The Canadian government’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies are undermining merit-based recruitment within the federal public service, which could lead to serious repercussions for the country, a new study suggests.
A report by the Aristotle Foundation on the Canadian government’s DEI hiring practices found that the federal public service has shifted from a “blind” merit-based system to one that is heavily weighted toward identity representation.
“The federal public service employs nearly 350,000 Canadians. At that scale, how the federal government decides who to hire is not an insignificant matter,” the report said. “Its staffing decisions affect the quality of public services Canadians receive and the efficiency with which the public’s scarce resources are deployed.”
The foundation examined 301 federal job postings across 59 departments and agencies, between February and July. It found DEI language to be “nearly universal,” appearing in 95 percent of the postings it analyzed.
Forty-two percent of postings either directly or indirectly prioritized candidates according to race, ethnicity, or other identity characteristics, and 4 percent limited eligibility to specific groups, the report found.
Treasury Board Hiring
The report’s authors used the Treasury Board of Canada as an example where DEI hiring is heavily used. The Treasury Board is responsible for overseeing federal government spending, administration, and personnel.
Treasury Board reporting on employment equity within the core public administration indicates that by March 2025, three out of the four designated groups—women, indigenous peoples, and members of visible minorities—either met or surpassed the workforce availability (WFA) benchmarks.
Hirings in 2025 at the executive level exceeded their respective WFA benchmarks in all four groups, which also includes persons with disabilities. The authors said that 10.9 percent of Treasury executives had disabilities, well above the 5.3 percent WFA benchmark, demonstrating that identity-focused recruitment remains in place even after targets have been met.
Hiring data tells a similar story, the authors said. The percentage of new hires who are part of visible minorities has steadily increased from 17.9 percent in 2016-2017 to 27.2 percent in 2024-2025. Similarly, the percentage of individuals with disabilities hired has also seen a significant rise, moving from 3.7 percent in 2016-2017 to 8.6 percent in 2024-2025.
“To be clear, these outcomes are not inherently problematic, provided the appointments were made on the basis of competence,” they wrote. “The central point is that the gender, disability, or race of a public servant should be irrelevant to their hiring. What matters is whether they are best suited to perform the responsibilities of the role.”
The Treasury Board Secretariat’s 2024–2025 Demographic Snapshot acknowledges these targets have been met at an aggregated level but maintains that DEI hiring is still required to achieve proportionate representation.
The Treasury Board described WFA as a “starting point” that ensures the public service continues to “close gaps and sustain progress toward representation.”
It noted that broad labels like “visible minorities” can mask disparities within individual communities. For example, while the larger category may exceed benchmarks, specific subgroups can continue to experience lower retention and promotion rates into senior salary rankings.
DEI Approach
While the goal of DEI during the hiring process is to remove bias and offer fair job opportunities to candidates from all backgrounds, the report says empirical evidence challenges the necessity of implementing such a system in job postings.
“Every community, without exception, contains individuals of outstanding competence,” report co-author Conrad Eder said in a press release. “A staffing system designed to identify and appoint those individuals serves Canadians better than one that seeks to predetermine staffing outcomes based on group membership.”
Using a DEI approach could risk compromising the quality of public administration, especially in highly technical or safety-critical fields, by reducing the pool of competitive applicants based on demographic factors, the report added.
The authors noted that the majority of Canadians are opposed to DEI hiring, citing a 2024 Léger survey that indicated 57 percent of Canadians disagree with the idea that employers should take cultural background or racial identity into account when making hiring decisions.
There is significant opposition to DEI hiring policies even within the communities they are designed to assist, according to the survey. Women oppose these policies at rates similar to men, with 57 percent expressing disapproval. Among non-white Canadians, 49 percent are against it.
The foundation recommends the government amend the Public Service Employment Act to remove demographic representation from the definition of merit and focus instead on individual competence.
“DEI practices that remove barriers to fair participation ensure that people of comparable ability have a genuinely comparable opportunity to attain and achieve,” the authors said. “A genuinely open competition is more likely to identify the most capable candidate.”
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