Then they would be going on a hiring spree for men. As would hospitals and schools but that’s a local and provincial matter.
My column from this morning’s Sun Media papers is generating quite the reaction from people sharing their stories of reverse discrimination to me being called a bigot. I mean, I must be a bigot, I believe we should hire on merit and not let factors such as race or sex enter into the hiring process.
Some people mistakenly think the federal government is a place filled with only white, English speaking males. Not true. Far from it.
The feds own numbers show that they have what would be deemed an over representation in three of the four protected employment equity groups. This chart shows that only visible minorities are not at or above what they deem the workforce availability of each group.
The chart also shows that women, disabled and Aboriginals have been over represented for years. So why are they still protected employment equity groups? Shouldn’t there be a program to ensure men are represented at the same level their workforce availability?
Meanwhile on the language file it turns out that Francophones are over represented as well. Page five of this report (page 13 in the PDF) shows that in the core public service Francophone are heavily over represented.
Regarding equitable participation, the proportion of Anglophones in federal institutions subject to the Act was 73.2% in 2009-2010. The proportion of Francophones was 26.8%. For the core public administration, these rates were stable at 68.6% and 31.4% respectively. Based on the latest data from the 2006 Census, employees from both official language communities were relatively well represented in federal institutions subject to the Act. The distribution essentially resembles the percentage of Francophones and Anglophones in Canadian society, that is to say 74.8% of Canada’s population who reported English as their first official language and 23.6% who reported French.
I’m not saying the feds should stop hiring women, Aboriginals, the disabled or Francophones yet if they believe in employment equity that is exactly what they should be doing.
Otherwise they should change the law and try doing something radical such as treating everyone the same regardless of race, ethnicity, sex etc.
