Canada Revenue Agency
Letter on Implementation of the Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion

Summer 2021 update

Dear Janice Charette:

I am pleased to provide you with the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) response to your Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion in the Federal Public Service.

The CRA is committed to fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace and building a more diverse workforce. Achieving progress in these areas requires intentional and continued effort from our senior leaders and employees at all levels across the organization, an engagement reflected in CRA’s priorities through its new Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan (EEDIAP) 2021 to 2022 through 2024 to 2025.

Overview of CRA’s actions

Over the past year, the CRA channeled its efforts towards: a) amplifying the voices of racialized employees and other equity-deserving communities; b) providing better career developmental opportunities to Indigenous and racialized employees; c) recruiting Indigenous and racialized employees; d) building greater awareness of racism and all forms of discrimination, and the importance of diversity and inclusion through employee and leadership training; e) fostering deeper partnerships with our Indigenous employee community; and f) enabling and advancing the work of grassroots networks. These initiatives, along with others, helped us make progress in addressing anti-racism and strengthening equity and inclusion.

Amplifying the voices of racialized employees and other equity-deserving communities

This past year, we sought to hear from an array of different voices to develop our EEDIAP by holding additional and targeted consultations with a broader range of our workforce. To ensure no perspectives were missed, we convened meetings between our National Employment Equity and Diversity Committee, the Corporate Management Committee and Indigenous, Black and other racialized employees as well as Persons with Disabilities, to discuss their lived experiences with racism, discrimination and other forms of exclusion at work. Our employees’ honest and constructive insights informed our senior leaders’ commitment to identify concrete measures to facilitate the upward mobility of racialized employees in view of building a more inclusive management cadre. These discussions also helped us to better understand the specific challenges and barriers these employees experience, and to identify measures to address these issues through our EEDIAP.

These consultations resulted in the publication of a What We Heard Report entitled Taking Action Together: Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism at the CRA and the development of a Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Framework establishing roles, responsibilities and management accountability for combatting racism.

To gather feedback from all employees in the development of our EEDIAP, we created an online engagement tool that afforded all employees the opportunity to suggest changes to the draft EEDIAP to ensure that it reflected their perspectives.

In addition, the voices of employees in equity-deserving groups were amplified throughout the year through dozens of interactive national webinars on a variety of topics (such as Black History Month, Anti-Black Racism, Intersectionality, Asian History Month, etc.).

As we know from the findings of the Public Service Employee Survey, employees with disabilities are more likely to experience discrimination at work than other employee groups in the federal public service. To support the full inclusion of Persons with Disabilities, we conducted consultations with members of this community and their managers to identify what barriers they face that hinder their full participation in the workplace. This effort culminated in the publication of a What We Heard Report on Accessibility to ensure that concrete measures were integrated in our EEDIAP. Moreover, an Accessibility Working Group was created to provide timely and pertinent insights on accessibility issues to be captured in the development of the Agency’s Accessibility Action Plan.

The CRA also participated in the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s Horizontal Audit of the Employment of Racialized People in Management and Executive Positions in the Canada federal public service. A cross-section of managers provided insights on what we can do differently to support the professional development of racialized employees in management and their appointment to executive roles.

Strengthening the developmental and career support for Indigenous and racialized employees

Having heard from racialized employees that better access to mentoring could help prepare them for leadership roles, our Human Resources Branch partnered this year with our Visible Minority Network to promote our national mentoring program, MentorMe, to racialized employees in order to enhance their awareness of the program and encourage increased participation of racialized employees. Through this program racialized employees have opportunities to have one-on-one sessions with mentors and access to supporting job aids, tools and resources.

We also launched an Indigenous Mentoring Initiative in our Headquarters’ region which created 13 pairings between Indigenous mentees and non-Indigenous mentors, permitting both parties to exchange knowledge and professional advice while also building the mentors’ cultural understanding of Indigenous issues.

