Quotas in Canada

It's interesting that now the Department of Public Works has now said it was only kidding when it sent out an email saying that no white males could be hired. Sorry...we're just joking! Ha ha ha. Nice to see a sense of humour.

Unfortunately, there is a policy of discrimination against white males in the government. Martin Loney has a nice op-ed in the National Post today on the bogus case for quotas.

The origins of Canada's preferential hiring policies lie in the 1984 report of the Commission on Equality in Employment, which was headed by Rosalie Abella. But the report lacked empirical evidence of the discrimination in employment to which it recommended urgent remedy. Commission researcher Monica Townson observed that the lack of any agreed definition of visible minority "prevents any assessment of the 'social indicators of discrimination' for Canada's population of visible minorities."

Later, a review of 1986 census data by Monica Boyd -- an avowed feminist -- found no evidence of any earnings penalty for Canadian-born visible minorities.

What of the widely published claim that visible minority women are "doubly disadvantaged," experiencing discrimination by virtue of both race and gender? Ms. Boyd found visible minority women born in Canada to be more successful than their white counterparts. And more recently, reports from two University of Manitoba economists found little difference between the relative earnings of Canadian-born visible minorities and other Canadians.

The recent Public Works announcement reflects the 20% "target" set for visible minorities in public-service recruitment and promotion, which stemmed from the work of the Task Force on the Participation of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service, chaired by Lewis Perinbam. But the key data on which its 2000 report, Embracing Change, based its recommendations was wildly inaccurate.

Perinbam claimed to be greatly troubled by the fact that while 30% of applicants to post-secondary public-service recruitment and 20% of general applicants were visible minorities, they secured only 13.9% and 4.1% of appointments, respectively. If true, these figures would certainly give cause for concern. But the Public Service Commission study of its 1998 post-secondary recruitment campaign -- from which Perinbam purported to draw his data -- actually reported that 22% of appointees were visible minorities, not 13.9%. (That report offered no evidence of discrimination, but observed that one reason for the lower success rate was that 16% of visible minority applicants lacked Canadian citizenship.)

Will the Conservatives have the stomach to actually campaign on the merit principle?