(This post was written for Sunday but problems with my connection meant it couldn’t be posted until now. I realize that I could modify the ‘date stamp’ after the fact but that practice strikes me as too reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 ‘We’re at war with Eastasia, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia’…)

So, on Friday, while the Federal Court of Canada was rebuking my government for it’s firing practices, Public Works Canada was also making some interesting changes to its hiring practices. Hopefully these changes will also prove to be illegal, but until they are, any healthy white male applying for a job with that department will be wasting their time. In an e-mail, the department’s Deputy Minister, David Marshall, ordered his managers to hire only the disabled, visible minorities, women, aboriginals (leading me to wonder how ‘aboriginal’ one has to be if you don’t already qualify for either of the proceeding categories). To violate this order without written permission from their superiors would be a very bad thing. You can read more about this here (hoping link works).

This might not be the dumbest e-mail from a senior civil servant to fall into the public domain since Jo Moore’s September 11, 2001 advice to her fellow British administrators that 'today might be a good day to bury news that one doesn’t want the media to find out', but I can’t remember another contender. I, personally, am very tempted to immediately apply for any Public Works job I can find and when I’m rejected, take this e-mail and a lawyer and sue the government. Hopefully, someone else will do so, after all if it works for M. Pelletier…

Now I’m all for diversity in the workplace. I strongly believe that bringing people with different backgrounds into the same environment creates a synergy otherwise absent from workplaces lacking such diversity. So that’s a ‘good’ reason to have a diverse workforce. A ‘bad’ reason is the one articulated by Mr. Marshall, as executives and managers, our role includes ensuring that the public service is representative." What is ‘representative’? Why is one visible minority out of every five new hires ‘representative’? And if your managers aren’t meeting this goal, could it be that there just aren’t enough qualified candidates who also are visible minorities? And isn’t your primary role to deliver the best possible service at reasonable cost to the taxpayers who foot the bill? And how does your memo really address these issues other than adding another approval layer to the hiring process?

I can only hope Public Works Minister Brison can take some time off from his current bashing of Stephen Harper to ask his deputy some of these questions. Business before pleasure, after all…