Editorial: Hidden apartheid or hidden apathy

The numbers; they tell a story.

And when you crunch the figures, ugly conclusions emerge.

Privy Council clerk Kevin Lynch, Canada’s top bureaucrat, this month issued an urgent "action plan" to government departments ordering senior civil servants to engage in a targeted recruitment exercise of visible minorities.

He wants to see another 4,000 new university and college graduates employed by next March, with priority being given to closing the gap between the growing population of visible minorities in Canada and the proportion who land federal jobs.

To do that, Lynch wants visible minorities to be recruited in numbers beyond their proportion of the workforce.

While it has been a priority, at least in written form for many years, visible minorities have not been hired for the civil service in the correct proportions.

The recruitment rate of visible minorities keeps falling, even though overall hiring in government departments grows.

One telling point of Lynch’s report states: Recruitment of visible minorities dropped to 8.7 per cent from 9.8 per cent of all hires even though visible minorities are more educated than most applicants – half have bachelor or other degrees.

So why is this happening and what are we going to do about it?

There are two schools of thought on this dilemma.

The first revolves around bigots and racism, unfair affirmative action policies and white males wanting to work with their own kind.

The second is poor planning, pure and simple.

The National Council on Visible Minorities thinks both poor planning and racism is at play.

"If we are among the most educated to apply then why aren’t we employed? The answer is racism, pure and simple," stressed said Igho Natufe, president of the National Council of Visible Minorities.

"They knew one in five Canadians will be visible minorities by 2017, but we have to wait until it gets here before we plan for it?"

Reasons aside, the end result is that Canada is wasting its large human capital potential.

While we go around the world to invite the best and brightest to come to Canada, many immigrants are going elsewhere for better prospects.

Cultural xenophobia, endless barriers and the non-recognition of foreign university degrees – which are fine to secure a visa but not good enough to land a job – have led to a chronic under-utilization of our immigrant workforce.

Who has not heard about the Indian doctor driving a cab, the Filipino lawyer working as a clerk and the Chinese chartered accountant settling for a career as real estate agent?

These stories of frustration abound in our burgeoning multi-cultural cities giving lie to the great Canadian dream.

Lynch’s action plan is a step in the right direction.

Canada should stop paying lip service to immigrants and research reports and move assertively to harvest its immigration bounty.

If we don’t do this, do it now and do it well, the ramifications will be ugly for all Canadians.