Justice with respect to visible minorities?
Ms. Therriault-Power: Yes.
Senator Munson: You may not be able to answer this question — and it is only meant as a point of clarification. I will give you a statement that was given to us by Mr. Niemi from the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations. He previously appeared before our committee.
If you are not aware, here is what he said:
If the members of the committee —
— meaning us —
— have to accompany a victim of discrimination, to walk that person throughout the human rights system at the federal level, they will understand how complex, discouraging and even how demanding the process can be. There is an average wait of three to four years before one can actually get a decision from the commission — that is, if the commission exercises its powers and authority to take in the complaint. That individual might then wait for another year or two before the case can be brought to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, at the complainant's expense. If the individual loses at the end of the five years, he or she may have to pay for the tribunal costs of the respondent. In most cases, the respondents are the Attorney General of Canada or big federal institutions, and opposite them is a lone individual. We do not believe this system is fair...
There was some confusion at that time as to whether costs would be expected to be paid at the tribunal level or upon appeal to the courts. Maybe you can clarify that issue for us. It does not have to be today.
Is there any case in which the Attorney General of Canada has demanded costs from a discrimination complainant upon appeal? If costs could be requested upon appeal, can you comment on the barrier that such a situation might pose to a victim considering bringing a complaint based on discrimination?
I know this is the end of the day and you may not have the answers to this. For the record, we would eventually like to receive answers to those questions.
Ms. Therriault-Power: We can follow up on that.
The Chair: I think those answers might be obtained from another division in the Department of Justice.
Ms. Therriault-Power: Yes. We could easily ask that question and obtain the information. I am sure that information would be available.
The Chair: Thank you for appearing today and putting forward the work that the Department of Justice is doing. From the questions, you can see that we are very interested in your efforts, and we will prod you to do more and put as a priority the issues of the target groups within the Public Service Commission.
In our first report, we indicated that we were not satisfied with the efforts to date and that more needs to be done. You have come to point out what you are attempting to do, and we thank you for that.
Our next witness is Mr. Karl Flecker, National Director of Anti-Racism and Human Rights Department, Canadian Labour Congress.
I think you have an opening statement. If that can be brief, we can engage the senators in questions and answers. We are interested not only in the national policies, but also in a frank and open discussion about implementation. I think that leads to a better understanding and support for the challenges we face throughout the federal public service in employing visible minorities, Aboriginals, women and the disabled.
Karl Flecker, National Director of Anti-Racism and Human Rights Department, Canadian Labour Congress: Thank you, Madam Chair, senators and fellow workers. I appreciate you ran a little late. I drove up from Kingston today and I have been on the road for the last week, so your delay was to my advantage.
I am with the Canadian Labour Congress, representing 52 affiliates and 3.2 million workers. My inputs today are intended to be on the broader policy level rather than the day-to-day matters affecting the federal workers, as I understand that one of our affiliates, the Public Service Alliance Commission, will be ably presenting next week.
I regret that the invitation was finalized just last week as I did not have enough time to make comprehensive inputs. However, I have provided you with some papers that I hope will be of relevance.
I will make a few preliminary comments relevant to your study mandate. I want to pick up on some of the recommendations in the "Employment Equity in the Federal Public Service — Not There Yet" report and, as you say, have a frank and open discussion with you.
One of the things I noted in the report, and that I often do in my work in the congress, is to point to the discouraging results for racialized workers. As did the witnesses who have presented, it speaks to the pressing need to get to a point of critical mass, or a tipping point, in order to see significant organizational change.
I often talk about the fact that the demographic data is making it clear that there is a wave of colour that is well under way. From the labour movement's perspective, there are only three cohorts that will play a significant role in replacing an aging workforce and our union density: the Aboriginal community; the immigrant community; and Gen X and Gen Y.
It is evident to us that each of these cohorts has an inherent composition of equality-seeking communities — women, persons of colour — and particularly the last two communities are predominantly persons of colour or racialized workers.
For example, in the immigrant category, 80 per cent of immigrants now are coming from the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Pacific region. Translated, these are workers of colour. The Generation X and Y cohorts — this is the 18- to 34-year-old band — includes some 7 million people; 20 per cent are people of colour. The 5- to 15-year-old cohort is the most racially diverse cohort in Canadian history; one in three is not White.
This cohort of new workers has a great deal to offer the federal public service and the labour movement in general. They are, and will be, entering the labour market at a rate of about 500,000 persons annually for the next 10 years, according to HRSDC's latest 10-year projection for the Canadian labour market.
