Commentary
If a new bill becomes law, Alberta’s public sector will henceforth be forced to hire and promote based on merit instead of immutable characteristics like race or sex. Every province, regardless of the political stripe of its government, should take this common-sense approach.
Bill 33, the Justice Statutes Amendment Act, would amend the Alberta Human Rights Act “to ensure hiring and promotion decisions in public institutions are based on merit, not diversity, equity and inclusion policies.”
Premier Danielle Smith promoted the bill in a post on X, saying “The best person for the job should get the job. Period.”
The legislation is sweeping in scope, with the definition of “public institutions” encompassing such varied bodies as “public agencies, Crown-controlled organizations, public post-secondary institutions, school boards and municipalities.”
Alberta’s move is in line with public opinion in Canada.
A survey conducted by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies, released in December 2024, shows that 57 percent of Canadians disapprove of considering “cultural background” in hiring decisions. Just 28 percent of respondents agreed with the idea of hiring based on identity.
Race-based hiring has in fact been controversial in Canada almost ever since it began.
In 1982, the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms laid out that “affirmative action programs” are an exception to the right for people to be “equal before and under the law.” It says programs to help those “disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability” are permitted.
Soon after, proponents of race- and sex- based hiring in Canada ditched the term “affirmative action,” since it carried connotations of American racial quota policies in place since the 1960s. They began to use the gentler euphemism of “employment equity,” which found its way into the title of the Employment Equity Act of 1986, passed by the federal government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
In the early 1990s, the NDP government of Ontario introduced its own version of the federal legislation, provoking immediate backlash that ultimately helped topple the government.
The Employment Equity Act of 1993 introduced by the Ontario NDP government mandated favourable hiring for “Aboriginal people, people with disabilities, members of racial minorities and women.” The late, great writer Richard Gwyn explains in “Nationalism Without Walls” (1995) that the legislation applied to “the entire public sector and to all private companies with payrolls of fifty or more,” making it “the most comprehensive of its kind in the world.”
The legislation came under fire from opponents who argued that mandating preferential hiring for certain groups would by definition entail discrimination against other groups, presumably in the form of some type of hiring quota. Newspaper editorials excoriated the law, saying that it “effectively requires discrimination against white males in hiring.”
In 1995, Progressive Conservative Mike Harris swept to power in Ontario in what his supporters heralded as the “Common Sense Revolution.” Along with taking aim at high taxes and welfare abuse, the Harris campaign promised to roll back race- and sex-based hiring, using the snappy slogan “Scrap the Quota Law.”
As John Ibbitson notes in “Promised Land: Inside the Mike Harris Revolution” (1997), the Harris campaign capitalized on “middle class anger,” including against “employment equity” hiring practices, by running aggressive television ads that “went for the jugular.”
Upon bowling the NDP from power, the Harris government repealed their Employment Equity Act. From then onwards, no province has attempted to mandate race- and sex-based hiring in such an aggressive manner as attempted by the Ontario NDP in the early 1990s.
The 1995 Ontario election was the only provincial election in Canada’s history to focus so intensely on affirmative action. Yet when voters were given a direct say, they endorsed meritocracy.
Alberta’s new proposed bill to enforce meritocratic hiring in the public sector shows that the issue of hiring quotas may be regaining saliency in the mind of the Canadian electorate amid a wider multi-year backlash against ideologies that places concepts like “equity” at their centre.
Every province should take a similar approach, because at its core the issue of a fair and equal hiring process should not be a polarized topic but rather a basic value.
One of the distinguishing features of the history of Western Civilization, and most particularly of the British Isles, from which Canada inherited its political institutions, was the slow but steady process whereby the individual citizen took primacy over the clan.
From this process the idea of meritocratic hiring arose. This was a unique development which only a portion of the world’s societies have copied and benefited from, with some to this very day clinging to longstanding practices of hiring based on family, caste, clan, ethnicity, or race.
Incorporating immutable characteristics like race and sex into hiring practices, whether it is called “affirmative action” or “employment equity,” not only limits the skill of workforces by elevating other factors beyond competency, but also returns us to the clannish mentality that our forebears broke away from long ago.
Every province should follow Alberta’s lead in mandating the restoration of meritocratic hiring.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
