THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON DIVERSITY
OF THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON INTERNAL ECONOMY, BUDGETS AND
ADMINISTRATION
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Wednesday, March 1, 2017
The Subcommittee on Diversity of the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration met this day at 2:30 p.m. to examine the findings contained in the Fifth Report of the Senate Administration’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Accessibility and issues of diversity in the Senate workforce.
Senator Mobina S. B. Jaffer (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators and everyone else, thank you very much for being here. I appreciate all of you volunteering to do this. It's very important and always the same people carry the load. Thank you so much.
I promised everybody that we're not planning to have many meetings. After having said that, I would like you to consider not making a decision today, and if we could just after this have one Monday morning meeting, two or three hours, and get everything done. We can talk about that later. In that way, we can have our witnesses, get our work done and be ready for the report. I think we did that last time and it helped to focus. I leave that thought with you. We don't have to make a decision now.
Our first motion is on agenda, witnesses and schedule. May I have a mover of this motion? Senator Marshall.
The second motion is to publish the subcommittee's report. Senator Omidvar moves it.
And the motion to direct staff: Senator Tannas moves it.
Travelling and living expenses of witnesses: Senator Marshall.
Broadcasting: Senator Omidvar.
In camera transcripts: Senator Tannas.
Staff at in camera meetings: Senator Marshall.
Thank you very much for moving those motions.
We will go to our first witness, Mr. Luc Presseau. Thank you for all the work you've done.
I have to say to you that I've been here 16 years, and the work that the Senate administration has done has really changed the face of the Senate. It's more reflective of Canadians.
I want to recognize the work that Senator Marshall did to make this possible as well.
Luc Presseau, Director of Human Resources, Human Resources Directorate, Senate of Canada: Thank you for that, senator.
Honestly, senator, I want to turn to the staff of Human Resources and the staff of the Senate in passing those thanks along because, as you know, I'm relatively new to the Senate. All of this work was done prior to my arrival, and it is excellent work. I would echo that.
From the presentation that we did earlier at the Internal Economy Committee, you know that in my review of that I was very impressed with the amount of work that was done and the changes that have occurred over the course of the last 10 or so years to really, truly reflect Canadian society in the Senate.
I was thinking of touching on some of the points we talked about at Internal Economy. Again, I don't want to repeat everything that was said there. We did do a bit more analysis to be able to get there. In preparing, we looked as well at the number of applications we get and the diversity that is coming out.
I will repeat a couple of interesting or important points. One is that what we are dealing with is self-identification. It's always an important factor to consider. We get asked all the time, “Well, you know that this person is a visible minority,” or “You know that this person is disabled,” but it's not up to us to make that determination for them. It is really up to that person to decide for themselves whether they do or do not want to self-identify.
Second, these reports and statistics deal strictly with Senate administration. They do not include the staff in senators' offices. So we've looked at that to see what it means.
In the Senate administration, and I'm going to use round numbers, about 25 per cent of employees self-identify. The statistics we have are based on that 25 per cent. Currently, about 10 per cent of employees in senators' offices self-identify.
It gives us an indication that some of the statistics might look a little different if we were to do a little bit more of a reminder, perhaps, to individuals that they should look at the self-identification to give us more specific results.
The other thing that I think is important for us to notice is that we've done extremely well in some of the categories of diversity, but there are a couple of categories that we still need to do more specific work on. We need to do a bit more work on disabled individuals, where our numbers are not quite as good as what the availability in the population might be.
The other group would be First Nations or indigenous people, in particular people from the North as well, where it is more complicated to recruit from or to get people to come in.
Those are a couple of areas where we should do a little bit more work. Dealing with that is a different kind of approach.
One of the things that we're currently in the process of doing — as a matter of fact, we're contracting out the work because it should be done by an external firm — is the Employment Systems Review to look at all of our employment systems and advise us on areas where we need to do a little more work to truly make it a bias-free selection or a hiring process.
It's hard sometimes to say it can be truly bias-free, but we have an electronic application system, for example, where people go in and answer a series of questions. It will actually separate or it will call out people who don't answer the questions properly or who don't have that type of experience.
