Health Canada scientist, Dr. Shiv Chopra, is, once again, in a dispute with his employer. He and three of his colleagues in the Veterinary Drugs Directorate (formerly the Bureau of Veterinary Drugs), have openly criticized their employer for the approval process it is using for hormones and other drugs in the meat-packing industry.

Chopra, along with Margaret Haydon, Gerard Lambert and Chris Basudde have filed grievances against what they consider a politically inspired appraisal of their job performance by management.

&#0147All four of us who have been complaining about the drug approval process have just been told that our work is unsatisfactory. It is becoming a pretty nasty situation,&#0148 says Chopra, who has been with the public service for 35 years. He describes his own department &#0147as a tool of the multinational companies and veterinary profession.&#0148

Chopra is a high profile critic of the use of drugs to fatten up food producing animals.

When the CBC reported last October on a federal science panelâe(TM)s warning that antibiotic resistant bacteria were showing up in humans because of meat being consumed, the media organization turned to Chopra, &#0147a scientist at Health Canada,&#0148 to comment on the impact of antibiotics in chickens, pigs and cattle on human health.

Health Canada spokesperson Ryan Baker said he cannot comment on its legal dispute with Chopra. &#0147It is before a (Canadian Human Rights) tribunal right now to determine a remedy.&#0148

Chopra, of East Indian origin, is best known for having been involved in a struggle to end systemic discrimination against visible minorities within the federal government. He has won two anti-discrimination cases against Health Canada. The case in 1996 involved systemic exclusion of visible minorities from management positions in the department. The second, in 2001, was focused on his inability to get a promotion because of his racial background despite more than three decades of academic and professional experience in his field.

In 1992, when Chopra launched his two anti-discrimination complaints, he says that close to 30 per cent of the scientists and professionals working in Health Canada were of East Indian origin. Many of the senior jobs, he recalls, were held by British-born immigrants.

In the 1996 tribunal decision, Health Canada was ordered to make a series of corrective measures over a five-year period by a Canadian Human Rights tribunal. It concluded that &#0147Dr. Chopraâe(TM)s feelings of mistreatment were not at all unreasonable; his pursuit of his complaint was understandable and he comported himself with dignity.&#0148 (Canadian Human Rights tribunal decisions can be found online at www.chrt-tcdp.gc.ca.)

This case, involving an entire federal department, caused the Chrétien government to introduce legislative amendments to ensure this type of ruling by a human rights tribunal would never happen again, according to University of Toronto sociology professor Jeffrey Reitz.

Reitz, a former advisor to Chopra, says that Canadian Human Rights tribunals hearing complaints of systemic discrimination can no longer rely on statistical evidence of under-representation of any of the targeted groups under the federal employment equity act — i.e. women, aboriginals, disabled people and members of a visible minority. This applies to federal government departments and federally regulated private companies — the latter including financial services and the transportation industry.

As a quid pro quo, the Canadian Human Rights Commission now has the right to audit the progress toward employment equity by departments, agencies and companies in its jurisdiction.

Chopraâe(TM)s systemic discrimination case received a lot of input from employees and their unions at Health Canada. &#0147You had a group of people who were in place mobilized to produce the relevant information for a specific hearing that was being held in a public way at a particular date,&#0148 said Reitz.

However, this kind of public participation is not encouraged under the current federal employment equity set-up and the reports of equity audits are somewhat restricted in terms of accessibility, adds Reitz, one of three authors of a Canadian Public Policy article (Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, 2002), Addressing Systemic Racial Discrimination in Employment: The Health Canada Case and Implications of Legislative Change.

Shiv Chopra says that with more visible minority immigrants entering Canada and applying for jobs in the federal public service, Health Canadaâe(TM)s employee composition has changed. But he maintains that there are still insufficient numbers of people of colour within the senior ranks of his department.

Chopra told CBC News that racism in Canada is more likely to occur in the boardroom where decisions are quietly made to exclude certain individuals because of their background than in the streets as name-calling.