Building a diverse leadership pool is important for the CRA. As such, in April 2021, we launched a Leadership Learning Initiative to increase leadership capacity through enhanced learning opportunities targeting high-potential employees in management feeder group positions. Fifty percent of the seats allocated for this program are reserved for three of the four employment equity (EE) groups: Indigenous Peoples, Visible Minorities and Persons with Disabilities.

Supporting the recruitment of Indigenous and racialized employees

Building a diverse workforce is key to the current and future success of the CRA. To broaden representation of Indigenous, Black and other racialized employees among our leadership cadre, the CRA launched a targeted recruitment process for racialized employees. This process allowed us to pre-qualify 30 new employees for consideration for executive level positions and has already resulted in some recent appointments of racialized employees to executive level positions.

In addition, we developed a targeted student recruitment approach for employment equity groups which includes connecting with various student associations, hosting targeted events at universities and hiring students through our Indigenous Student Employment Program and the Federal Student Work Experience Program for students with disabilities. One such event included holding a virtual career information session at both Western University and Lakehead University for students of Indigenous background as well as students with disabilities.

Another action we implemented earlier this year to support efforts to attract more racialized candidates at the CRA is the mandatory inclusion of a minimum of two members from employment equity groups to all staffing boards for management and executive level positions.

We also revamped our Character Leadership tool for executives and managers to incorporate a focus on biases to ensure a more equitable application of the tool when managers and senior leaders are assessing leadership potential in the context of staffing and talent management programs.

Building greater awareness of racism and all forms of discrimination, and the importance of diversity and inclusion through employee and leadership training

At the CRA, we acknowledge that fighting racism and fostering diversity and inclusion is a commitment we must live up to on a daily basis. As a dynamic organization that brings together people from many different regions, backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, gender expressions and abilities, we committed to educate ourselves on bias, racism and other forms of discrimination to enhance understanding of how these behaviours manifest themselves at work.

In support of this commitment, we developed and deployed an unconscious bias workshop for employees (mandatory for staffing board members for management and executive level positions), introduced an Ally Guideto help employees become stronger advocates for anti-racism and inclusion and published a Diversity and Inclusion Lens Handbookto help employees at all levels understand how they can integrate diversity and inclusion in their day-to-day work.

Fostering deeper partnerships with our Indigenous employee community

Advancing reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples continues to be a priority for the CRA. In line with this objective, we collaborated with our Indigenous Employee Network to develop a manager resource to help engage the services of Indigenous Elders in a culturally-sensitive way as well as to facilitate Tobacco Offerings at CRA events in a respectful manner.

We have also created and published guidelines to encourage CRA employees and managers to understand why, when and how to acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ lands during meetings and events.

As well, we published a poster on the CRA intranet detailing the Seven Grandfather Teachings to help inspire employees to cultivate positive and respectful relationships with Indigenous communities and assist them on their personal journeys to reconciliation. Inherent linkages between the Seven Grandfather Teachings and the CRA’s Character Leadership tool were showcased during our Celebration of the National Indigenous Peoples’ Dayto exemplify the deep relevance of these teachings in shaping our approach to leadership.

Enabling and advancing the work of grassroots networks

At the CRA, we pride ourselves on ongoing and honest communication with our employees concerning anti-racism, equity and inclusion. Supporting our grassroots networks in their work is an important mechanism through which we do this.

Our employee networks for the employment equity groups have been extremely active this year hosting a number of events, supported by senior management, that highlighted current issues impacting their respective communities. These forums provided an opportunity for employees to share lived experiences and make recommendations for change moving forward.

During 2020 and 2021, we created focus groups based on these five employee networks: Indigenous Employees Network, Women’s Collaborative Network, Persons with Disabilities Network, Visible Minority Network, and the LGBTQ2+ Network. We also consulted with the Executive Group Network, the Management Group Network, the Young Professionals Network  and the National Employment Equity and Diversity Committee. The networks’ valuable input was critical in shaping our EEDIAP.

Understanding, through consultations with networks, how racialized employees and others equity-deserving groups experience life at the CRA is vitally important to ensure that we put in place the right measures to address racism and all forms of discrimination and exclusion.

