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Mina Spartin
It has been almost 4 decades since the sole commissioner of the Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, then judge, now former Supreme Court of Canada Justice, the Hon. Rosalie Silberman Abella, explained the urgency of her proactive, distinctively Canadian approach.
This is the first time since the Employment Equity Act came into force in 1986, and was significantly revised in 1995 that an independent, arms-length task force has been established to offer a comprehensive review of the entire employment equity framework.
Our task force heard one message loud and clear: Not only is there widespread commitment to employment equity in Canada. There is also a firm recognition that employment equity is not optional. For a society that is as deeply diverse as ours to flourish, we must prioritize achieving and sustaining employment equity in the workplace.
Yet along the way, something happened. For some, employment equity just got outdated. The terminology did not keep up with the times and was not inclusive enough. The data collection challenges began to weigh down the process with outdated, less than reliable information. Processes became bureaucratized. Boxes got checked, but were things really getting better?
It is, however, startling to see how unrepresentative some employment remains across Canada. Thirty-seven years since the Employment Equity Act was passed, it is hard to consider that a framework has remained truly proactive if its objectives have not yet been substantially achieved in the workplaces it covers.
As a country we may have forgotten our history of discrimination and segregation in our society that for some employment equity groups extended well into the 1960s. By adopting legislation on employment equity federally, Canada set out to transform our workplaces.
Employment equity was an early model of reflexive regulation, designed to encourage employers to take a close look at their workplace and identify the practices necessary to transform their workplace. But it was never assumed that they could do this alone. The conditions necessary to make employment equity effective must extend beyond employers acting alone.
Based on the law, extensive research, and consultations, this report cautions vigilance to ensure that the proliferation of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) practices actually supports rather than supplants the Employment Equity Act framework. Voluntary measures alone will not work to bring equity to Canadian workplaces. Similarly, employment equity must not be allowed to be reduced to a numbers-crunching exercise that loses track of individual workers and in particular equity changemakers. Employment equity requires us to pay close attention in particular to retention, promotion and other practices that ensure the well-being and progress into higher ranks. The preponderant focus on numbers crunching in employment equity has displaced a focus on making equitable inclusion the norm. And the Employment Equity Act framework must not be reduced to a mere checklist or a series of forms to fill out.
In Canada, we have an opportunity, indeed a responsibility, to lead by cultivating social justice through equitable inclusion. Equitable inclusion means all of us have a place in Canadian workplaces. Equitable inclusion is about capturing a vision of our country that is greater than any one of us but very much about all of us. Employment equity is about making workplaces better and more inclusive for all of us.
The third pillar is active support for compliance, accountability and enforcement through sustainably resourced regulatory oversight. Workplaces should be supported through guidance and oversight by state regulatory actors who understand the workplace context and are sufficiently well resourced to give real-time advice. They should be able to provide independent, transparent external auditing to ensure that equitable representation is both achieved and sustained. The structures that are in place leave the Employment Equity Act framework largely to achieve implementation on its own. Someone needs to be making sure that reasonable progress is actually occurring, with a view to achieving and sustaining employment equity, that is properly resourced and effectively structured to avoid incentivizing non-compliance. Employment equity must not be sacrificed to wishful thinking. On regulatory oversight we must put our money where our principles are. The regulatory oversight needs to be rethought. Central to our recommendations is the establishment of an Employment Equity Commissioner.
Chapter 7 returns to the theme of equitable inclusion, to explore some of the more technical regulatory implications of supportive and sustainable employment equity coverage. This includes broadening the coverage of the Federal Contractors Program.
A clear message came through our broad consultations, study of the law, statistics and expert reports: employment equity is central to labour law in Canada and a crucial component of what makes work fair.
First, the Employment Equity Act framework cannot stand alone. It needs to be understood as an important part of a broader, comprehensive law of work. Employment equity requires strong surrounding labour and employment laws upholding decent work in the changing workplace. Attempts to reduce the prevalence of precarious work complement attempts to achieve substantive equality at work. In this regard, employment equity coverage is not quite about broad coverage the way much other labour and human rights law imagines coverage.
Equitable inclusion is a challenge to the overrepresentation of employment equity groups in precarious work. We must therefore go back to first principles and ask: what categories of employment should be covered under the Employment Equity Act framework to ensure that employment equity group members are equitably included in the workplace?
Finally, Chapter 1 takes a hard look at discouraged workers and workers who are overqualified for the work in which they are employed. In this chapter, we find that the Moreover, we address the concern that the benchmarks used to calculate availability reproduce the occupational segregation. In other words, if workers with doctorates who drive taxis are simply being captured as taxi drivers, we have a problem.We need the data that allow us to capture this overrepresentation and to remove the barriers that prevent those workers from getting the job opportunities for which they are qualified. We need to rethink the data collection, to foster data justice.
Data justice involves building trust with employment equity groups, ensuring public transparency on data methodologies and collection, as well as keeping reporting simple. Moreover, there is a need to work with Statistics Canada to collect and release more useful, timely and informative labour-wide employment and equity data. Put simply, data justice needs to focus on building sustained progress over time.
The data justice approach to employment equity data collection forces us to examine and fundamentally revisit how data have been understood, to ensure that research and analytical approaches do not embed systems of discrimination. Data justice facilitates the identification of barriers to equitable inclusion at work. It enables workplace actors to work together to ensure that employment equity is implemented. It provides accountability, ensuring that reasonable progress can be made and monitored, so that employment equity will be achieved and sustained. Data justice is the backbone of substantive equality.
Chapter 2 includes several recommendations for the Government of Canada to revisit how data are developed, analyzed and reported publicly, and to do so in a timely manner, and in a way that can be communicated clearly and easily. In this way, the report recommends strengthening public accountability by democratizing access to employment equity data and systematically rethinking employment equity data collection and benchmarks to eliminate barriers and foster data justice.
To address historical discrimination and a lack of trust among many equity-seeking communities, we propose that the Employment Equity Act specifically clarify that the purpose of data collection is to support achieving and sustaining substantive equality in the workplace by building trust in all three pillars of the revised framework.
Central to the recommendations is the creation of an Employment Equity Data Steering Committee as part of the Employment Equity Act framework, to support implementation, meaningful consultations and regulatory oversight to achieve and sustain employment equity. The Steering Committee should consist of senior government officials under a revised Employment Equity Act. It would provide advice regarding employment equity data and undertake research.
Specifically, the production of the current benchmark used in the federal public service, WFA is now understood to be a distraction, taking time and energy away from the fundamental work of barrier removal. Government should be the site for experimentation and creativity for sustainable change. Our task force was persuaded that the federal government, assuming its dual responsibility as a symbolically important federal employer as well as regulator, can do better. We recommend that WFA no longer be used. Rather, we recommend mandating the proposed Employment Equity Data Steering Committee to consider how best to draw on existing and emerging projections capabilities, to redress the time lag in the calculation of LMA alone, and move toward a benchmark that supports a focus on removing barriers, meaningful consultations and regulatory oversight. Our aspiration should be that our workplaces reflect our populations. The benchmarks help us to get there. They should not be hindrances. They should not get in the way of the real work of equity. So long as representation is lower than Census population levels, employers should be permitted to continue to work to correct underrepresentation.
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