These workers are at the front end of their careers. They are highly educated, a very colourful crew of both racialized individuals and, what my son and daughter refer to themselves as, "hybrids," the consequence of mixed relationships.
My point in referring to these cohorts is to agree with your report that employers like the federal government need to ramp up their recruitment, retention and advancement strategies for equality-seeking communities, with particular attention on the cohorts where representation in the federal public service has been poor. I am talking here about the racialized workers. Quite simply, we need this crew in large numbers. Critical mass is very much around us.
We would concur with your recommendation that it is also long overdue to think outside of the box in terms of strong leadership and accountability mechanisms to bring about sustained and meaningful change. Your recommendation that bonuses be tied to deputy ministers' performance assessments in terms of progress on diversity and equity goals is a good one. However, you may also want to consider punitive consequences for hiring managers who consistently fail to change the face of their staff and their programs.
I have a very limited understanding of the bonus systems and performance assessment processes. I understand they are quite complex and may not provide both the carrot and the stick that is necessary to get the change that is needed, and at the pace that is required. In essence, we are saying that we need to add teeth that are prepared to chew out consequences for employment equity plans.
We have seen a lot of employment equity plans in unionized workplaces; they are essentially very thick documents with very long histories that few people can recall or make any informed commentary about. One lesson this has taught the labour movement is the need to make these plans less process heavy, more comprehensible and, perhaps more important, measurable in a timely and integrated manner — not unlike the process in which unions advance collecting bargaining negotiations.
The recommendation in your report dealing with advancing concrete action plans to ensure effective corporate culture and change was also of interest to me. As you know, you cannot attract folks who feel, see and hear that the organizational policy, cultures and practices are not genuinely welcoming.
Your "Not There Yet" report cited the need to confront discriminatory attitudes, address the resistance and foster a supportive workplace that understands differences — all good things, and steps that we advocate in the labour movement. However, when other federal policies are being advanced through other branches of government that effectively institutionalize policies such as racial profiling and the discriminatory treatment of some designated group members, such as Middle Eastern, Arabic or Muslim communities, the contradictions of a government being a welcoming workplace are laid bare.
I am referring to policies within various parts of the federal government that embrace no-fly lists, security certificates, preventative arrests, investigative hearings or security clearance processes that are associated with international and bi-national agreements like ITAR — International Traffic in Arms Regulations — or the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorists, C-TPAT, or questionable security clearance checks for airline and marine workers, or the rapid expansion and exploitation of foreign worker programs. Each of these has the effect of either overtly sanctioning profiling practices or covertly enabling discriminatory attitudes among citizens. We see the unwelcome message surface in many of our workplaces.
These policies sacrifice questionable notions of security at the expense of a broader workplace climate that purports to respect difference. When the federal government, on the one hand, advances these types of policies and regulations, including having their workers implement them, then the organizational welcome mat looks questionable.
Your "Not There Yet" report spoke about the need to have a communication strategy that would reach out to different populations, employ enhanced techniques to recruit and retain external candidates and improve the understanding of the federal hiring and promotion process — all good stuff. We would add there is also a need for an honest, yet saucy communication strategy — not only for the federal public service as a workplace, but for all Canadians. The extent to which discrimination, racism and xenophobia persists is alarming and it must be aggressively confronted.
I notice that today a report was released by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and the Association for Canadian Studies that reported that one in four Canadians feels their rights are violated. The three most common areas identified by Canadians who say their rights have been violated were discrimination based on race, ethnicity, skin colour or gender — two of the top three.
I also quickly want to point to a very disturbing survey done by the Strategic Council in 2005. They asked the question about immigrants to Canada — if they felt that some immigrants made bigger and better contributions than others.
I want to share these results: 40 per cent of those surveyed expressed the view that immigrants from some countries make a bigger and better contribution than others; 80 per cent claimed that European immigrants make a positive contribution; 59 per cent said Asians; 40 per cent stated East Indians; and only 33 per cent chose those from the Caribbean.
Given that the report I referred to earlier shows foreign-born population has increased and is up by 14 per cent since 2001, four times higher than the Canadian-born population, it has serious consequences for a welcoming of a critical mass, and it is sending a message that government needs to be serious about changing dominant culture, especially when we also take a look at the fact that labour force growth is anywhere between 75 and 100 per cent dependent on immigrants in the next number of years.