Louis Perinbam is a former senior civil servant who was hired by the Chrétien government in 1999 to head a task force that would raise the participation level of visible minorities within the federal bureaucracy. He is also of East Indian origin. He has seen, he says, &#0147a significant change in the public service mentality at senior levels since I left it eight years ago.

&#0147The court did make stipulations or recommendations to Health Canada a few years ago and set certain benchmarks. And in fact at that time, Health Canada not only met the requirements, but in fact exceeded them,&#0148 Perinbam said.

Perinbam, a former vice-president at the Canadian International Development Agency, cites the example of Sri Lankan-born Ranjit Perera, who sued CIDA for systemic racism in its promotion practices. Eventually, the federal agency settled with the complainant by acknowledging, &#0147whatever wrongdoing they might have done. But they also compensated him and they also gave him a significant promotion into the executive ranks,&#0148 says Perinbam. (Because of a gag order, Perera cannot discuss the case, says his former union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada.)

Nevertheless, Perinbamâe(TM)s task force, dubbed Embracing Change was unable to reach its benchmark of 20 per cent of the federal public service to be made up of members of visible minorities by 2003.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission reports that as of March 31, 2001, visible minorities comprise 6.1 per cent of the federal public service.

That number is out of date, says Nurjehan Mawani, the head of the Public Service Commission, responsible for recruitment and staffing in the federal bureaucracy. She is confident that progress has been made in the hiring of visible minorities in the past 18 months. &#0147I agree that we will not meet the benchmark by 2003. However, we have made a significant dent.&#0148

But unless senior managers in the federal departments and agencies are forced to adopt employment equity plans that eliminate discriminatory practices, the movement towards diversity within the federal bureaucracy will continue at a snailâe(TM)s pace, says David Onyalo, director of the anti-racism and human rights department at the Canadian Labour Congress.

One way that diversity might succeed is if federal public sector unions are given joint responsibility with management in the implementation of employment equity in the workplace, says the CLC spokesperson.

It is not a suggestion that either Chrétien or labour minister Claudette Bradshaw have taken up yet, says Onyalo.

Both prime minister Jean Chrétien and the senior government managers and deputy ministers are committed to encouraging a better representation of visible minorities, within the federal public service, says Jean Augustine, a Toronto Liberal MP (Etobicoke Lakeshore), secretary of state for multiculturalism and status of women and herself a woman of colour.

It is the middle managers who evaluate employees on their performance who remain the biggest obstacles for change, Augustine says.

&#0147At the top there is no problem,&#0148 Augustine has heard from her informants in various federal departments. &#0147They feel there is strong support, there is strong belief, there is strong commitment. But at the middle managersâe(TM) level, there is some work to be done.&#0148

Augustine was asked if the current Liberal government could not follow the example of an earlier prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who, following the passage of legislation in 1969, simply ordered the implementation of official bilingualism in the federal public service despite opposition from anglophone civil servants.

&#0147It is a little more complicated than ordering,&#0148 says Augustine.

Furthermore, she adds, &#0147it is social change that we are talking about here, and those things seem to be more evolutionary.&#0148

As it ages, the Canadian workforce in general and the federal public service in particular will rely more and more on immigrants and people from the four targeted groups under employment equity to staff empty positions, stated a report of the parliamentary committee reviewing the employment equity legislation. Libby Davies, the Vancouver East NDP MP, who sits on the committee, suggests that the Chrétien government is making all the right public statements about diversity, but there is still unevenness department-by-department in how measures are being implemented. What surprised Davies is evidence that the federally regulated banks have done a better job in hiring and promoting visible minorities than the Canadian government. In 2000, visible minorities accounted for about 10.7 per cent of the employees in this sector.

Nurjehan Mawani says it is ironic that the more market-oriented banking sector recognized earlier &#0147the importance of a workforce that is representative of its customers.&#0148

Paul Weinberg

Paul Weinberg

Paul Weinberg is a freelance writer as well as author and editor, based in Hamilton, ON.