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A group of workers’ rights organizations is calling for the removal of top executives in the federal public service, after an internal audit revealed a workplace culture of racial stereotyping, micro-aggressions, and verbal violence within the Privy Council Office (PCO).
The Coalition Against Workplace Discrimination — composed of several other groups representing public servants, including the Black Class Action Secretariat and the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) — released an internal report from PCO on Monday, which it had obtained through an Access to Information request.
The audit and subsequent report was completed more than a year ago, according to the coalition of public servants, and shows what the coalition says is an entrenched and systemic culture of discrimination, where Black, Indigenous and racialized employees are often brought in to pad diversity numbers, but discouraged from speaking out and blocked from career advancement.
The report found that such discriminatory behaviour is “regularly practiced and normalized, including at the executive level,” that the PCO’s culture discourages reporting of such incidents, and that accountability mechanisms are “currently non-existent.”
Dozens of recommendations listed in the report have not been implemented, but include line items to “develop and implement a Blackcentric lens, with best practices, inside PCO,” create an anti-racism secretariat or chief diversity officer position, set clear, department-wide guidelines, and improve data collection to monitor progress.
The PCO is the highest-level bureaucratic office in Canada, and is responsible for 137 government departments, representing about 270,000 federal public servants.
“We are particularly concerned about the lack of accountability measures against leaders who were at the helm,” said Nicholas Marcus Thompson, president of the Black Class Action Secretariat, at a press conference on Parliament Hill Monday.
“Ultimately we are witnessing a scenario where those who have been perpetrators of harm are now tasked with carrying out the solutions,” he added.
The report shows Black and racialized employees have a distrust for the PCO, and describes an organization that focuses on “self-preservation — and even dishonesty — at the cost of authenticity.”
When asked about the report at a press conference in Toronto on Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said, “Racism and discrimination are never acceptable.”
“It is not acceptable anywhere in Canada, least of all inside our government,” she added.
CTV News has reached out to the PCO for comment on the report, but has not yet received a response.
Sharon DeSousa, the national president of PSAC, said the report makes it clear that Black, Indigenous and racialized employees experience “separate and unequal realities” in the federal public service.
“(They) are without the same opportunities for career advancement, trapped in a revolving door of tokenism, and brought into temporary positions to give the appearance of racial equity then moving out without meaningful opportunities for advancement,” DeSousa said.
The PCO audit, conducted by Rachel Zellars, a Saint Mary’s University professor in the department of social justice, focuses on the results of a PCO “Safe Space Initiative.”
Of 1,200 Privy Council Office employees, Zellars only had access to 58 staff members to interview as part of the audit, and only 13 were racialized.
In Zellars’ report, released by The Coalition Against Workplace Discrimination, she noted that few racialized employees worked at the PCO for more than a year, and most only worked there a few months.
The professor also noted that although PCO data states Black representation has increased from March 2019 to March 2022, from 22 employees to 38 — about 3.9 per cent of total staff, a ratio higher than the public service overall — the data is “largely symbolic, as it reveals nothing about employment level or length of tenure or employee experience.”
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