Finally, I wanted to also point to the October issue of Maclean's, which pointedly asked the question: Are we becoming a nation of bigots?
The article exposed the attitudes of Canadians on the issue of reasonable accommodation for religious and cultural minorities, and the responses indicated a very intolerant population. Most striking was that 45 per cent said that no accommodation in the workplace should be provided and only 4 per cent agree with full accommodation, all of which is to say the need for the federal public service to demonstrate leadership by advancing an aggressive, saucy and honest communications campaign about the persistence of racism and discrimination and our resistance to it is long overdue.
Here we share some common ground. The labour movement in Canada has no choice but to also confront and challenge and use tools that we have on hand and those that we have not thought of using yet. This includes communicating honestly about our failures with the equity-seeking communities, particularly the racialized communities and the kids-of-colour cohort within that broad category; ad campaigns that not only show the faces of kids of colour, as I call them, but show the dramatic and graphic portrayals of the costs and consequences of discrimination. This must have a place in arresting these increased incidences of discrimination and intolerance that the Maclean's survey demonstrates.
Outreach using new approaches. I noted in the previous presentation that we need to move beyond simply putting booths on campuses, but look at creative internships, messaging with young cohorts about what the work is really like and providing dynamic workplace opportunities that will change systems that do not work. These kids are not interested in simply trying stuff that they know has failed.
Talking with equality-seeking communities to hear first-hand what barriers they are facing has been instructional to the labour movement. Talking via equality-seeking media outlets, community associations and networks is also essential. We learned about wage gaps, differentially applied developmental opportunities, informal workplace practices that move some up and others aside and a lack of role models. These are just some of the lessons that we have learned. The point of hitting on those is they also point to specific actions that we must fight for.
Employment-equity initiatives must similarly address these realities with less process and more action. Finally, ongoing workplace training to change organizational culture is another mainstay the labour movement has made significant investments in, as well as putting some resources into supporting networking amongst and between equality-seeking groups that will help to build and sustain critical mass. Is it enough? Not by a long shot. We too are not there yet.
I will stop there and do my best to answer your questions.
The Chair: Thank you. Am I correct in assuming the situation we identify within the Public Service Commission to some degree — I do not know what degree — mirrors the same difficulties within the labour movement as well? In other words, we heard from another witness who said to bring forward a complaint on racial discrimination does not get you as far as perhaps in some other category of work-related discrimination and, therefore, it is a common issue for all of us. I am wondering if there are any specific ways that you are working in the labour movement across this country, not just at the national office, because I think the Canadian Labour Congress here at the national level has policies and understands the issue. It is how to get it down into the field.
Are there any particular programs or issues that you are dealing with that may be of benefit as a suggestion or at least to broaden our knowledge?
Mr. Flecker: Certainly. I am glad for the opportunity. You are right; the problems that the Public Service Commission is facing are the same as the broader labour movement. To get to some specifics, some things we are doing relates to the opportunity for education within the labour movement. This is a great opportunity to actually confront these racist and discriminatory attitudes and put them into the context of what workers are dealing with.
Since I have taken on this position, for example, part of our labour schools across the country have one-week or weekend courses to integrate modules directly into existing courses. In the past when we would take a look at the issues of racism, discrimination and equity, quite often they would be billed as add-on courses related to human rights. The course would be offered, and the only people who would come were the equality-seeking groups. It was typically a therapeutic weekend for those individuals, but did it change organizational structure? Not in the direction we need.
We have begun to develop modules that go into the collective bargaining, health and safety and communications courses, into various courses, that integrate the issues that workers of colour, for example, are experiencing in their community or workplace. We then present that discrimination, xenophobia or intolerance, in the context of workers' rights.
For example, one of the papers I passed around talking about the increased incidence of covert racial profiling in some sectors, in manufacturing or transportation. We present those issues and say here is a real-life case study. Take a look at how this is affecting 40 per cent of a particular membership that are foreign born. There are persons working on the docks, for example, who have to go through these extra processes for security clearances, whose names are entered into homeland security databases and cross-checked with three-quarters of a million Black and White names, mostly Black, and subsequently finding that their career opportunities or lives are somewhere between impeded or destroyed.
We present those issues and ask how to deal with them. What slowly begins to happen is the workers see the human rights or equality issues in a much broader scale and begin to use the tools as the collective bargaining process to make changes.
