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Jamie Sarkonak: Bird conservation — the latest field to take up race-based hiring

A Quebec human rights case over job posting excluding white applicants dismissed as 'ideological'

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In Quebec, government-sponsored racial discrimination is totally OK — as long as it’s directed at white people.  

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That’s the conclusion of the province’s human rights tribunal last week, having examined the case of a bird conservation non-profit, QuébecOiseaux, which refused to consider applications from white people for a temporary position in 2021. 

Jamie Sarkonak: Bird conservation — the latest field to take up race-based hiring Back to video

QuébecOiseaux did not act alone in this. The race-restricted job was supported by a federal wage subsidy (via the Liberal “Youth Employment and Skills Strategy”) from Parks Canada with an emphasis on non-white workers, which was in turn distributed by the non-profit Nature Canada to smaller partner organizations.  

Parks Canada had required that at least 40 per cent of the youth hired with the funds be part of a diversity group, identifying as either non-white, immigrant, disabled, idle (not employed or in school), LGBT, still in high school, or an official language minority. When Nature Canada passed the funds along, it tightened the eligibility criteria, limiting the funds to youth who identify as any race other than white. 

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Nature Canada was eager to implement such a diversity program. Coming out of 2020, the year of BLM riots, it had joined society’s new zeal for eradicating “systemic racism” — that is, any statistical underrepresentation of minorities in any field. By early 2021 it published its own study on demographics in the field of environmental protection, which had found that non-white individuals were very underrepresented. It was clamouring for a grant to remedy this, and Parks Canada obliged. 

Ultimately, 295 people were hired through the program. This included 81 Indigenous people, 214 Black or otherwise non-white people. The remainder, 56 hires, were not in either category: the human rights adjudicator inferred these to be white — and some of them certainly were, as Nature Canada admitted that it waived the racial requirement for certain organizations that were unable to find any candidates — but some of them could have been minorities who simply didn’t self-identify.  

Alas, a law student with a background in sustainability, an interest in environmental issues and a natural sense of justice discovered QuébecOiseaux’s race-restricted posting for a worker to help reduce threats to birds in urban habitats. She submitted a complaint to the human rights tribunal, arguing the job posting was exclusionary, but was dismissed outright. 

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Her complaint was tossed for a number of reasons. One, the tribunal didn’t accept that she was ever trying to get the job, which the human rights adjudicator considered necessary for discrimination to have occurred. She hadn’t actually applied, and the adjudicator scrutinized her finances, as well as her education and employment situations, concluding that she wasn’t really looking to be hired. Instead, her motivation was pegged as “ideological.” 

“It is clear that her objective in bringing an action against QuébecOiseaux is to assert the theory that affirmative action is contrary to the right to equality and the (Quebec) Charter,” reads the decision. 

The student was also part of a group that opposed race-based programs, and had given a talk that criticized affirmative action, which drew the ire of the human rights adjudicator: “It also appears from the evidence that (she) had a motivation other than her interest in the position, namely to advance the causes of universalism and resistance against ‘wokism,’ by preventing the implementation of affirmative action programs in Quebec.” 

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When you compare this with other cases, it’s clear that Quebec’s human rights tribunal has a political agenda. This is the same entity that, in October, forced a hair salon to pay $500 for not including a non-binary option in its online booking form, causing great offence in the mind of a bald non-binary serial complainer named Alexe Frédéric Migneault. The hair salon even made a counterclaim for abuse of process, alleging that Migneault “uses the courts excessively and unreasonably, without legitimate basis … to extract money from various companies, based on ideological positions,” which the tribunal dismissed. To these adjudicators, complaints with an ideological twist are only a problem if they criticize progressive policy. 

But even if the law student had desperately needed this job and satisfied the tribunal’s selectively high bar, she would have failed. The Quebec Charter, just like the Canadian Charter, allows discrimination in the case of affirmative action programs. The job at QuébecOiseaux was such a program, and thus, it was legal. Case closed. 

This is simply how the law works in Canada. It’s a degrading force of systemic discrimination in the literal sense: rules from on high are ordering a certain kind of person to be denied opportunity en masse, simply because of their heritage. But instead of letting it demoralize you, take it as motivation: just as these rules were written into existence, they can be erased — and replaced with something that punishes those who discriminate in the name of “equity.” We should demand nothing less of our provincial governments, along with the federal Conservative party. 

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