Transcript
Inside Out - Policy Changemaking from the Inside
[00:00:00 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:00:04 The screen fades to Richard D. Sharpe at a podium.]
Richard D. Sharpe: The call to action is seminal, and it was a gift to us, and it should be a gift, considered to be a gift, to all public servants. What I wanted to do was talk about three things, within that, with some story, within that, with some... a little bit of panache and some flair, my own special style. I want to talk about the Federal Black Employee Caucus journey. I wanted to talk about, a bit, my journey with the Department of Justice Canada, and I want to talk about my new journey with the Ontario Public Service, all that within a couple of minutes so that we can have a good conversation.
I think that for those of you who don't know the Federal Black Employee Caucus, it was really a couple of people getting together ten years after the collapse of another group, employee group, the National Council of Visible Minorities. I was there for that, both the beginning of the council's run at addressing equity workplace issues for racialized people we call visible minorities, and ten years later, people approached me in particular and said, Richard, why don't we form a group for Black people? Black people's issues were nowhere to be seen within the diversity inclusion narratives within employment equity. We were kind of... even though employment equity was one of those systems and policy instruments, if you want to call it, that were put in place to support the upliftment of Blacks and other underrepresented groups, we found that Black people were suffering at the lowest levels of the federal public service and not getting the due, just, supports, and equity that they deserved.
So, a couple of us, and I'll name a couple of names here, kind of sat around after a conference over in Toronto where it was the National Black Canadians Summit, the first one that was held in Toronto in 2017. And when we came back, my good friend Robin Browne said we should create something here, and the creating something here for the two of us actually became three organizations, one of them being FBEC which was germane to the federal public service context and the work that we do. So, having worked in the federal government for more than 20 years at the time, in union and employment equity and diversity, done a lot of song and dance with this stuff, I realized that we needed to lead differently in this space, that we could not go to senior leadership or anybody else for that matter with the same tools and the same approaches that we've always used. We knew for a fact that if we didn't come out in a way that was completely different, completely redesigned, that we would go the same route as previous organizations like the National Council of Federal Public Service, the National Council of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service, NCVM, that crashed and burned in 2019.
So, we created this group, understanding the policy implications of creating a group within the federal public service that was not a part of the public service but wasn't... but was very much part of the public service, and by that, I mean, this was a group of employees that got together without any corporate or institutional support. We used our own money to buy... make business cards. I was a graphic designer in my past. I designed posters. We'd do reports. We'd engage people. It was five people, became 20 people, became 50 people. I can remember Public Services and Procurement Canada organizing a meeting that brought Black employees from other ministries and we kind of overtook a boardroom that was supposed to be for about 25 people, and there were over 60 people, and so people were ringed around the place. And when people left that boardroom, there were people, our White colleagues... because this was in Gatineau. Our White colleagues, the Francophone colleagues were all standing up in their cubicles and watching this parade of Black people leave this boardroom, and there was such a sense of power that folks did not have, a sense of being able to contribute in a way that they couldn't do, having those little water cooler conversations.
Now, we were building something that was meaningful. We did it from the ground up because, as a community organizer before I came into government in 1996, I knew that's how you got things done, you worked things from the ground up. So, we were able to start this work and start it not just for getting Black folks together, but we knew we needed some policy drivers, some underpinnings to get this to work, to get some traction with senior management, and we knew none existed. Black people don't exist in the federal public service. We're lumped in with this thing called visible minorities. The United Nations says visible minorities is a racist term that Canada uses to identify the majority of people on the planet. So, we knew that we couldn't use existing legislation to the extent that it existed and how people were using it in terms of employment equity, multiculturalism, and so on. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I'll get to that in a minute, was something that we could use.