I often conduct workshops for unions. We are saying we need to be able to challenge the climate in the workplace. There is one approach that in the past has used an anti-racist approach or a strictly moral-suasion perspective. There will always be individuals who are just not willing to make that kind of inclusive leap in their thinking. However, when we present the fact of an aging workforce, a declining fertility rate and that by 2016 our population will top out at 35 million and that pension growth, in order to be dynamic, requires a vibrant workforce, now we are talking dollars and cents. Workers begin to look at that and say, "I have a vested interest in ensuring that someone who is 25 and happens to be from an equality-seeking group — we know 70 per cent of our workforce will fall in the four designated groups — gets a job, a good job, and moves up in the job, because your career success is my pension success." To be crude, those are the kinds of motivators that we have found a certain inspiration.
The Chair: It grabs the attention.
Senator Jaffer: Thank you very much. I found your presentation very interesting. Being the largest group, you bring people together. I have some questions of you.
Last week, as you were told, Mr. Fo Niemi, the co-founder and executive director of Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations was before us, and he suggested that the committee needs to examine not only employers but also the role unions play regarding employment equity. Some of this you answered in your presentation, but please expand. Do you think unions are equipped to deal adequately with racial discrimination and harassment?
Mr. Flecker: Certainly, we could always do better in this regard. I think you will find in talking to the workers who face these complaints that the processes are and can be very cumbersome. Take the example of the stewards tasked with the job of actually advancing the complaint case. If we do not spend enough time on the stewards' training to be able to give that steward the understanding about why it is important to advance an individual complaint and to be able to see the systemic nature of individual complaints, which might actually trigger a class set of grievances or policy grievances, then we miss that opportunity.
To answer your question, we need to do more in training the stewards and using the internal tools available to them before looking at the external legislative tools. Unions like CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, have made important steps bringing together a critical mass of unionized Aboriginal workers. Approximately 500,000 workers in CUPE were asked what they found in their experience and respective workplaces that would be helpful in terms of progressive collective agreement language to advance the issues of concern for Aboriginal workers. A manual has been put together with specific clauses.
Those are the kinds of concrete suggestions that the labour movement has done. They have been done because human rights advocates within the labour movement demanded that we take a chunk of workers' dues to be able to fund those things. We do not get resources from the federal government or from other places to do those; they come internally. Hence, the impact is commensurate with the size of the resource that we have.
Senator Jaffer: I was interested in your brief regarding racial profiling and what you said about marine workers here. I deal regularly with minority workers at airports and their loss of jobs. There is a glass ceiling. What are you doing to educate people within your own movement?
Mr. Flecker: In that paper, for example, we indicate that we have been speaking publicly at events. We use our website. When we talk about human rights issues, we are taking the contemporary issues affecting Canadians now and saying this is what has taken place since 9/11. Since June 18, 2007, Canada created its own no-fly list or passenger protect program. We spoke out against this particular program. It is not because we do not want to have secure flights, but there is something about simply embracing a U.S. initiative without the thoughtfulness around the consequences of what this will mean. We have received reports and we are creating a website that actually allows people who have been falsely or wrongly included on these lists to be able to tell their stories because we do not hear enough about the consequences.
You mentioned airline workers. There are approximately 1,000 airline workers that were denied their opportunity for security clearance to work in different parts of airports because of the hastily implemented security measures after the Air India disaster. Do not mistake that every worker is concerned for safety in the workplace and for the broader public. It is the mad rush to implement national "insecurity" policies that profile particular communities without any thought of the consequences that is our concern.
To counter that, we speak against it, meet with the respective ministers, the unions are filing grievances, we go to the arbitration boards and we use whatever tools are at our disposal to be able to resist this.
Finally, one of the things we would encourage is to profile everyone and not just a few if this is the way we are going. However, I think the Canadian security establishment might already have that under way.
Senator Jaffer: Do you do any specific training within the union movement on racial profiling?
Mr. Flecker: Yes, we do in the training and the courses we offer. For example, in collective bargaining, we talk about how racial profiling has manifested itself in the airline, manufacturing, transportation and portions of the service and communications sectors. We are using those examples to show how it is operating covertly and overtly, so that people can begin to see the implications.
For example, if you look at the docks, until you recognize that 40 per cent of the ILWU, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, are persons who are foreign born or from another soil you will not be able to see the racial profiling impacts. We need to look at the question of dual citizenship for approximately 20 countries and how that applies to manufacturers who have won federal contracts under ITAR rules. Persons born in Lebanon, Iraq, et cetera, have limited career opportunities or are subjected to extra security measures.
