Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada
Letter on Implementation of the Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion

Summer 2021 update

Dear Ms. Charette:

Thank you for the opportunity to share the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB)’s progress on the Clerk’s Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion in the Federal Public Service, released earlier this year.

Around the globe, discrimination and racism continue to trigger intolerance and violence. At the IRB, we are confronted with the consequences of this every day, as we provide access to justice to those seeking protection and a better life in Canada. As a result, and with a mandate rooted in protecting and advancing human rights, it is all the more fitting that our organization strives to reflect the kind of welcoming, diverse and inclusive country that immigrants and refugees are hoping to find here.

The past year’s events, including the many incidents of racial injustice and rising rate of hate crimes across various communities, have helped us see more clearly the painful inequities and discrimination that continue to exist in society. They have created a sense of urgency to identify and reflect on systemic issues within our own organization – and what we can do to address them as we define with purpose the organizational culture we wish to build.

Our response

In the spring of 2020, I re-affirmed in a message to all staff the IRB’s commitment to fostering a more diverse and inclusive organizational culture in support of a healthy and effective workplace, and provided direction on how we would identify our way forward, together. We began the hard work of holding conversations and taking important steps to address issues of anti-racism, discrimination, employment equity as well as diversity and inclusion at the Board. We recognized the importance of involving diverse employee voices, to learn from their lived experiences and to craft a better way forward.

In early fall, 2020, we established the Chairperson’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, a forum for employees of diverse backgrounds to provide candid and honest advice to me on the culture of the organization, helping to identify key areas requiring attention in order to strengthen diversity and inclusion.

The advisory committee has met regularly since it was stood up last year and will continue to do so. It has guided our efforts to develop the IRB’s first and recently released Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan. The plan is the result of months of collaborative work and consultation with the advisory committee, employees, managers, champions and networks across the organization. Our strategic plan is based on three pillars: (i) promoting a diverse and inclusive culture; (ii) building a diverse and inclusive workforce; and (iii) embedding diversity and inclusion in our policies and programs. For each pillar, concrete actions and specific performance measures have now been identified. 

As an example, last year IRB leaders engaged in mandatory training on unconscious bias and anti-racism to deepen their understanding of the Board’s commitments to diversity and inclusion – with wider rollouts planned for other parts of the organization throughout this fiscal year. Making the training mandatory is a demonstration of our resolve to achieve real, meaningful and lasting change for everyone at the IRB through personal learning and fostering a positive environment where conversations on these issues are encouraged and acted upon. As another example, in 2020 the IRB appointed its first Ombudsperson to promote a healthy, diverse and inclusive workplace, and to provide a safe space for all employees to discuss concerns and identify potential solutions with full confidentiality.

Among other current initiatives, we are actively reviewing our staffing processes to identify and remove barriers to improve diversity: we want applicants from all under-represented groups to feel welcome and eager to join the IRB and be able to contribute fully. Working with the Personnel Psychology Centre at the Public Service Commission we are examining statistical reviews of past staffing actions and conducting in-depth analyses of our staffing tools to remove barriers and make improvements. 

Annex A maps out the IRB’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan achievements and commitments as against each of the actions in the Clerk’s Call to Action. 

Throughout the year, we have built momentum across all parts of the organization, with task forces and committees established by employees themselves and making important contributions.

Taken together, these efforts and commitments aim to increase awareness and build a culture of diversity and inclusion at the Board, providing a strong foundation to remove systemic barriers in order to build a truly representative and inclusive workforce at all levels of the organization.

More broadly, as Canada’s largest administrative tribunal, we are charged with the responsibility of resolving immigration and refugee cases fairly, efficiently and in accordance with the law. As we work to build a more diverse and inclusive organization, we are also making efforts to ensure equitable outcomes for those appearing before us, conscious of potential biases and the need to understand cultural differences and lived experiences different than our own. We must make decisions with integrity, respect and sensitivity, ensuring that we do not rely on outdated stereotypes or incorrect assumptions in the decision-making process. To that end, the Board has embarked on a comprehensive review of its adjudicative policy guidance to its decision-makers, with, for example, revisions to the Chairperson’s Guidelines on Gender and on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics, to be published by the end of this calendar year. The Board also intends to publish guidance adopting a trauma-informed approach to decision-making by the end of the calendar year and to provide training on avoiding unconscious bias in decision-making early in 2022.

Measuring progress

Moving from commitments to results will require ongoing measurement and adjustment. Our Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan establishes expected outcomes supported by a range of performance measures, including milestone tracking, employee surveys and pulse checks, for each of the three pillars and their commitments. We will use the data from these performance measures to assess the success of our efforts and to adjust any components that are not producing the results we expect. 