So, lo and behold, around the same time, and we timed it perfectly because I think that a lot of this stuff is around timing, on January 29th, I do believe, of 2018, Prime Minister's Office called a number of us Black leaders out to Parliament Hill for an announcement. I had no idea what the announcement was about, and the announcement was that Canada was endorsing something called the UN International Decade of People of African Descent, what I call the UN-DPAD. And I said, ‘Wow, that's it. This is our policy driver. We can use this. The Prime Minister is talking about it, federal public service should too.' And from that, we started this, initially a gentle push. We first asked people if they knew what the UN-DPAD was. Of course, everybody said no, but the Prime Minister just announced it. ‘Oh', I said, ‘here's the press release, these are the priorities that they're setting forth. And by the way, FBEC's priorities are in line with what the government is saying around the decade.' ‘Oh, that's interesting.'
So, then, we started to build that out as that narrative around using the UN-DPAD to engage public servants, to engage leaders within the public service, to engage community, because community didn't know what it was all about either. We were able to redefine the narrative around what a Black person was in the public service using that as the initial instrument. We had some great opportunities with partners and collaborators. I have to give another shout out to Deputy Minister Bill Mathews who was, at the time, the DM over at PSPC. When I found a way to get in to see him, because he didn't know who I was from Boo, I said, ‘We'd like to do this and we'd like to link it to the UN-DPAD.' And he said, ‘What is that?' And I said, ‘You know what? One of our priorities is that we are looking for disaggregated employment equity data so we can understand actually what's happening to Black people in the system, because anecdotally, I know a lot of Black folk. They're telling me it's tough, but there's no data on it.' And he said, ‘Well, that doesn't make very much sense.' So, he's a financial guy. ‘You need numbers. You need data. I can help you with that.' He said, ‘How much money do you need?' I said, ‘I don't want your money. I don't want no money. I don't want money from any of you. Give me a couple of employees and we'll do it ourselves.' So, he did.
He gave us four people, including myself, to go off and run amok, cause some trouble, press up against some people, very gently of course, and ask people to continually give us some data. We want to talk about Black mental health. What's happening with your Black employees? Let us tell you, Mr. Deputy Minister, we did a roadshow and we talked to a number of institutions, deputy heads, must have gone through about 40 of them here in the National Capital Region and elsewhere. We weren't looking for that institutional support. What was golden to us was tacit support. We want someone to just walk into a room and give us some space so that we can do our thing. If you put us in a room so we can do our thing, I think we can convince you to do the right thing. So again, a couple of shout outs to Mr. Michael Wernick, who was previous Clerk to Ian Shugart. After we had done our roadshows and we had brought in a number of people to have conversations with us, parliamentarians, I think we met in the basement of the Ottawa Public Library and that theatre there. And so, a number of people see now this thing is growing to a point where now it's being noticed, and asking favours of people to get us to see the Clerk, and we did.
And I remember that conversation with Mr. Wernick, who also didn't know what the issue was, didn't know that there were issues. It's not that he didn't know there were Black people, but that Black people had issues, right? And so, I remember saying to him, and we remember saying to him, ‘And you know, by the way,' after going through the narrative of why this was important, ‘there's never been a Black Deputy Minister in the federal public service in the 150-year history. You do realize that, right?' And he turned to his counterpart, Assistant Secretary, ‘Is that true?' And the counterpart said, ‘I think so. I've never seen.' And they had this little mini thing, ‘I don't think I've ever seen.' I said, ‘Well, of course, you've never seen a Black person in these spaces. This is your space. It's not our space.' So, he said, ‘That's really interesting.' He said, ‘What do you need? What resources?' I said, ‘I don't need any money from you. We don't want any resources. Just tell them that we're coming. Tell them that we're coming with an ask, and that ask has to do with opening up conversations around equity for Blacks.' Black equity, I didn't know there was a term called Black equity. I'm a Director of a Black Equity Branch now in the Ontario Public Service. I didn't know Black equity was a thing in and of itself. I was always talking about equity.