How does that affect the climate in that workplace? Is that fair and just? How can we counter that? The educational steps are raising the examples, where possible challenging through the legal strategies available to us, and asking whether this is achieving the security we want or whether it is costing particular workers their career opportunities.
Senator Jaffer: I noticed reports regarding Aboriginal people, women and people with disabilities on your website. Has the Canadian Labour Congress done any recent research on visible minority issues within the workplace?
Mr. Flecker: A paper I was unable to bring in, which I will send to the clerk electronically, is a standing committee report looking at the four identified groups with some research data we would be happy to share.
The Chair: We have asked for profiling on the Human Rights Commission. Do you have statistics within the CLC for all your affiliates, including the breakdown of the number of women, disabled, visible minorities and Aboriginals? Do you have those breakdowns of your own position, which would be helpful for us to compare?
Mr. Flecker: I do not have the kind of detail that you like.
The Chair: Do you collect it, and if so, would you provide us with that?
Mr. Flecker: We could provide you with some of that data. It would be at a more global level. Each of the affiliates will have different degrees to which they may or may not collect that data within their own unions.
For example, recent Canadian census numbers have shown that women in unionized workplaces now outstrip men.
I will do my best to provide global data and review some of the G8 to see which of them have useful data.
The Chair: We have asked the Public Service Commission for that, and it would be helpful if we had the complementary data to see whether we practise what we preach. We have looked at the Senate and the Senate has used our report to monitor its own work.
Mr. Flecker: Certainly.
Senator Munson: You interested me with the progressive language clauses you referenced in terms of the collective bargaining process on the hiring of Aboriginals.
Do you have progressive language in any of these collective bargaining processes when it comes to visible minorities? If you do not, what are you really saying in terms of progressive language?
Mr. Flecker: Let me talk about the CUPE example regarding the Aboriginal collective agreement clauses. Everything from notions of family and family stays or days of observance was unique to that particular community. It was the first union that took the initiative to compile this into a useful book. Other unions and the Canadian Labour Congress have not yet done this, but it is something that CUPE has suggested to us is long overdue and we need to take a look at it.
Senator Munson: We have been listening to a lot of numbers today from some of the senior management at the Department of Justice and the Canada Public Service Agency. They seem to be talking about doubling the number of visible minorities adding to the core public administration. The representation of visible minorities is now approximately 8.6 per cent as opposed to 4.5 per cent 10 years ago. People seem to be proud of those figures.
What is your view on what is happening in the federal public service in all these levels or occupational categories? Everyone will say that more must be done. From a labour point of view, have they really done that much? Or is it because there are more visible minorities in this country?
Mr. Flecker: Quite frankly, the efforts have not been very impressive. This business has been around for 80 business quarters, or 20 years. If I were in the corporate sector and someone said that we have a new idea, we want to try it out, but it will only take 20 years before we will assess it, I would be out of business.
When I look at the long term and the demographic wave that I described, we are at such a dangerous point in terms of being behind where we need to be that I often fear we have missed the opportunity.
When I look at a longitudinal study that was completed by Statistics Canada on how long immigrants stick around, looking back to 1980 data, I see immigrants — particularly racialized workers — that were living in low-income situations for two decades. When I see that young males between the ages of 18 and 44 stick around Canada for one year or less — six out of 10 leave town — I think we are in serious trouble.
This country, and the federal public service, is in a serious competition for talent. Seventy per cent of the job openings between now and 2017 will be as a result of retirement. The crowd that is coming up must feel that they are interested, welcome and capable to do the job. That crowd, as I mentioned, are hybrids. They are immigrants. They are sons and daughters. They are my kids.
Quite frankly, if I were in their shoes, with an ancestral link to India, for example, one of the hottest economies on the planet — tomorrow 72 million cell phones turned on and 350 million people speaking English, and if I knew my way between Hyderabad and Bangalore — and I had a choice between driving a cab, which is realistically what my kids would be looking at, between Surrey and downtown Vancouver seven days a week, or running my own business or working with a community service or public centre in India, the choice is simple — I would look there.
The new generation will be commuting between Mumbai and Montreal. The federal public service and Canada has been fighting for 20 years to get bad numbers on the table. We are in serious trouble.
