Thank you very much. I'm happy to help explain that provision of the legislation.
Currently the legislation gives the Public Service Commission—and this power is delegated to deputy ministers and hiring managers—the authority to use any assessment method they wish. That could include an assessment method such as a reference check.
There have been submissions from both the equity-seeking groups and the bargaining agents, and evidence through an audit conducted by the Public Service Commission, that different assessment methods can pose bias or barriers to groups in different kinds of ways.
The requirement in the legislation would be for an evaluation of the mechanism to be done to determine if that does pose bias or barriers, and if a bias or barrier is found, to seek reasonable mitigation efforts.
I can't prejudge right now the conclusion of what that evaluation would find, nor what the reasonable mitigation might be. It could be about the way a tool is used—for example, the types of questions asked. It could be about the degree to which something is used exclusively, and so on and so forth, but that would be part of the tool that would be developed to evaluate whether a barrier or a bias is, in fact, posed by that assessment method, and if so, what is reasonable as a mitigation method under the circumstances.
That does not necessarily mean that a specific tool might not be used at all. It might mean that there might be suggestions made about how to use that tool to seek to minimize any potential barriers that it includes.