Measuring our progress

While we are eager to see a more inclusive, equitable and diverse CRA, we know that our efforts will take time to deliver the results that CRA employees and Canadians want to see. We also know that we need to do more.

In 2020, we introduced our Employment Equity Gap Reference Tool to give hiring managers more timely information about employment equity gaps in their area so they can make more strategic hiring decisions to increase the diversity of their workforce.

Currently, we are also developing an employment equity (EE) dashboard with key EE‑related performance indicators for Executive teams in all CRA regions and branches to better align their workforce plans with employment equity objectives to improve EE representation.

Challenges and barriers

Conversations around racism and all types of discrimination and inclusion are difficult to hold and they can be even more delicate in a virtual work environment, where people’s reactions can be more challenging to gauge. Though this challenge is not unique to the CRA, it highlights the need for us to continue to show great sensitivity, respect and inclusion in terms of ensuring that all voices are heard in a way that is constructive and that can help support cultural change.

Another area where the CRA is looking to make further progress is around collecting disaggregated data on racialized employees to ensure that their unique perspectives are captured in the programs, services and initiatives developed to advance anti-racism, equity and inclusion goals. Having enhanced collection tools that allow us to better understand representation at the subgroup level will be helpful in furthering our efforts to strengthen representation. We continue to work with partners from across the federal public service to find ways to gather this information to strengthen the impact of our EEDIAP.

Sustaining the momentum

The CRA is undeterred in its objective to make ourselves more inclusive, equitable, diverse and free of racism and all types of discrimination. We know that attaining this goal requires us to continually review every facet of our systems, practices and culture to identify barriers to inclusion for Indigenous, Black and other racialized employees as well as other equity-deserving groups. Once these barriers are identified, we must methodically analyze them to ensure that they can be dismantled.

With that in mind, we have launched an exhaustive review of our staffing processes that will take place over the next two years, from job poster to appointment, with the goal of identifying systemic issues that inhibit diversity and inclusion. This spring, we launched the Strategy to Hardwire Diversity and Inclusion into Executive Staffing and Recruitment Practices and we are actively working on deploying a National Employment Equity Non‑EX Staffing Strategy to close representation gaps for employment equity groups across the Agency. Also, we will soon be launching a thorough employment systems review, through a third party, to guide us in combatting racism and all types of discrimination and identifying and removing systemic barriers in our formal and informal human resources policies, practices, systems and behaviours.

The CRA is also developing a diversity and inclusion learning framework for all employees through which they will participate in experiential learning activities to continue to increase our cultural intelligence on anti-racism, equity and inclusion.

Lastly, in order to uphold leadership accountability for tangible progress on anti‑racism, equity, diversity and inclusion, we have identified specific performance measures linked to diversity and inclusion which will be embedded in their performance agreements.

In closing, I can advise that CRA’s leadership have and continue to be fully engaged in the development and implementation of initiatives, programs and services that support anti-racism, equity and inclusion. Our leaders and employees’ commitment to deepen our understanding of equity, diversity and inclusion issues is evident through their active and ongoing participation in our learning activities on these topics. These efforts along with the foundational elements described above will enable us to proactively address issues of anti-racism, equity and inclusion to  foster long-term and sustainable change at the Agency. Creating a diverse, inclusive workplace where people can thrive and be their full selves at work will strengthen the quality of service the CRA can deliver to Canadians and its employees.

Should your officials require additional information, they can contact Dan Couture, Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch and Chief Human Resources Officer, at Dan.Couture@cra-arc.gc.ca.

Sincerely,

Bob Hamilton
Commissioner of Revenue and Chief Executive Officer
Canada Revenue Agency

Data Annex – CRA Employment Equity Statistics

The information in this section provides an overview of employment equity statistics for Indigenous and Visible Minority employees at the CRA. Although data is available for other employment equity groups, given the focus of the Clerk’s Call to Action only these two particular groups are highlighted.

Internal representation

Graph 1

Graph 1 below illustrates the CRA’s internal representation (IR) of designated employment equity groups at the non-executive level and compares it to the broader Labour Market Availability (LMA) for the same employment groups.