Other institutional mechanisms will also be relied on to hold us to account, including the Chairperson’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion and specific diversity and inclusion commitments built into performance management agreements for all executives.

Overall, the IRB exceeds workforce availability estimates for 2019-2020 in all employment equity groups, with the exception of persons with disabilities, where the workforce availability definition of disabilities has recently expanded. That gap may narrow when new surveys, using the new definition, are conducted. Across the entire public service, the IRB has the largest proportion of racialized employees and the third-highest proportion of employees who are Black.¹

Results regarding diversity representation are included in Annex B, highlighting the IRB’s current workforce compared to the workforce availability rate. 

However, we now recognize that national numbers do not tell the whole story; important gaps between the IRB’s workforce and workforce availability remain across certain classifications and levels, particularly for racialized employees and people with disabilities in the Program Administration (PM) group, including the more senior adjudicative decision-making roles. 

I am pleased to share that recent efforts to increase representation of racialized and disabled employees across our PM group, made up largely of the adjudicative decision-maker role, have delivered important results, not yet captured in our reported quarterly data. Through an external recruitment campaign, the Refugee Protection Division (the Board’s largest tribunal), has so far in 2021-2022 hired nearly 60 new decision-makers, over half of whom are racialized or people with disabilities. A similar recruitment campaign for Adjudicative Claims Officers, a career progression position to a decision-maker role, yielded eight new racialized employees out of a total of 13 hired.

Similar recruitment efforts were also recently undertaken at the Refugee Appeal Division, where a Coordinating Member (a decision-maker manager role) process was run based on diversity and inclusion best practices. These included using multiple channels to encourage racialized persons to apply, seeking input from racialized communities on the job poster and on interview questions, and ensuring that a racialized person sat on the interview and assessment board. We solicited anonymous feedback from everyone who participated in the process (applicants and those on the panel), asking what could have been done better and what recommendations they have for the next process so that we can continue to learn and apply best practices in our ongoing recruitment efforts. The process resulted in six Coordinating Members being appointed, half of whom are Indigenous or racialized. 

Priorities ahead

Our Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan has set out clear and consensus-based initiatives to foster a more diverse and inclusive organization. It has also encouraged employee-led groups across the IRB to initiate their own plans and initiatives aligned to our corporate goals. 

In the coming year, our workforce representation and our ability to foster an inclusive workplace will be improved by priority initiatives already underway and to be launched. For example, we will establish a talent recruitment and retention plan, parterning with equity-seeking communities to attract and retain new talent that reflects Canada’s diversity. We will publish a hiring manager’s toolkit that provides hiring managers with guidance and tools for the recruitment, retention and accommodation of under-represented communities. And, we will launch sponsorship and leadership development programs for employees from under-represented groups. These programs will support high-potential aspiring candidates so that they have access to developmental and promotional opportunities. 

We also intend to improve our available data so that we can assess the success of our existing plans and inform future work. A key element to improving our data will be the release of the modernized Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat / Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer (TBS/OCHRO) self-identification questionnaire. Improved self-identification data will give us more accurate and reliable diversity data and help us see more clearly our workforce representation.

In the context of our renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion, certain challenges have been identified which will also require our collective attention: developing expertise and capacity in addressing and measuring progress with respect to systemic organizational inequities; short-term operational pressures competing with broader diversity and inclusion commitments; and, with almost 50% of the IRB’s workforce currently in determinate positions based on temporary funding, retaining new recruits from diverse communities who receive indeterminate opportunities from across the broader public service. Efforts are underway as part of our go forward plan to address each of these challenges.

This past year has marked an important step in the IRB’s journey to strengthen its organizational culture and respond to the Clerk’s Call to Action. While proud of recent work, we recognize it will take time and an ongoing commitment from everyone at the IRB to achieve a truly diverse and inclusive workplace. We are committed to sustaining the momentum by advancing the broad range of initiatives outlined in our recently released Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan and learning and adjusting over time.

Thank you for the opportunity to share with you the Board’s work to date and our plans in response to the Call to Action. Together with my entire organization, we are looking forward to continuing to build the organizational culture we aspire to have based on our values of civility, respect, diversity and inclusion.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Wex

Annex A – Achievements and commitments as against each of the actions in the Call to Action

Annex B – Workforce representation

Representation by occupational group – Q4 2020-2021

*Positive numbers indicate that we exceed the 2018-19 WFA // *Negative numbers indicate that we fall below 2018-19 WFA
** does not include recent hiring of roughly 30 PM-06 decision-makers who are racialized or people with disabilities