According to an investigation by the French language version of the publicly-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the public sector workforce of the province of Quebec is “too white”.
The investigation claims that white Canadians are overrepresented in the public sector workforce in comparison to their overall population in Quebec.
White Quebecois are increasingly becoming a smaller segment of the overall population of the province, with visible minorities almost doubling from 7 per cent to 13 per cent of the population between 2001 and 2016.
The author of the report, Thomas Gerbet, lists several publicly-owned companies and lists the number of minority employees, such as Quebec’s public liquor corporation Société des alcools du Québec, which has minorities as only two per cent of its overall workforce.
Nine out of 10 non-white residents of the province live in Montreal and, according to the report, the Montreal Transit Corporation (STM) is one of the few public organisations to meet government diversity quota targets.
Publicly-funded Quebec universities, known as CEGEPs, are also subject to diversity quotas. According to Mr. Gerbet, universities which do not actively promote diversity targets for new hires could face action from the province’s human rights tribunal.
The Quebec police force is also lagging behind the diversity quotas, with Montreal having only 14.5 per cent of its police and administrative staff coming from minority backgrounds compared to the 34 per cent minority population of the city.
Over the last year, Quebec has born the brunt of illegal mass migration to Canada, as Haitians and others have rushed across the U.S. border by the thousands. Many of the illegal migrants seeking asylum have been housed in Montreal, where the Olympic stadium was converted into a makeshift asylum home last summer.
After the influx of asylum seekers, believed to have been encouraged following a tweet from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the government has now started to advise asylum seekers not to cross into the country illegally.
Earlier this month, immigration minister Ahmed Hussen warned illegal migrants: “We don’t want people to illegally enter our border, and doing so is not a free ticket to Canada.”
He added: “We are saying, ‘You will be apprehended, screened, detained, fingerprinted, and if you can’t establish a genuine claim, you will be denied refugee protection and removed.'”
In the United Kingdom, police forces and public companies like the BBC have also embraced diversity quotas, sometimes even advising that white people need not apply for certain positions.