The Hill Times, April 19th, 2004
CIVIL CIRCLES
By Paco Francoli
'Systemic racism' in PS at all-time high: Senator Conservative Senator Donald Oliver makes pitch for a new commissioner on visible minorities. Veteran Conservative Senator Donald Oliver has called on the Liberal government to create a new officer of Parliament for visible minorities, arguing that federal policies to address the "systemic racism in the public service of Canada" are not working.
The black politician from Nova Scotia has approached the Clerk of the Privy Council, Alex Himelfarb, about his idea.
He's also launched an inquiry into the issue in the Upper Chamber and raised $500,000 for a major research project currently being conducted by the Conference Board of Canada which is set to report at the end of May on best practices that both the public sector and the private sector can use to diversify their organizations. The results will come out in Toronto on May 27 at a major summit.
When launching his inquiry earlier his month in a speech in the Senate, Sen. Oliver stressed that the governing Liberals still have far to go before reaching their one in five benchmark for visible minority participation in public service-wide staffing actions, including recruitment, acting-appointments, and promotions.
"Systemic racism in the public service of Canada has reached an all-time high," argued the Senator who was appointed in 1990 by former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
"Morale among visible minorities is at an all-time low. There is little, if any, hope of advancement or of being treated equally with others. Nothing is being done to address this problem because few people recognize or understand or accept the ugly reality that systemic racism still exists in this country. There is a widely held misconception and misperception that racism, prejudice and bigotry are things of the past, but the fact is that racism continues to cloud the judgment of Canadians. It is a problem that has simply not gone away.
Added Senator Oliver: "I have felt the lash of discrimination. I am painfully aware of what it is like to receive anonymous hate mail, to be treated with contempt, to have business opportunities denied to me because I am black. I know the pain of watching others bend and eventually break under the pressure of discrimination. I know what it is like to see potential, unfulfilled lives ruined because of racism. I know all this and I would like to see it stopped." The one in five target was a major recommendation of the Task Force on the Participation of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service's final report, Embracing Change in the Federal Public Service. The plan was eventually endorsed in 2000 by the Liberals.
"They [the Liberal government] set that as their official target and they've fallen way below it," Sen. Oliver told The Hill Times. "They haven't even come close to keeping it. The deputy ministers can't do it, the Prime Minister can't do it, so we really need to have a person with the power and influence like a commissioner who reports to Parliament and can say, 'Here's my report and here are the six deputies who refused to meet with me and refuse to do anything and look at the numbers.'"
Though the government's latest employment figures show inroads have been made visible minorities now make up 7.4 per cent of the core public service, compared with 5.5 per cent in 2000 only one in 10 new hires are visible minorities.
Those figures are contained in the Employment Equity in the Federal Public Service 2002-2003 report which states that "there continues to be mixed results against the benchmarks," that the "public service is still not representative" and that "unless the pace of progress is intensified significantly, it is also unlikely that the 2005 benchmarks will be achieved." Under the Embracing Change Task Force Committee, the government wants to have one in five, or 20 per cent, of all new appointments in the senior executive groups to be visible minorities by 2005.
For Sen. Oliver, this disappointing record is proof positive that the government's current approach has been a failure and that something more drastic needs to happen, such as creating a visible minority commissioner who would be cast in the same mold as other officers of Parliament.
The federal government currently has only five officers of Parliament Auditor General Sheila Fraser, Information Commissioner John Reid, Languages Commissioner Dyan Adam, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, and Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley. Two more are coming now that Parliament passed the Liberals ethics bill creating two independent ethics watchdogs one for MPs and one for Senators.
Last Wednesday, the Senator also made his pitch at a regional meeting of the National Council of Visible Minorities in Ottawa. If Ottawa agrees to such an idea, it would be breaking new ground as no other visible minority commissioners exist at the provincial level in other countries, Sen. Oliver told The Hill Times.
"What we really need now is a commissioner for equal opportunity," he said, adding that the job would come with the same investigative powers given to the commissioner of official languages who monitors the way the Official Languages Act is followed by federal organizations and exerts pressure on political leaders and administrators.
In an interview with The Hill Times last month, Wally Boxhill, a director at the new Public Service Human Resources Management Agency who tracks and monitors equity trends for the federal bureaucracy, acknowledged that the government's record stands to be improved when it comes to hiring visible minorities.
"Our principle challenge rests with visible minorities," said Mr. Boxhill, adding that on the bright side, the government continues to surpass its employment goals for the other equity groups it tracks, including women, aboriginal peoples, and persons with disabilities. The government's latest equity numbers show that visible minorities make up 7.4 per cent of the core federal public service that is 163,314 employees strong. Yet visible minorities now make up 13.4 per cent of the Canadian population.
The core public service doesn't include military personnel, or employees working for Crown corporations, nor those attached to some agencies like the old Canada Customs and Revenue Agency which was split up by the Paul Martin government last December.
Sen. Oliver said the numbers are bound to get worse in light of the fact that immigration now accounts for more than 50 per cent of Canada's population growth, and that some predict that by 2016 about two-thirds of the Canadian labour force will be made up of employment equity-designated groups. He said the person best suited to push the idea of a commissioner for visible minorities is the clerk of the Privy Council, with whom he said he had a "brief" discussion. "It's got to come from the clerk," said Sen. Oliver. "He said we'd have to talk some more."
Mr. Himelfarb was one of three "deputy minister champions" of the National Council of Visible Minorities' founding conference held at the Delta Hotel in Ottawa in 1999. At the time, Mr. Himelfarb was deputy minister of Heritage Canada. The other two champions were Frank Claydon, then DM at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and Janice Cochrane, then DM Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Sen. Oliver said that the study being done by the Conference Board is "the biggest and most comprehensive" of its kind. In addition to reviewing employment trends in federal departments, it will look at how well major companies in Canada are diversifying their workplaces. He said he doesn't expect the results to be encouraging.
"You look at the board of directors of any major company like a bank and they're all white. Does it mean that there are Chinese and Japanese who don't know enough to be able to sit on the board of a bank, or is it because they like to have their cozy little club, and the answer is that they like their cozy little club," he said.
He said that the report will come with a booklet of best practices that both business and federal organizations can use to to attract visible minorities.
francoli@hilltimes.com
Courtesy of The Hill Times