Evidence of meeting #109 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was pco.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:35 p.m.
President, Public Service Commission
Thank you for the question. Certainly, employment equity in the federal system is a shared responsibility between the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Privy Council Office—
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
—the Public Service Commission. You just took over her job.
12:35 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
12:35 p.m.
President, Public Service Commission
—the Public Service Commission, I'm sorry.
We have been making steady progress in terms of women representation among the executive ranks. I have data dating back to 2015-16. We're still working on our most recent data, but steadily the increase has been happening.
The most recent data was 47.3% of our executives were female, compared to a workforce availability for executives in the workforce at large of 47.8%. This would indicate a 0.5% gap. I'm hopeful that over the last two years, once we get the data, we'll see that gap pretty well disappear. For aboriginal people it's not so good. We're at about 3.7% compared to a workforce availability of 5.2%, so clearly there are some issues there. For persons with disabilities, it's 5.1%, compared to an availability of 2.3%. Mind you, these are workforce availabilities that date back to the census of 2011. I suspect that once we have the new census data, there will be gaps that will be identified. For visible minorities, again we're closing the gap there. We're at 9.4% of executives compared to 9.5% workforce availability.
We're also looking at what I call the pipeline, people applying to jobs in the federal government or people from the outside being hired to entry-level jobs. Again, in those cases we see visible minorities or people who identify as visible minorities clearly outperforming workforce availability. The most surprising data I saw recently for our student applications in the last summer, 32% self-identified as a visible minority. To me, that indicates that the pipeline is quite healthy.
I think we have more problems when it comes to persons with disabilities and aboriginal people, where we don't get as many applications as I think we should.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Time is precious, Madam Ratansi, fleeting.
To our witnesses, thank you very much for being here today, and thank you for all the information. It has been most informative, most helpful. Should you have any additional information you think would be of benefit to our committee, we invite you to please make those submissions directly to our clerk.
With that, thank you once again for your appearance. We hope to see you, at least some of you, again soon.
We are suspended for a few moments, colleagues, while we wait to go in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]