The bulk of Canadians don’t think employers should be selecting candidates for jobs based on cultural or ethnic backgrounds, according to a new Leger poll for the Association of Canadian Studies.
The poll found that 57% of Canadians disagree with diversity, equity and inclusion hiring practices, a sentiment that is surprisingly even more pronounced in Canada than in the United States.
Walmart was the latest to join some of the world’s largest corporations in rolling back its DEI policies amid a growing public backlash.
The company joins the likes of Harley-Davidson and John Deere which have already done away with race-based hiring.
“There is clearly pushback on DEI approaches that extend to hiring practices and support for employment equity (affirmative action in the US) appears to be softening both in Canada perhaps more so than it is in the United States,” reads the survey.
According to the survey, only 28% of Canadians support equity hiring, compared to 36% of those who support it south of the border.
Additionally, only 46% of Americans said they outright oppose it.
Certain political parties have also scrapped DEI hiring, most notably Alberta’s governing United Conservatives. The provincial party has explicitly endorsed eliminating such practices regarding public service and Crown corporation employment.
Meanwhile, Canada’s federal government first implemented specific equity targets for hiring in the 1980s.
More recently, visible minorities in the federal government grew from nearly 18% in 2016 to almost 27% this year.
However, diversity hiring among the average Canadian is becoming increasingly unpopular, particularly among those aged 45 to 54, at 62%.
While it’s similarly disliked across all age groups, even among the country’s youngest working demographic of 18 to 24-year-olds, 50% still said they were opposed to diversity hiring policies.
Broken down by gender, men and women responded equally in their opposition, at 57%. A surprising result considering that women tend to hold more progressive views on social issues compared to men generally speaking.
Author of the study Jack Jedwab noted that this may be that among the cohort of women who do feel there is systemic racism in Canada, they still don’t believe that DEI hiring is the right avenue to remedy the situation.
Provincially, the pushback against DEI hiring was most evident in Quebec at 63%, where the government has already made strong efforts to have religious dress and symbols removed from the workplace.
Alberta was next in line at 58% responding that ethnic background should not be considered in hiring, followed closely by British Columbia at 57%.
In Ontario, 55% of respondents felt that way, with Saskatchewan and Manitoba agreeing at 53%.
Only in Atlantic Canada did that sentiment get as low as the halfway point, with 50% of respondents opposing DEI hiring, making it the only region to not hold an outright majority opposition to it.
On a national scale, 15% of respondents said they didn’t know how they felt about it, with a minority percentage in each province giving that response. Ontarians were the most likely to not know at 19%.
By sector, freelance workers and those self-employed are most likely to oppose equity hiring at 75%, followed by full-time workers at 58%. Whereas, just over half, (51%) of part-time workers opposed equity hiring.
Immigrants were slightly more likely to support diversity hiring when compared to non-immigrants at 34% and 36%, respectively.
Still, a solid 50% of immigrants opposed the practice.
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