Evidence For The Latest Elvis Sighting Is Greater Than Evidence For Equity Employment For Visible Minorities
Dear Prime Minister Martin and Fellow MP's:
Most Canadians have heard the statement that employers must make their employee roster reflect the current ethnic mix of their area. Among a great number of public and private employers, this statement has become gospel-truth. In fact, as Dr. Martin Loney, a critic of such policies, has pointed out, “Thousands of people now make a living in the preferential hiring industry or the linked field of 'diversity training' ….” (P. 4, The Pursuit of Division:Race, Gender and Preferential Hiring in Canada).
All Canadians can quickly see the absurdity of forcing the Montreal Canadiens or Vancouver Canucks to reflect the current ethnic mix in their areas by dressing 8 or 9 South Asians who have recently landed in the area and would not know how to skate two feet without falling. But a number of Canadians have trouble seeing the lack of logic in the “reflection”
argument. The key point is that the spokespeople for Canada's “diversity industry” and its equity employment advocates say little about the competition the federal government has created between nearly 2 million of Canada's own unemployed (among them, Canada's own visible minority Natives) and the flood of recent immigrants whose arrival the federal government has never provided justifying evidence for. In fact, the diversity industry, like the immigration industry, is not required to furnish evidence that its claims are true. All of us are merely expected to accept their claims.
If we don't, we are subjected to “Multicultural/Diversity Re-education Programmes” which are reminiscent of the re-education programmes many Canadians scoffed at in much less tolerant countries.
Here are three points to contemplate:
(1) The facts, as Dr. Loney points out, are quite different from the claims of the “diversity industry”: “In fact, analysis of 1971 and 1981 census data showed no generalized trend for visible minorities to be concentrated at the bottom of the labour market. In 1971, for example, Asian Canadians were in the second highest earning group, and in 1981, Japanese Canadians were the third highest earners in all ethnic groups (Winn 1985:686). Such findings are profoundly disturbing for preferential hiring advocates, for if some non-white groups out-perform some white ethnic groups, the claim that non-white groups face pervasive discrimination at the hands of whites becomes questionable. (In other words,), if some racial minorities succeed where others fail, explanations more complex than discrimination begin to intrude.” (P. 7)
(2) Although some Canadians are aware that Canada's federal government has set the very questionable goal of having visible minorities occupy 20% of all federal civil service positions (the reflection argument again) , most Canadians are not aware of the extent of legislated preferential hiring and for how long it has occurred. The first federal employment equity legislation was introduced in 1986.
But Dr, Loney points out that the City of Toronto “had established numerical goals for some positions by 1982; for all external positions in 1985; and for all vacant positions in 1992–an example of the escalating reach of preferential hiring advocates. It continued to dress its policies in the language of “merit,” but, in a situation in which increasing attention was paid to the possession of desireable group characteristics, being an able-bodied white male was not helpful.” In 1996, the hiring of a group of firefighters showed that even after hiring standards were substantially lowered, candidates from visible minority groups still did not meet requirements. In the end, a merit-driven system was “replaced by one that would overtly discriminate on the basis of race and gender in order to attain numerical targets.” A similar incident occurred in the same year in the hiring of fire-fighters in Ottawa. As Dr. Loney points out, “Once justified to address perceived historic or contemporary discrimination, preferential hiring was now justified simply because few qualified candidates had the desired (visible minority) characteristics.”
(P. 33) In other words, the possession of visible minority characteristics had become the major reason for hiring. In summary, the refection argument had become an employment policy.
(3) Canada's 15-year-old mass immigration policy and its equity employment policies are closely connected. The former is unjustified and is a major cause of the latter. Both have little evidence to support their existence.
In fact, the evidence for the latest Elvis sighting is greater than the evidence for either mass immigration or equity employment.
As the examples show, all three levels of government have to become involved in restoring sanity to immigration and employment policies. This is an issue that should be discussed in the upcoming federal election. It should also be an issue in provincial legislatures and in municipal council chambers, particularly in those legislatures and council chambers where mass immigration and equity employment policies have been supported without much thought. Unemployed Canadians are not disposables.
We invite you to visit our web site at WWW.ImmigrationWatchCanada.org
Best wishes,
Dan Murray
Immigration Watch Canada
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