Still too few visible minorities in Quebec's public sector, data suggests

Many of Quebec's public sector organizations need to hirefar morevisible minorities in order to have their workforcesrepresent the province's demographics, an analysis by Radio-Canada has found.

Radio-Canada compiled data from500 organizations including school boards, cities, and hospitals that employ about 600,000public employees.

Their analysisfound thatvisible minorities make up, on average, only fiveper cent of workforces even though11per cent of the province's population is neither white nor aboriginal.

The data Radio-Canada looked at was published in December 2014byQuebec'sHuman Rights and Youth Rights Commission, which sets minority employment targetsfor each organization, depending on such criteria as the organization'sregion and the availability of people to do the work.

That data, the most recent available,paints a portraitof thesituation between2010 and2013 in Quebec.

For instance, visible minorities wereunder-represented at theSocit des alcools du Qubec (SAQ), which had only38 minorities on a staff of more than6,000.

Hydro Qubec, meanwhile, employed only 312 minorities in a workforce that topped20,000 people, the analysis found.

Montreal's transit commission and its Jewish General Hospital were among those employersthat come closest to hitting their targets.

Only 1 Outaouais agency hit target

In the Outaouais region, onlyPavillonduParc, an organization that helps people with autism and intellectual disabilities, employeda representative number of people of non-white backgrounds during the data's timeframe.

Pavillon du Parc's head of human resources,Anick Malette, said the agency wasproud to be 96 per cent of the way toward hittingthe target set by the human rightscommission.

The process was difficult, she said, but it happened because of a change in the organization's human resource policies, coupledwithleaders who really pushed for the changes.

On the other end of the list, theHauts-Bois-de-l'Outaouaisschool board in Maniwaki had only a single visible minority among its staff of 677.

The school board should have had 27, according to the data.

City of Gatineaulagging behind

According to the human rights commission's data, the City of Gatineauwas not quitehalfway to having the prescribed number of visible minorities on its payroll.

The city had24 visible minorities among its 2814 employees, when it should have had 56.

Claude-Yvette Akoun, directorof theAssociation of Immigrant Women in theOutaouais, said that while she expects managers mean well, it can be a challenge to hire people fromother cultures without concrete suggestions for how to do so.

Evaluations of job applicants areoften rooted in aNorth American approach to work culture, and hiring panels could look at ways to acknowledge cultural differences, she suggested.

with files from Radio-Canada's Thomas Gerbet