Senator Munson: You use the word "dangerous." Obviously, attitudes are changing. We are at a dangerous point. If it goes at this particular rate, what is the danger? As a country, do we stagnate economically and culturally?
Mr. Flecker: On the economic side, I think that is clear. We can top out at a 35-million total population and begin to stumble along with a service industry economy and watch a lot of people actually go to other places.
However, I would say one of the more dangerous things we need to watch is this: If we think about the riots we saw in France two years ago, the rise of neo-Nazi Germany again, some of the policies we are following in the absence of a warm and welcoming climate and the ethno-racial hubs that are being created, then one of the most dangerous things we are looking at are the schisms and tensions between communities that might well be irreparable. I think we have all seen signs of that in different places.
I will provide you a personal example. I live in Kingston, and every Canada Day, the Aryan Nation and the Heritage Front have a Canada Day barbeque outside of my town. It is a barbeque that has gotten bigger, not smaller, every year.
That is an anecdotal expression. That is the kind of danger I think we are heading into. As the workers, the kids of colour cohort, do not see economic opportunity in the federal public service, the labour movement or anywhere else — then the problem is obvious.
Senator Munson: Sometimes I think the attitude that it will not happen in our backyard results from the fact that we are surrounded by oceans, but it could very well. I agree with you.
Before I go on, since I have been saucy most of by life, I saw the word "saucy" twice in your presentation. You said a "saucy communications strategy" and then "aggressive, saucy and honest communications campaign." What does "saucy" mean in this regard? I am just curious.
Mr. Flecker: It strikes me that when we talk about this issue, sometimes the language gets very muted. We talk about diversity and inclusiveness, and it all becomes very rubbery. I do presentations quite frequently, and I am quite astounded that I am the first person who says the word "racism" and acknowledges that we have had a very poor track record in our workplaces and in our society.
Senator Munson: After you listen to people speak for three hours, there are so many phrases that they are rubbery.
Mr. Flecker: Yes. We need to say that this stuff is very real.
I will give you an example. For those of you who are watching television, there are some graphic ads out there currently about workers who get injured in the workplace. It is a horrific kind of imagery, and it drives home a very central point.
When I say "saucy" in that sense, I think we need to move away from this very rubbery language about diversity and inclusiveness and say that we have failed in actually truly welcoming people. We need to change that.
We have recognized that one in five people has experienced racism, and that is intolerable. We need to uphold real examples, whether they were intended or unintended, that discriminate against any of the designated groups. After 20 years, if an employer or a union has not got it, it is long overdue. It is time for the stick, folks.
Senator Munson: I, too, read the article in the Ottawa Citizen today where one in four reports discrimination on basis of race. The information is quite startling, yet it is on page A10. It is buried. You have to go look for that kind of story. It should be a front-page story.
Mr. Flecker: Coming back to the Gen X and Gen Y cohort, there are some of us who continue to pick up the paper copy of corporate media's newspaper and begin to scour it to give us an informed sense of what is going on. I do not think Gen X and Gen Y do that. They are using different mediums.
When I say "saucy" in terms of our communication strategy, we can take out ads and put them on the side of OC Transpo buses, in buildings and on the sides of vending machines, but we need to think about the different vehicles that people are getting their information from.
Will corporate media put this on the front page the way it needs to? No. Will they put the arrest of the homegrown 17 terrorists, on June 2, a year ago, on the front page in a weekend splash and include photographs of the homes of where those individuals lived? Yes, and with no consequence of the xenophobia and racism that came with that media presentation.
I am suggesting that we need to look not only at very provocative ads, but ads placed in different mediums to deliver them, so there is a different kind of communication to a different kind of audience.
The Chair: I think the problems have been identified, and you have certainly added to that description. The dilemma is that we have heard a lot about discrimination and the fact that we have not gotten there yet.
In our first report, our first attempt at it, we are looking at solutions. The struggle is for those within the system, such as the Public Service Commission, within the labour movement, how do we change the dynamic? We continue to identify the problem, and then we say we have for the moment the solutions that we know, but they have not produced the results we want.
In your analysis and critique today, you said we are not getting it. We should not be proud of the targets that we have reached. How do we go further? You have pointed out being provocative with ads and using the media in a manner that young people and a broader community can understand. I think we have reinforced that some of us still work in the print age, yet most of the people that we want to reach are in the technological age.
The Public Service Commission has come up with a new model with inclusive planning. They are structuring themselves differently. How do you see that plan? Do you think it is a better model than they have had in the past?
