Question to Minister Brison: What’s next for name-blind recruitment in the public service?

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: I’ll move on to a different question, minister. Thank you for being here.

Your department, along with the Public Service Commission, implemented a pilot project for understanding the depth of bias in terms of names and resumés. You implemented a blind hiring pilot project to understand the depth, scope and scale of discrimination and bias in the federal public service and found that there was no bias.

However, your department itself has acknowledged that there were issues with the methodology. First, the hiring managers who were recruited for this project volunteered. I would suggest that creates a certain lack of purity, if I can use that word. The second is that the hiring managers made their decisions knowing that their decisions and the comparative results would be subject to review.

Minister, your office has acknowledged these issues. I am wondering what your next step will be. Will more work be done on this issue? The pilot project, I would submit, was not adequate.

Hon. Scott Brison, P.C., M.P., President of the Treasury Board and acting Minister of Democratic Institutions: I very much appreciate that question. It plays to a core value of Canada and our government and our public service, and that is diversity and inclusion. We are stronger and we make better decisions as governments when we have more diversity in decision-making rooms. That goes for cabinets and committees. It goes for the public service.

I hear the argument made for more diversity in terms of the presence of individual groups and ethnocultural minorities. In fact I have heard it made for women. For instance, the argument made for more women in decision-making roles is that it’s good for women. Well, that’s actually the wrong argument. The right argument is that you get better decisions when you have a greater diversity of perspectives in decision-making rooms. I witness that in a very diverse cabinet on an ongoing basis.

The objective of the Treasury Board, as the employer of the public service working with the Public Service Commission, with the name-blind hiring pilot was to actually try within the government to apply name-blind recruitment approaches to discern whether or not we can see bias within hiring practices in the Government of Canada.

I appreciate very much you pointing out that there are methodological challenges in the pilot. The good news is that the pilot came back and said that they did not find, necessarily, a bias or discriminatory hiring practices within the Government of Canada. On a positive note, what that speaks to is that there is an effort, I believe, within the Government of Canada on an ongoing basis in our recruitment and hiring practices to actually ensure that we have a strong representation in terms of employment equity categories. So I think there is a proactive effort made within the Government of Canada on an ongoing basis. But I do believe that there are methodological issues within that pilot.

I have said to my department, Treasury Board, as a central agency and the employer of the public service, that I want to actually continue to apply the name-blind hiring pilot and to potentially apply it in departments or agencies wherein there is less diversity, to apply it in certain departments and agencies and in regions, to actually continue to work to this.

Because if you look at name-blind studies that have been done in other countries and jurisdictions, including one by the University of Toronto, they did find that when you hide somebody’s name, it does have an impact on whether or not they get a job interview or whether or not they end up being considered fully within the recruitment process. In Canada, a person’s name should not prevent them from having an equal shot at employment with their government.

So again, the pilot came back. It was one pilot. It came back with saying that they did not discern a bias. That is fine, but you’re right to recognize some methodological issues. We intend on continuing to work to further test this and to take a look at the application of name-blind assessments in other areas because we need to be rigorous on this.

The other thing in terms of this name-blind recruitment pilot is I believe very strongly that governments ought to experiment with new approaches. When you do that, you’ll find sometimes that you get the result you expected and other times you will get a totally different result, which is inherent in experimentation.

I want to see, as government and as ministers, that we encourage public servants and that we are open to trying new things, learning from those experiences on an ongoing basis and replacing a culture of risk aversion in government in terms of trying to do things with a culture of experimentation.

Pilots and trying something new as opposed to a monolithic approach across government actually help inform a better public policy. This kind of pilot approach is something that I think we should encourage. We should learn from each of these pilots and then move forward with better public policy.