Data source for Graph 1:

• Corporate Administrative Systems as of March 31, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Notes for Graph 1:

• The CRA’s internal representation statistics exclude the executive group (i.e. EX, EC and DM).
• The LMA rate for Indigenous Peoples, Visible Minorities is based on the 2016 Census.
• The CRA’s internal representation statistics reflect the proportion of employees who self-identified as members of designated groups.

Graph 1:

	Internal representation 2019 (%)	Internal representation 2020 (%)	Internal representation 2021 (%)	Labour Market Availability (%)
Indigenous Peoples	3.2	3.2	3.2	3.6
Visible Minorities	25.6	27.1	30.9	22.5

Graph 2

Graph 2 below illustrates the CRA’s internal representation (IR) of designated employment equity groups at the executive level and compares it to the broader Labour Market Availability (LMA) for the same employment group.

Data source for Graph 2:

• Corporate Administrative Systems as of March 31, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Graph 2:

• The CRA’s internal representation statistics reflect the proportion of executives who self-identified as members of designated groups.
• The LMA rate for Indigenous Peoples and Visible Minorities is based on the 2016 Census.

	Internal representation 2019 (%)	Internal representation 2020 (%)	Internal representation 2021 (%)	Labour Market Availability (%)
Indigenous Peoples	2.1	2.1	2.1	2.8
Visible Minorities	11.5	13.8	14.2	16.4

Employee movement rates

The information that follows provides an overview of hiring, separation (e.g. retirements, resignations, etc.) and promotion rates by designated employment equity group. For the purposes of this analysis, hiring rates are compared solely to the LMA, by contrast, promotion and separation rates are compared to the internal representation at the CRA.

Graph 3

Data source for Graph 3:

• Corporate Administrative Systems from March 31, 2019, 2020 and 2021. 

Notes for Graph 3:

• The CRA’s internal representation statistics for employee movement include permanent employees and term employees with contracts of three or more months in duration.
• The statistics on employee movement rates include members of the executive group (i.e. EX, EC and DM).
• Statistics on hiring rates only include first-time or new external hires to the CRA, as well as “students bridged” into the Agency. Comparison of hiring rates with separation rates is not possible due to the fact that different employee sample groups are used to compute these numbers.

Graph 3:

	Indigenous Peoples
	2019 (%)	2020 (%)	2021 (%)
Hiring	1.3	1.0	1.3
Promotion	3.3	3.5	3.9
Separation	3.0	3.2	3.7
Labour Market Availability	3.6	3.6	3.6
Internal representation	3.2	3.2	3.2

Graph 4

Data source for Graph 4:

• Corporate Administrative Systems from March 31, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Notes for Graph 4:

• The CRA’s internal representation statistics for employee movement include permanent employees and term employees with contracts of three or more months in duration.
• The statistics on employee movement rates include members of the executive group (i.e. EX, EC and DM).
• Statistics on hiring rates only include first-time/new external hires to the CRA as well as “students bridged” into the Agency. Comparison of hiring rates with separation rates is not possible due to the fact that different employee sample groups are used to compute these numbers.

Graph 4:

	Visible Minorities
	2019 (%)	2020 (%)	2021 (%)
Hiring	15.9	22.6	32.5
Promotion	29.8	31.8	27.8
Separation	17.5	16.5	18.8
Labour Market Availability	22.5	22.5	22.5
Internal representation	25.6	27.1	30.9

Representation in agency leadership development program

The graph below provides information on representation of employment equity designated groups in the Agency Leadership Development Program (ALDP) in comparison to their internal representation (IR) at the CRA.

Graph 5

Data source for Graph 5:

• CRA Leadership and Learning Directorate as of March 31, 2019, 2020 and 2021

Graph 5:

	2019		2020		2021
Employment equity designated group	Representation of designated group members (%)	Internal representation (%)	Representation of designated group members (%)	Internal representation (%)	Representation of designated group members (%)	Internal representation (%)
Indigenous Peoples	8	3.2	8.1	3.2	8.5	3.2
Visible Minorities	24.4	25.6	25.3	27.1	26.6	30.9