There are things that perhaps we can do to make that system a little easier, a little more useful friendly for a variety of individuals. Those are part of what we're hoping the employment systems review will provide for us, some of those examples, some of those areas where we can do a little better work to get us better organized.
I pulled out a few quick statistics earlier to give you an idea of the type of uptake we get when we post positions or we have people go onto that system and create profiles. It is quite interesting to determine exactly what we get.
In the period between April 1 last year and March 1 this year, we received 4,812 applications in total for positions within the Senate. Of those, we ended up hiring 103 people, to give you an idea of the magnitude of applications received and the work that goes into that. That is a 2 per cent placement rate based on application to other things.
Within that group of applicants, only 65 per cent actually self-identified. That's interesting as well, meaning that when people go in, they do feel free to self-identify; and the more we do that, the better we can get through that.
The number of individuals hired out of those groups is consistent with the rest of the numbers. So 2 per cent are hired out of the full application. It's fairly consistent in the other groups as well. There's nothing that can come out of that that would tell us we have a specific bias in one area or another, because it is fairly complete as far as an information package.
I thought that was important for us to look at to give us an idea of who is applying and who we are hiring from that pool. We have to cull it down a lot to get to that, but I thought that was interesting.
I could bore you with statistics until 3:30 if you wish, but I'm not certain that would be the best use of the time of the committee at this point, rather than go into more in-depth conversations, if you feel that is appropriate.
Senator Marshall: Thanks very much. That was excellent. I have some comments and questions. I'm going to start with what you said most recently.
When you talk about the 4,800 applicants and you said we actually hired 100 and something, and 65 per cent self-identify, does that mean that 65 per cent of the 100 self-identified as one of our four categories?
Mr. Presseau: Yes. We had 4,800 applicants; 3,100 self-identified.
Senator Marshall: Oh, they did.
Mr. Presseau: Yes.
Senator Marshall: That would also include women?
Mr. Presseau: Yes, and some people self-identify in more than one category of diversity. You could be a visible minority and a woman or disabled. So the numbers have to be taken into that kind of —
Senator Marshall: You said they could be duplicate or triplicate?
Mr. Presseau: Exactly, yes.
Senator Marshall: Earlier on when you started your comments, you were comparing administration to the senators' offices. I thought you said 25 per cent in administration self-identify. That's 25 per cent of the employees?
Mr. Presseau: That's correct.
Senator Marshall: So what's the issue with the senators' offices? Actually, I didn't think we had any self-identification with regard to senators' offices. Just go through that again so I can understand it.
Mr. Presseau: For any employee of the Senate, whether they are employed in the senator's office or in the Senate administration, we provide a letter of appointment and an opportunity for people to self-identify. We do that for senators' office staff as well, and it is totally voluntary, so it really does depend on how many decide to do so as opposed to not.
Senator Marshall: A couple of other comments that relate to the work we did on the previous subcommittee, which was a few years ago. I don't remember; I think you used the term “disabled numbers,” or perhaps my terminology isn't good, but my only recollection is that our indigenous numbers weren't representative of the entire population.
The other issue that I remember is how people are selected for positions. My recollection is that it's not the majority of decisions that are done through a merit-based system; it's almost like people are identified for positions as opposed to advertising and interviews being conducted.
Mr. Presseau: Certainly in the Senate administration, everything is through the merit system, interviews and that kind of stuff. That is what our policies require us to do.
In the case of your own staff, senators, there are some that are more advertised. In other cases they're not, and the selection is done differently. But certainly within Senate administration, our policies do require us to have a merit-based process. Senate administration staff have recourse rights if they feel that the processes have not been dealt with appropriately.
Senator Marshall: My last question relates to the recommendation to conduct the Employment Systems Review, if feasible. What would that entail?
Mr. Presseau: We have started our process to do that, and we're seeking proposals from outside firms. What it does, really, is that there a paper review of policies. Are there biases within our policies that we may not be able to recognize ourselves? Sometimes that may be through time. Is there a bias in our electronic system? I would be hazarding a guess, and I shouldn't: I don't think we'll find a lot, but there are things.