But we were realizing that at the time without knowing it, and this was 2018, that we were effectively changing the narrative, changing policy around how we deal with Black folk. By the time 2020 came around, COVID had started and that existential moment that everyone was facing about their own mortality gave pause to everyone on the planet, and that pause allowed us to reflect back on ourselves. This is what I think happens. This is why I think... I'm talking about the Floyd effect moment, that moment that we all realize, that moment where we saw in 8 minutes and 46 seconds that a white supremist agent of the state can extinguish the life of a Black person. All Black people experienced this, and at a time where people are experiencing their own mortality was a moment in history that I don't think we'll see again for a very, very long time. Atrocities committed by law enforcement against Black people happened daily for thousands of years in North America but that one moment, that one moment, was such a pinnacle moment that it galvanized the entire planet, in a way, to support Black life that I have never seen before.
And so, we were there at the right time because we had been preparing for two years to help the public service deal with this thing called Black people, and when Floyd happened and the calls started coming in from rank-and-file employees, unions, community, and Deputy Ministers to our little, little office of four or five people, we realized then that the public service didn't have any language around the Black experience. Diversity and inclusion... as I do in some talks, I talk about being Black in the Matrix, diversity and inclusion is an illusion when it comes to the real necessity to ensure that human beings, Black people, are able to express their humanity within these workplaces, within the society. It is something that we all sort of come to terms with when you're born with this melanated pigmentation, right? We're not as human as the rest, but for a moment in time, we were. For a moment in time, we enjoyed personhood and the right to life. And so, when the public service realized it did not have that language, I call it the love language for Black folk, then we were sort of brought in, not just as FBEC but Black executives, to lead things like secretariats and other institutional bodies to address equity, anti-racism and so on.
So, going back to Ian for just a minute, because it was around that time that we were having biannual bilats with him, we compressed a lot into those meetings. And at the time, I didn't know my man was sick, but he was very interested in what we had to say, and again, very almost puzzled by our existence, I think, but open to our commitment to support the organization. I said to him, ‘You know what? You don't get this stuff right, you guys are going to be facing litigation some day and it's going to be a whole bunch of angry Black people coming to get their money.' And he said, ‘Well, you know, as a Christian man,' I'm not forgetting this, ‘As a Christian man, you know, I think that, you know, I believe in that.' I said, ‘I don't believe in this Christianity stuff. Christians, they enslaved me. We got a bad history with your religion. Come with me to do something different. What do you really mean by what you say?' And he says, ‘You know what? You're...' Okay, a pause. ‘We need to do what's right by you as a human being, by you folks, by you as a community, as human beings.'
I'll never forget that because he didn't react defensively like so many other people when I challenged the core of what he was. He's a very religious man. He was a preacher man, and there are many people in my family who were preacher men. So, I know when I challenged someone's faith, I know of how serious that can be, but he didn't go back on that. And when I told him that I had... that my children have no intention of ever working for the public service, they're almost grown and moving out, no intention at all, he was puzzled again. I got home and I received this e-mail, and it's from Ian. He says, ‘What would it take for your children to want to be a part of the public service?' And I'm saying, what's this? The Clerk of the Privy Council is not so busy that he's sending me an e-mail like that.
(Laughter)
Like, what's he doing with his time? I'm like... but I'm taken aback by that for a second because it showed that somehow at some level, this senior leader who was running the public service cared enough about... not about me but the future of the public service, because I kept telling him we are the future of this public service, not necessarily Black folk but people of colour, Black folk, are the future of this country. We're the future of the planet. I've seen the numbers. I know what's coming. So, let's get prepared here, shall we, and start laying the ground so that we do this right, so we don't have that conflict. So, I did. I just want to end that little story by saying, we sat around the dinner table with my three children, and I said to them, ‘So, the Clerk of the Privy Council wants to know what it would take for you guys to work for the federal public service.' And they just put their pencils... not pencils, forks down and said, ‘Who?'
(Laughter)
I said, the guy I've been talking to on the screen, that guy, the older guy, and I said, ‘Yeah, he runs the public service. He wants to know.' And two of my children responded, and he said... and my son was the oldest. His name is Mandela for obvious reasons. Mandela says, ‘I have no interest in working for a place where you, Dad, have to work so hard just to be seen as a human being. I'm not going to do that.' And my daughter and my other daughter say ‘Mmhmm'.
