National Defence Deputy Minister Christiane Fox waits to appear as witnesses at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in Ottawa on April 13.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The deputy minister who breached conflict of interest rules when she intervened to help an acquaintance land a job should have admitted she made a mistake, rather than saying she was promoting diversity, an expert on anti-Black racism says.
Rachel Zellars, who has worked with government departments on combatting racial bias, warned that Christiane Fox’s explanation of her actions may give critics of equity and inclusion policies ammunition, and discredit equity work.
In 2023, Ms. Fox was the immigration department’s deputy minister when she intervened in the hiring of Björn Charles, whom she knew from university. She’s now the Deputy Minister of National Defence.
Ms. Zellars, who authored the 2024 Study on the Black Executive Community in the Federal Public Service, said in an interview Friday that Ms. Fox could have helped build trust as a leader if she had admitted she had made a mistake.
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The report by Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein last week found Ms. Fox helped Mr. Charles, who was working as a gym manager, land a project management job at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in 2023.
The Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office have not said if Ms. Fox will face any consequences.
But in a statement issued following the watchdog’s report, Ms. Fox said she was aiming to promote diversity and bring in outside perspectives when she helped the racialized acquaintance, who did not speak French or have previous government experience, get a job in IRCC’s Access to Information division.
Mr. von Finckenstein concluded Ms. Fox had “used her position as Deputy Minister to give Mr. Charles preferential treatment, by ensuring he met with departmental officials quickly, seeking updates about his hiring, giving him internal information and pushing for a higher job classification.”
He said evidence showed that staff reporting to Ms. Fox “felt pressured to hire him at a level for which he was not qualified.”
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Ms. Fox told the Commissioner that her involvement in the hiring process was appropriate and that it advanced objectives to further anti-racism, equity, and inclusion in the public service, claims the ethics watchdog did not find credible.
Ms. Zellars, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Justice at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, helped to shape the curriculum offered to federal public servants on topics such as unconscious bias and anti-Black racism when she was a visiting scholar at the Canada School of Public Service in 2021-22. She has also worked for a number of federal government departments including on combatting anti-Black bias.
Her report for the federal government into the experiences of Black executives followed a 2021 Call to action by Ian Shugart, who was the Clerk of the Privy Council at the time. It called on public service leaders to take specific and meaningful actions to address racism, equity, and inclusion.
In an interview, Ms. Zellars said the Call to Action is not designed to promote the hiring of underqualified employees or to bypass merit.
“To engage in DEI, you can create opportunity, but the decisions have to be made through transparent, consistent, accountable processes,” she said.
She said Ms. Fox “interfered in the hiring process by pushing someone who did not have the hard skills to do the job.”
“And so that’s not opening a door, if you put a racialized person into a position to fail.”
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Ms. Zellars said many able Black public servants have been stagnating for years in federal jobs. Rather than intervening to help an acquaintance land a management job in her department, she believes Ms. Fox should have “looked inside of the system and said who is here that has stagnated? Let me see what racialized person is deserving of an opportunity.”
She believes following the publication of the ethics watchdog’s report Ms. Fox should have said, ‘I made a mistake.’”
“The ‘I made a mistake’ part is so important for leadership and trust. It’s one of the most important ways for leaders to build trust, to show the vulnerability around mistakes and say: ‘I’m sorry.’”
Ms. Zellars, in a post on LinkedIn, said diversity and inclusion can “serve as a virtue and shield when it protects some from accountability.”
She wrote that at a time when diversity and inclusion commitments are increasingly treated as suspect, “Ms. Fox’s diversity and inclusion defense exploits the moral credibility of DEI work while effectively hollowing it out.”
“In an already hostile anti-DEI climate, the facts of the Fox Report paired with Ms. Fox’s defense create rippling harms that discredit genuine equity work, protect bad-behaving actors, and importantly, give opponents easy and effective ammunition.”
Ms. Fox declined to comment.