I think I mentioned that at one point, senator, that sometimes if you want to increase your indigenous representation, it's where you advertise sometimes that makes a difference. So that's the type of thing we're hoping to get as well. A typical example is you don't advertise necessarily in the Ottawa Citizen or in The Globe and Mail for certain types of resources when there are community newspapers or others that we could use better.
Those are the types of things that we hope to get out of that review.
Senator Tannas: I had a couple of things that I wanted to clarify or that I thought were interesting regarding Aboriginal people. I think it's important that we keep our eye on status versus non-status. I wonder if there is any way to break that out.
Self-identification of being an Aboriginal person versus actually being one in the eyes of the government is important. The reason I say that is that you can't fake being a visible minority or a person with a disability or a woman, but you can fake being an Aboriginal person. We've all seen Facebook and heard the stories of civil servants who declared themselves as Aboriginal people to get a promotion or a job, when they clearly weren't, but they self-identified that way.
So I think it's important that we actually try to figure out status people, because status people are 3 per cent. Around a million people are status Aboriginals under the Indian Act. We may find that we need to focus on that. We may find we have zero out of 12, or 2 out of 12, or maybe we've got 12 out of 12; I don't know. But would you be comfortable going that extra step? Can we?
Mr. Presseau: It's an interesting question, senator, whether we can or can't. I'd have to look into the actual question and how the question is posed, which I don't have with me right now. But that's certainly something we can look at from that perspective. It's not one that we've looked at so far.
Senator Tannas: I'd ask maybe that you do, because to me it is an issue for Aboriginal people and we should try to nail it down.
Mr. Presseau: Yes, try to figure it out.
Senator Tannas: Thank you.
The other one I thought was interesting is on the last page, chart 7, “Senate Representation vs Workforce Availability,” where we actually have six where we are under-represented and ten categories where we are overrepresented. But what's also interesting and what we have to keep in mind is that one or two people on either side moves it from over to under in many of these categories.
I was pleasantly surprised by these numbers. Thank you for compiling them.
The Chair: Senator Omidvar?
Senator Omidvar: Thank you for reconstituting this committee. I think it is important.
I have a couple of observations and some questions. I was struck by what when you said, Mr. Presseau, that when the Senate staff are asked to self-identify, only 25 per cent do so, and yet out of the 4,812 applications you received, if I have it right, 3,100 self-identified. That's about 60 per cent. What happens there? They believe in self-identification when they apply for a job, but when they get the job, they don't believe in it. Can you help me understand that?
Mr. Presseau: To be honest, I wish I could. I think there are probably some factors that go into it. It could be simply that people believe they've already self-identified, so when they see the form in the hiring package, they say, “I've already done that, so I don't need to do it again.” It could be simply that once somebody is hired, they just say, “Now that I'm in, I don't need to self-identify.” A number of factors might go into it.
We have little capacity, I think, to actually figure that out, because it is a difficult one. I would hope that in some ways our Employment Systems Review might help us get some of that, but I'm not sure that it will.
Senator Omidvar: I actually think you can. You can have little focus groups. You can put out a survey. Your workforce is not large. How many people are we talking about?
Mr. Presseau: The Senate administration is about 360, give or take, and senators' staff is about 230.
Senator Omidvar: When we met, you told me it was 360. I got really excited, because with a number as small as 360 people — it's not 5 people, but it's not 5,000 people — you can actually do some things around the edges and create innovative practices so that we become the best in the system. That would be my objective.
What is the objective? I see tactics, efforts and numbers, but what's the overall objective of the Senate HR administration in terms of its workforce capacity?
Since we are embarking on a new committee, I may suggest, chair, that we actually start from where it is we want to go so that we can arrange our time and resources and that of the good people around that so that we have a discussion on objectives as opposed to what the numbers are for this group versus the other.
Talking about groups, I'd like to see veterans. Our government has made a commitment to hiring veterans where they can. I'd like to know if any one of those 360 people is a veteran. I know it's outside the bandwidth of employment equity, but it's an important question. If we don't hire veterans, who will? I feel passionate about that. I hope we can do something.