(Laughter)
‘No, no, no. When you don't have to do what you're doing, Dad, maybe we'll think about it. But right now, there are other things to do.' Africa's poppin', Africa's poppin'. So, I had to reluctantly, in some ways, go back and tell Ian that, and he said we have a lot to do. And I think that, again, the moment was so seminal, those conversations with him and other senior leaders like Caroline Xavier taking on that sort of historic role as the other deputies that came into that space. Really, again, the networks that started to form, the networks started proliferating everywhere, right? They didn't just happen because of Floyd. They happened because we created that space, the Black executive network. I think we created that space. They've charted their own course since. There was a really profound desire, I think, for us to redefine what leadership looks like because there seems to be a struggle with the basics of leadership when it came to human rights and equity. I see equity and human rights synonymous. They are part and parcel the same thing.
I'm going to move a little bit more quickly now because I wanted to talk a little bit about my time at the Department of Justice. So, after that very tumultuous time where I actually had no intention of coming back to government, I was on interchange, I was out working in Black communities, having the time of my life, working 20-hour days, touching engagements, files, nationally, internationally. Dr. Marcus Garvey's son, I was on a panel with him. For those of you who know Marcus Garvey, it was a time when I said, this is it, I'm ready to step out of my public service life. And then, Justice came knocking, ‘Would you be an executive here to help us with this anti-racism stuff?' And I said, ‘Well, I'm just about to bounce.' It's like, why would I come back and do this now? But then, folks and my mentors and coaches said, ‘You know what, Richard? Maybe it's worth coming because maybe you can affect some change here much the same way that you did on the outside?' After all, when I started in 1996 as a graphic designer, my plan was to come in and go to Justice and change how they deal with Black justice. Little did I know how foolish that was to think that I could come in as a graphic designer and do that, and not have the background and the experience. So, here I was, getting the opportunity to do that.
I have to say that the call to action, again, provided moral incentive for that to happen. There were DMs there that were ready for this, Deputy Minister, our François Daigle, Shalene Curtis-Micallef created space and they were supporting this around other deputy minister tables to get this stuff done, for us to push our frameworks to work, for us to push this notion of accountability around equity. It was a remarkable time to be sitting around tables with other deputy ministers trying to scheme how to do this work even though the institution itself is not ready for the kind of change that we're trying to instill upon it. The other deputy ministers of the other organizations, IRCC, DND, and Global Affairs Canada, they really did contribute quite a bit to this work in the early stages. I brought in folks and this is, I think, where we started to leave our mark before my swan song out of gov. I brought in someone by the name of Dr. Martin Nicholas, who some of you will know, this brainy brainiac chap who's retired but coming back to work with us. He would have worked for free. I said, ‘I got to pay you something. That's slavery. We got to give you something.'
He came up with things like supported our engagements with Department... with Statistics Canada on predictive modeling so that we could come up with baseline data for labour force availability, so that we can predict what the future would look like, what the future representation will look like, groundbreaking stuff. The stuff that central agencies should do, we were doing, and establishing benchmarks based on those future-oriented numbers. We were pushing the vanguard within one of the most conservative organizations in the public service, and that was so, so much fun. I can't tell you how much fun that was to do that in a place where I think... like, I got lawyers in my family. And so, sitting around the table and being able to convince a bunch of lawyers that this is the right thing to do, I felt like I had accomplished much. One of the great things about that secretariat and the work around the anti-racism, anti-discrimination secretary is the work continues. The senior leadership of that organization made it a permanent entity within the organization. That's really key when other institutions felt that it was a two-year initiative.
I want to talk briefly about the Ontario Public Service, where some would say I escaped to and others would say that I was welcomed there because they were ready for what I had to sell. You saw Deputy Minister Richardson here as a Mi'kmaq woman. Tomorrow, at this conference, you're going to have Deputy Minister Roda Muse, who's a Black Muslim woman who wears hijab, who is the Deputy Minister of Francophone Affairs for the province of Ontario. That's pretty cool. These are people that I work with. I have a Black Chief Talent Officer, equivalent to the Chief Human Resources Officer, that is actively trying to make sure that the senior cadre of the OPS is represented. We don't do what we should be doing here to keep talent... people, we're going to steal your talent and put them to good use, I assure you.
