Immigration Canada is expecting to set up a new office to address staff racism complaints by this fall.
According to the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), they will be creating an equity secretariat that will support “safe and independent channels for reporting racism and discrimination,” more accountability for senior managers, as well as including an ombudsperson’s office available to all of its employees.
However, unions representing IRCC employees said the department has not formally spoken to them about the steps involved in creating the secretariat or the ombudsperson’s office.
OMNI News spoke to Daniel Pollak from the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO) for a comment.
“First and foremost, it needs to be very accessible to employees and that means that it’s important when they go there’s no fear of reprisal or any type of consequences that they’re going to face as a result of speaking up. People have to know when they do take the steps to report an incident, that it will be acted upon,” Pollak said.
Earlier this week, the IRCC published a summary report of a survey conducted among 62 employees, with the chief complaints of many linked to racist micro-aggressions, harassment and professional marginalization.
Pollak, who works as an advocacy and stakeholder relations officer at PAFSO, said employees face much more racism and microaggression than expected.
“We do know through grievance processes that our union sees on a regular basis that there are certain incidents through our tri-annual survey, we have heard of incidents of racism and microaggressions, but the sheer number is a lot more than we expected.”
“Some progress has been made, especially domestically, but there’s a lot more progress to be made even right here in Canada and also in our presence and embassies abroad.”
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he expects the federal government to quickly address the issues raised by employees in the latest survey.
OMNI News contacted the IRCC for a comment, but they didn’t respond in time.
