National Defence Deputy Minister Christiane Fox waits to appear as witnesses at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in Ottawa, Monday, April 13, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldAdrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The deputy minister who breached conflict of interest rules when she intervened to aid an acquaintance land a job in her department, on Monday defended her decision to help him enter the public service even though he did not speak French.
Speaking to reporters for the first time since the federal Ethics Commissioner issued a report into her conduct, Christiane Fox said she did not recommend the man for a bilingual position.
“I didn’t recommend him for a particular job,” she said after appearing at a Commons committee hearing Monday about defence issues.
“I think we have objectives in the federal government to have personnel who represent the linguistic diversity and the diversity of Canada. So that’s really our objective. It’s not one or the other,” she told reporters.
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Ms. Fox said to The Globe and Mail in a statement that, in helping Björn Charles while she was deputy minister at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, she had “genuine intentions in my actions.”
“I’ve been committed to advancing diversity and inclusion throughout my career and I am reflecting deeply on this and how I make change within organizations,” Ms. Fox told The Globe.
In January this year, Ms. Fox was appointed deputy minister at the Department of National Defence.
Earlier this month, Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein found that Ms. Fox had breached conflict of interest rules when she helped Mr. Charles, who she knew from university, land a project management role in her department.
He concluded that she 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.”
IRCC staff had expressed concerns about offering him a more senior role.
“Evidence showed they felt pressured to hire him at a level for which he was not qualified,” the ethics watchdog found.
Ms. Fox had told the Ethics Commissioner that she wanted to ensure Mr. Charles was not automatically appointed to an entry-level position, “as is the case with many racialized individuals entering the federal public service whose experience and skills are not recognized due to racism.”
Ms. Fox, who has a track record championing diversity in the public service, was in 2024 promoted from IRCC to Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council and Associate Secretary to the Cabinet, one of the most senior civil-service roles in Canada.
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After she moved to the Privy Council Office, Mr. Charles asked her if there were job opportunities there. He was facing being moved to a lower-grade job at IRCC. Ms. Fox forwarded his résumé and he was offered an interview.
Later, she met him and walked him up the corridor and introduced him to her colleagues before he was interviewed by them. He was hired for a position in the PCO’s access to information department with top-secret clearance.
While Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, Ms. Fox played a key role at a high-level event on Values and Ethics in Today’s Federal Public Service at the Canada School of Public Service, including chairing a discussion on conflict of interest with senior public servants.
“It’s actually enormously healthy for an organization to be talking about conflict, to declare that conflict,” Ms. Fox said.
While deputy minister at IRCC in 2023, Ms. Fox was part of a deputy ministers’ task force on the federal public service and ethics.
The task-force report, published in January, 2024, recommended that “deputy ministers ensure that obligations under the Values and Ethics Code, and departmental codes of conduct, are clear and are upheld with consequences for violations regardless of level or position.”
It said that there is a “perceived lack of accountability or a ‘double standard’ between senior leadership and employees when it comes to compliance and enforcement of the Code.”