I think that what's really important at any level of this work, and I'm going to do my little wrap-up now, is that the organizations have to be ready. We have to have tacit support at the top for us to do this work. This work cannot be done through the labour or the talent of people like myself alone. It's just not possible. The focus on results, the focus on accountability, the focus on measurement, the focus on data, all that stuff, is always in play with this work. If you're not doing those things, then you're not serious. If you're not serious, you're going to run into trouble. The OPS, Deputy Richardson had mentioned that there are lawsuits and so on, they don't want a big class action like what you folks are dealing with, with Black folk. And so, as I tried to help and support heading that off here in the feds, I'm going to try to do that within the Ontario Public Service and any other space, quite frankly, that wants to get to the bottom of treating people as they should be treated.
I want to end on a couple of things really quick, because I'd like to have the conversation. We have to be able to deal and face our fear with the public service, and the biggest fear in the public service is fear of a Black planet or, as Jesse Wente said this morning, the fear of loss. What's going to happen when Richard becomes the Deputy Minister of the federal public service? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? Who's going to lose? Am I going to hire all people from the Black community to replace all? No, that's ridiculous, right? But what is that fear? And deal with that fear. The work with the willing, we spent a lot of time just working with senior leaders and others who wanted to get this stuff done, and when we got traction, it's true, other people followed. We focused on the people and trying to keep people well. When Floyd happened, we took the week off. The Black team couldn't function. As some of you have read in one of my pieces, I spent the week counting stucco in my ceiling and wondering, what the hell, what the hell? What am I going to tell my children? How am I going to face my children? So, we got to take care of the people, especially with this work, because this work is hard.
Addressing intergenerational trauma, I think at the OPS, it's one of the biggest things that I face within Black communities, but it's not only trauma with the communities that we're serving and supporting. We need policy instruments that also support trauma within the broader community, the institutional trauma, the trauma that all employees face at some level when they watch Black, Indigenous, and racialized people suffering within their workplaces and being done wrong by, not the trauma (inaudible) stuff that I understand people are contemplating here in the federal public service where we pour out our pain and suffering and that somehow makes us human, but actually deal with the root causes and find ways in which that we work towards restorative justice, restorative justice and reparatory justice, which has to be part of our work. It's part of all of our work.
I'm very mindful of the fact that... and we've always centered the Charter around this work. There's no Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Act. That's... therefore, it's just nice to do. We have employment equity, which has some rigor around it. We have human rights. Except for the Human Rights Commission, we have some rigor around it. We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 15, for example, that says we got to do right by people like myself, like racialized people in this space, Indigenous, people who are different. The clerks focus on values and ethics, I think this is a very interesting one. When I started with the federal public service decades ago, I was very perplexed with the people coming to my cubicle asking for help because they were being discriminated against yet had this values and ethics policy. It was the first thing that I received. How can we have values and ethics in place when we have people being done wrong by? So, maybe we should build that into the values and ethics regimes that we're talking about being so important, because obviously they don't seem to work very well or they're not in line.
I have a theory that white supremacy and racism are core values of this country, and that seeps into the public service and that's why it's so difficult to eradicate it, because it's part of us. It's part of this place and we have to do what we can to address it. Level of ambition needs to be higher than it is, or else we're going to slide back where we're seeing the pushback. The focus on safeguarding our humanity collectively has to be part and parcel with the love that we have for one another as human beings. Again, this love language, that's us. If you look with a little bit of love and dignity, it goes a long way for us to be able to achieve some of the equity and address the longstanding issues that we face within the public service.
And with that, I thank you very much for this time and look forward to our conversation.
(Applause)
[00:29:32 Richard D. Sharpe leaves the podium and sits down next to Serge Bijimine.]
