Able-bodied white men seeking a career in Canada's Department of Public Works had best wait awhile before submitting their resumes – the deputy minister of the federal agency has instructed managers to temporarily hire only visible minorities, women, aboriginals and the disabled. David Marshall yesterday ordered that his edict banning hiring of Caucasian males be distributed throughout the agency by e-mail. The new policy, introduced in response to the department's failure to meet targeted employment-equity goals, will be in place for the next five months, at which time it will be reviewed.
Canada's federal benchmark for hiring visible minorities is one-in-five. Public Works' proportion of female, disabled, aboriginal and non-white new hires fell from one in eight in March to one in twenty in September of this year. "As executives and managers, our role includes ensuring that the public service is representative," Marshall wrote in his memo. "This involves providing direction and leadership by example, and demonstrating a firm commitment to an inclusive workplace
Robb Macpherson, a labor attorney with the firm McCarthy Tetrault, agrees Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms permits some discrimination to assist groups identified by the government as disadvantaged, but the form it usually takes is through programs that promote recruitment and hiring of qualified people from those groups – not by banning members of a non-minority class. "They are in effect cutting off a significant portion of the workforce from these opportunities," Macpherson tells the National Post. "It sounds like a pretty extreme measure that they're contemplating."