Workplaces that reflect the communities they serve are usually stronger for it. Discrimination against people because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation is wrong, and Canada was right to build legal protections against it.This is an account of what happens when a policy designed for one set of conditions keeps running long after those conditions have changed. The stated purpose of diversity initiatives is to widen the pool of qualified candidates and ensure that people who might previously have been overlooked receive fair consideration.There is an important distinction between widening a pool and restricting based on identity — which has the direct effect of narrowing the pool. These policies are outdated. Most Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring frameworks in Canada trace back to the theory that certain groups are underrepresented in workplaces relative to their share of the population, often because of biased screening or narrow recruiting networks, and that targeted programs were needed to correct it. Canada's demographics have shifted enormously since then. Permanent resident admissions roughly climbed from around 270,000 a year in 2015 to over 480,000 in 2024, alongside a much larger surge in temporary residents — international students and work-permit holders — over the same stretch. By the 2021 census, nearly one-in-four people in Canada were landed immigrants or permanent residents, the highest share since 1921 and the highest among G7 countries..What that means in practice is that most entry-level applicant pools today are diverse by default because of the nature of the field. The underrepresentation that these programs were built to correct is, in a lot of entry-level hiring, no longer applicable. The policy is calibrated for a labour market that no longer exists. It keeps producing the same result — exclusion by category — even in applicant pools where the original justification is much weaker than it used to be.If one raises this point, the reflexive assumption by the woke crowd is that they must resent the people the policy is meant to help, or that they think discrimination against women or minorities isn't real. Neither is true. It creates an environment where people face barriers that have nothing to do with their competence. The answer to "people were excluded unfairly" is not "now let's exclude someone else unfairly." Two wrongs don’t make a right.That is the asymmetry in how this conversation goes. If you say anything about it, you get branded racist, misogynistic, or a Nazi, or potentially all three. There is no room for an open dialogue..What should change? Diversity targets should be reviewed against current applicant pool composition, not set once and left running on autopilot. Hiring processes should document why a candidate was or wasn't advanced, tied to actual competencies, rather than silence when the real reason is a demographic target. Honesty needs to be present in the conversation, internally and externally, about whether a role has a hard demographic constraint — so candidates aren't spending hours applying and interviewing for something they were never eligible for. That last point is really the core of it. Nobody is owed any particular job. People are owed a straight answer about whether they were ever actually being considered for one, and a policy that's honest about whether the problem it was built to solve still looks the way it did when it was conceived.Fairness isn't a zero-sum resource where protecting it for one group requires suspending it for another. A habit that quietly shifts unfairness onto a different set of shoulders isn't a fix; it’s a problem.Matthew Mueller is a Calgary-based writer with a history of being immersed in news from a young age. He is passionate about Alberta and Canada relations.
