Alberta’s government tabled a bill on Tuesday that would stop the provincial public service, Crown corporations, school boards, municipalities and publicly funded universities and colleges from considering diversity, equity and inclusion when they hire. It is the first bill of the legislature’s fall sitting.
Justice Minister Mickey Amery tabled it. As Canadian Press and CBC News describe the legislation, it would keep those employers from basing hiring and promotion on “personal characteristics”: the grounds the Alberta Human Rights Act already protects, which include race, religion, gender identity and disability. The bill would also ban mandatory DEI training and education at those bodies and at any organization that receives provincial funding. The government says public-sector hiring should rest on merit, qualifications and competence.
For Black Albertans, the reach is wide. The 2021 census counted 177,940 Black residents in the province, 4.3% of the population, and the Prairies are where Black communities have been growing fastest. Between 2016 and 2021, 34,320 people moved to Alberta from Africa, most of them settling in Calgary. Many of them now look for work or send children to school in the institutions the bill covers.
The same bill carries a separate change that has nothing to do with hiring. It would rename the province’s law on non-consensual image sharing the Intimate Content Protection Act and extend it from images to live video, audio and deepfakes.
Alberta has been moving in this direction for months. In March, the University of Alberta’s board of governors voted to drop a long-standing line in its hiring policy that told panels to favour candidates from historically under-represented groups when two were equally qualified. The bill would turn that kind of change from a campus decision into provincial law.
Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi has called the government’s agenda a distraction from the cost of living, jobs, health care and education. The bill now goes through debate in the legislature. The government has not said when it expects a vote.
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