I think your business systems review is an excellent opportunity to tease out unusual system barriers. Some of the unusual system barriers have been documented by researchers and scientists. I'd like you to think about a systems review and a solution that deals with name-based biases, because we know that name-based bias is rampant. If your name is Scott Tannas, you're 60 per cent more likely, sir, to be screened into a job, whereas if your name is Mobina Jaffer — because it's Jaffer, you even have fewer chances than me, or maybe the same. But we do not stand to get the same entry start as you do just because of our names.
This is a great opportunity for you to do some innovation around the edges. We could do some really exciting work here in this committee and show the other house that this is how you actually do diversity.
Senator Tannas: Just on the 65 per cent, did that include women? I thought I heard you say maybe it did. If you filter: “I'm here now and it's obvious I'm a woman, so I don't need to write it down,” versus in the application. Is that why? Or is it genuinely 65 per cent versus —
Mr. Presseau: I could break it down for you if you're interested. So 65 per cent self-identify. Of the number of applications that we received, 2,293 were from women. So 47 per cent self-identified as women, 199 identified as disabled, 1,440 identified as visible minorities, and 99 identified as Aboriginals.
Senator Omidvar: That many?
Mr. Presseau: We've started to get these statistics out and we get more and more information for this. We've analyzed some. There's more that needs to be done from that perspective, but it certainly gives us an indication.
When I asked the questions here, I was trying to get at of all of the people who apply, what did they look like? It helps with the Employment Systems Review in trying to figure out. So if the number of applicants is higher and the number of actual hires is lower, then maybe we have something in there that we need to look at. That's what we're trying to get at.
Senator Marshall: I was saying when we did the review a number of years ago that we have four groups. So is the fifth group men? I'm an accountant. I like to see everything add up to 100 per cent. Is there just a fifth category and is that men? I'm trying to get a handle on whether there is reverse discrimination? I'm not that far down that road yet, but I'm wondering what the fifth column is? Is it men?
Mr. Presseau: The fifth column is not just men. The fifth column is everybody who did not self-identify. It could be a very large group as well.
Senator Omidvar: Again on the Employment Systems Review, I imagine you hired a consultant to do it.
Mr. Presseau: We haven't hired yet. We're in the process of going through the request for proposals.
Senator Omidvar: This is very timely because, based on capacity, it would be interesting to ask them to do some things that give us depth in our information.
Your information is at two levels. One is the demographic makeup of those who are hired as compared to labour force availability. The second level of information we get is those who apply versus labour force availability. Then there are steps in between. Who gets screened in? Who gets called in to the first interview? Who gets called in for the second interview? If you follow that progression and do the breakdown, and I know I'm asking for a lot, but I think that's when you actually begin to see where your systemic issues lie.
Senator Marshall: Who has the RFP? Is it something we can look at? Is that something the committee could look at? You're developing the RFP right now. I'd be interested in seeing it, because there might be issues not in there that you'd be interested in including. I wouldn't mind having a look at the RFP.
Nicole Proulx, Chief Corporate Services Officer and Clerk of the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration, Senate of Canada: Basically, the RFP will be developed like the statement of work. So if this group wants to see the statement of work before it is issued, that would be perfect timing.
Senator Marshall: It would be better for us to see it beforehand so that when the work is done we won’t say we're so disappointed you didn't look at this.
Ms. Proulx: Absolutely, and it will be a competitive process.
The Chair: I have one question on the self-identification.
When I was Chair of the Human Rights Committee, I insisted every year that the unions and the federal agencies come to tell us what the progress was under the federal act. The federal act sets out 2 per cent, depending on the census. I don't know what the census says now, but the last census said our federal service should reflect the last census.
At that time, there was a lot of discussion on self-identification and every year we had this issue: Once people come in, the environment does not make people feel comfortable to any longer say they are part of this group. When they're outside, as Senator Tannas said, and I agree, there is the perception that if you're X, you may get in. This is perception; I don't have any statistics. Once you're in, because you're worried about whether you are seen as X, you may not get the promotions. There is reluctance.
There is a lot of research on self-identification. We could ask the Library of Parliament to prepare something for us, and then we would have it exactly right. It has all been done for the Human Rights Committee over many years, at least seven, so we could ask them to give us a briefing on that.
