Thank you so much for speaking to that, because I think that is one of the problems. Often in polite society we will talk about unconscious bias. We will talk about cultural competency. We will say all of these kinds of words that we make sound very nice and very flowery but really what we are experiencing and what we have seen and what the Polaris report has stated and what we have heard in incidental conversations with IRCC staff and other colleagues is that there is real racism. There is real discrimination, and if we don't name it and we don't utilize the appropriate measures..., just as for any other type of action, if we want to change it, we absolutely need to be able to have those people in the room.
When we look at things through an equity lens, we're not asking for proportional representation. We're asking for equitable representation, which means in all levels of IRCC there needs to be much more proportional and equitable representation of the BIPOC community. There also needs to be, in my humble opinion, a lot more anti-racism training and discussion of something that everybody is scared to name. It's really interesting—back in the 1990s nobody was scared to say this, but now nobody wants to talk about white privilege anymore. Back in the 1990s it was something we could talk about and we could see as something real that we needed to address, but these days it's very difficult to talk about that.
I'm really grateful for the question that you asked, because I agree with you 100%.