Whites need not apply

Excerpts from an article by MARGARET WENTE

A few days ago, Marc Gage, a self-employed communications consultant, saw a job ad that caught his eye. The federal Department of Fisheries was seeking a regional communications director in Vancouver, Canada. It sounded right up his alley. The pay also wasn't bad -- up to $99,700 a year.

Mr. Gage wanted to apply, but one fatal flaw disqualified him: He's white.

The ad, which was posted on the federal government's Web site, was explicit. Under the heading "Who can apply," it said: "Persons working or residing in Canada and Canadian citizens living abroad, WHO ARE MEMBERS OF VISIBLE MINORITY GROUPS."

Mr. Gage says he's a pretty liberal-minded guy. But the ad sent him into orbit. "I don't care what colour you are," he told me. "You've got a right to be judged on merit."

Some people might call these ads "race-based recruiting." But that would be uncharitable. Sometimes, Ms. Mawani says, "special measures" are required to reach out to the target groups. The Employment Equity Act permits and even encourages "special measures," of which exclusionary job ads are one example.

Visible minorities (or vizmins) still make up only 6.8 per cent of the civil service. Canada's top bureaucrats, including Alex Himelfarb, Clerk of the Privy Council, have decided that's not good enough. Progress, they insist, must come faster. If you're one of the folks in charge of running, say, the Department of Fisheries, this is not an academic issue. This affects your bonus, your raise and your career prospects if you don't deliver.

Even so, everyone in the bureaucracy rejects the word "quotas." Instead, they say "benchmarks," "targets" and "guidelines."

Not everyone is so sure that discrimination is the right way to achieve fairness and justice. Janet Smith is another former bureaucrat who helped launch Embracing Change. But this isn't quite what she had in mind. "When you do it this way," she told The Vancouver Sun, "what you're hiring is the skin, not the content."

Personally, I'd be thrilled if our public service looked more like Canada. I'd be even more thrilled if all our children grow up colour-blind. But how can we expect them to if we keep flogging them with the politics of identity? How can we expect them to be colour-blind when our own government insists on racial profiling as the basis for its hiring policy?

Racial quotas are ugly things, or so I was brought up to believe. No matter how lofty the goals that are invoked in their name, I haven't changed my mind.

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