The other thing — and you may have this here, but I haven't studied this as well as I should — is about Aboriginals, the disabled and minorities. I just came from the Veterans Committee where there is a big issue amongst veterans that they do not get jobs. We are proactive on many other things, so I think that would be a brilliant thing for us to look at. We could send that out as well.
Sadly, sometimes veterans are discharged because of their physical ability, but that doesn't stop you from working in the Senate. There are many jobs you could do. If everyone agreed here to have a category for veterans, that would be a step forward for the Senate.
If you don't mind, could you just roughly explain your charts? Don't go through the details; we can look at them. Explain why you have done these specific charts. I can lead you, and then my colleagues can jump in.
I get the overall representation. I have no issue with this, and I get this representation of the different groups. You don't have women there. I was curious about that.
Senator Omidvar: Which page?
The Chair: Page one. You don't have women there.
The other thing is how does that compare to our census? The only way I know how they do it in the public service is that the representation should be as per the census. It doesn't have to be today.
I see you have the gender here, the men and women. So you've got the gender. You had to have it. And then the age is fine.
Then there is the occupational category. I have to admit this is complicated for me because it's different from all of the other charts. Perhaps you can make that clearer. Then there is distribution.
Where I'm going with this is that besides our asking, “Are the numbers in?” or “Where are they?” — to give you an example, in the public service, we said we have 59 per cent women, but a lot of them are at the bottom. It's the same with visible minorities. There is not one deputy who is a visible minority. What I'm saying is it's great to have the numbers, but it would also help in the chart to show where they are or how are they represented in the different groups.
Mr. Presseau: We have begun to do some work on that. If you look at table 6, it does talk about where people fall, and it's more on the salary base. Table 6 shows you that a little bit, so it is an indicator that things are moving forward. There's still work to be done there in getting things organized.
The Chair: Does anybody have any other questions? We've given you a lot of homework.
Senator Tannas: I had one that we had raised in the human resources committee, and it was specifically to geographic diversity and trying to come up with some potential programs where we could involve, on a rotation or on a secondment, people from provincial legislatures that could come here and have an experience. We could send some of our people. It would fun. So we asked Luc if he would take this on as an initiative, find a provincial legislature and get a pilot going to see if there is something there.
As a westerner, we're always complaining about how we see all decisions being made by folks in Quebec and Ontario, and this might be something that would be helpful in getting people moving around a little and seeing what's going on in their role in a different part of the country.
I don't know if it overlaps here, but we actually asked Luc to do that. If you look at the guiding principles of the human resources department, diversity including geographic diversity was specifically mentioned.
The Chair: I agree.
Senator Marshall: This is something like the page program. Remember we were concerned that it was always from Central Canada.
The Chair: Now it's doing much better.
Senator Marshall: Now it's doing better. Perhaps we could have the Black Rod in to ask him about the page program? I think that would be interesting.
The other thing I was interested in, Luc, and I mentioned this previously, is that diversity is an issue for the entire federal public service. I don't know who it falls under, if it falls under the Public Service Commission, or someone else who also has this on their plate. I would be interested in hearing what they're doing. They're dealing with larger numbers. How are they working with all this? What are they doing?
Mr. Presseau: Every year, the Public Service Commission and every other department have to do an employment equity report, and so there is something. I believe, on the witness list, you had indicated that you wanted the Public Service Commission to potentially appear. I think we will get that information.
We tried to get information from the House of Commons and got some things, but not the kind of detail that we have. They're just starting to do that kind of work so we're probably a little bit ahead.
Senator Tannas, I do have some results for you on that geographic. We just never had a chance at the last meeting of the working group to be able to share those with you. We did a survey in late January or early February to voluntarily identify which area of the country you identify as your home province or place of birth. We struggled with the actual wording, but we've got some statistics from there and so we have some things we can share with you.
I've got one copy with me. I didn't bring it because we didn't have a chance to talk about it at the committee.
The Chair: I'm sure you will be in front of us again, and thank you for all the good work you do.
(The committee continued in camera.)