Are you optimistic that it will achieve more than we have in the past? If not, what is your prescriptive for the Public Service Commission and for the federal service, beyond what we have already put in our report?
Mr. Flecker: On that particular point, I know that my colleagues Lisa Adario and John Gordon from the Public Service Alliance will be coming here on December 17. I chatted with them briefly on the way up here. They will be providing their input specifically because it affects their workers. I would like to defer to that.
Other than at that broader level, I would like to say that I was disturbed when I read the commissioner's comments — maybe I misinterpreted them — saying that the numbers might be too high. If I am recalling Ms. Barrados' references correctly, she was saying that maybe we need to pick an achievable number because the numbers are so poor. That worries me.
As I said before, it is not a question of not achieving, it is about asking this: What are the consequences for not achieving? I would like to emphasize on that particular piece in terms of a prescriptive solution: Do you think there is enough of a stick in the recommendations that you are hearing to be able to get the kind of change that we need to see happen?
The Chair: That is the dilemma that I am getting at. We have talked about the carrot and the stick. Information, education and coordination are the things that we have tried to get at a lot of issues — systemic racism may be one of them — but also, as we heard again today, competing responsibilities and targets. You have to achieve this and this in your job, so it somehow gets lost and you take a quick answer.
For example, in the public service statistics, the quick answer has been the quick contract but it has unintended consequences. That is your better way of getting into the public service, so it marginalizes those who are not near the system.
We have also looked at regionalism as one dilemma. If the centre of our new employees is in Vancouver and Toronto, how do we get them interested or have a fair chance of applying in Ottawa?
Is there some new design — some people say there should be — on approaching this issue, or is it trying to fix what we are doing and doing it better? If I understood Maria Barrados, it is perhaps an inchworm, or a step or phase at a time, but it gets you to the goal, rather than trying something totally new that may be even more regressive. Where do you come out on this debate?
Mr. Flecker: I appreciate the complexity of that. I will defer on an answer, because I think my colleagues will provide you with the kind of substantive, specific input for the Public Service Commission from PSAC next week.
The Chair: Bringing you back to the Canadian Labour Congress, you said you took a step up having the workshops as an add-on — that it is no longer integrated. To me, that is fine tuning a system that you have and making it more workable. Is that the approach of the Canadian Labour Congress for its own self now, or are you looking to any new initiative that might be different?
Mr. Flecker: That particular example is one of the pieces that we need to do to change the existing membership.
The other reality we are looking at — and a more comprehensive approach — is taking a look at a huge shift in where unionized workers will be found. We have lost 300,000-plus manufacturing jobs in the last little while. When you look at the breakdown, you will not find a large percentage of workers of colour in the manufacturing sector. Where you find workers of colour is in the service sector, increasingly in large numbers.
A substantive or a new policy change step is to be able to say that if we are to make the kind of headway that is necessary — not only in terms of union density, but in terms of the reality of where this economy and workforce is shaping up — we need to shift our wings and start working aggressively at organizing and working with where those communities are at, listening and understanding what those workers' issues are and to begin to represent them in a different way.
That is an internal and challenging struggle because of the face of labour leadership. There is a lot of support at the labour level, but the face itself still needs to change substantially.
The Chair: Has the Canadian Labour Congress looked at a different model of working with governments? Recently, looking at Europe, we have seen some of the initiatives that they have taken in the past and are looking at — different ways to partner and work together because of this new dynamic. Are you involved or engaged in any of those thought processes or initiatives?
Mr. Flecker: My tenure has been 24 months, 10 days and seven hours in the job. You can take that sort of timeline into consideration. What I have seen that I think is different is there is more engagement with particular ministers and deputy ministers on specific issues — for example, the government's Foreign Worker Program.
We have been meeting regularly since last fall with the senior policy-makers on that particular file and raising a host of issues in terms of the consequences, not the least of which is an equity concern. I think that is a progressive sign in terms of putting our issues front and centre and engaging more directly at a common table, even though we have very different points of view on that issue. I would suggest that is a different way than simply tossing our critique from a distance, which I think has been the case prior to my term.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Flecker, for coming here tonight. You have certainly given us a different perspective and broadened our discussions and assessments. I do not know whether you were saucy in your presentation, as Senator Munson said, but you were certainly provocative. You have suggested some concrete ideas that we can look at. Thank you for your patience in waiting for us and for your contribution.
The committee adjourned.