Serge Bijimine: Did they send you on French language training at the OPS?
Richard D. Sharpe: No, they did not, and I got my French just before I left here. And then, I didn't use it for a whole year. So, je suis désolé, my French sucks.
(Laughter)
And I lost so much of it because I haven't been practicing, but I could... I might be able to understand.
Serge Bijimine: No, it's actually really good.
A couple things, and there's a lot of questions there and I just want to have a free-flowing discussion. So, first, thanks for this inspiring speech. Second, thanks for showing courage in the face of adversity. And the one question I have, and I'm sure a lot of people have that, so when you go up against the status quo and you start pushing to make things better, because that's what it's about ultimately, you tend to face a lot of resistance of people not wanting to change, because often, for a lot of people, change equals scary because it's unknown, and it doesn't always have to be. Often, change ends up being for the better. What do you say to someone, now looking, and there's 3,000 people on screen as well, who are currently standing in the face of making people uncomfortable, who want to challenge the status quo and continue their work and their career in the public service, so being able to achieve all three. So, what kind of advice you would have for them?
Richard D. Sharpe: Being able to achieve all three? Okay. So, if you're going to stand up and challenge authority, then you have to be able to manage the risk that there will be blowback. So, I don't care. There's something wrong with me that I don't have fear. I think fear is a good thing to have, it can keep you out of harm's way, but I think for the most part, it's good to have a little bit of sense of self-preservation. If you're going to challenge systems, you need to be very well-educated on what it is that you're challenging and come with the critique or come with the description, as one of the panelists had said, but also come with the fix. So, I come with my big heavy stick but I also come with some fruitcake, and the fruitcake is the fruitcake that my mom made and it's got wine in it.
(Laughter)
And so, you can present it in such a way that it's like they're kind of... I thought I was being bludgeoned but actually, here's a gift, right? So, I think it's good to try to do it in concert to challenge but also to give and to have a lot. I have a lot of empathy for the people that... I have an enormous amount of empathy for the people that I've challenged in the past because I see a lot of fear. Like I said, they're like, what the hell is this Richard Sharp guy with the hair, and he's articulate?
(Laughter)
No, but it's true. It's the scariest... the only thing more dangerous than an angry Black man is a Black man that is articulate and intelligent and is not afraid. Like, that's dangerous, and what's really dangerous, where you got to (inaudible), is a Black man loves his people. Because then, if you love your people, then you're formidable, right? If you have all those things. So, I think people see me coming and they go, ‘Woah!' But really, I do it with a little bit of... I always do it with love and grace and as much as possible, not to harm the people but to just make them understand that my life depends, literally my life depends, on policies and programs being put in place to support our wellness and equity within the society, the life of my children and their children's children. So, I've got absolutely nothing to lose by challenging, but other people do and you have to gauge your level of personal security. You got to pay rent. The police officer has got a gun. You have to gauge your level of comfort and personal security so that you can still continue on with whatever you're going to do. So, I know it's a challenge for many people.
Serge Bijimine: And just for the record, and I think a lot of people in the room don't know, but as you said, the “scary” did lead to four Black deputies now, about 17 Black ADMs now as we're speaking, and I think 30 or 40 Black DGs. So, the scary actually ended up contributing to the system and made everyone in the system better, and I think it's just something for folks to remember as well. I always go back and think of how scary it was in the sixties when the Francophone wanted to get a bigger piece and bigger place at the table, and it was very scary for people. And they put in place the Official Languages Act and next thing you know, a whole host of Francophone people came and made the country that much richer. And then, in the nineties, they did put in place the Employment Equity Act. Women came into the workplace and it made that country, our country, that much more richer, to the tune of, I think, 50 or 55% of senior executives are women in Canada now, and I don't see any of the fear people were expressing back then realizing. And so, a lot of the fear is irrational but I think the more of the folks we let in, the stronger it makes us as a country. And then, from an economic perspective, it's just, you're not leaving any talent behind. So, whenever you fear something, don't think about the here and now. Think about the future. What would this look like in five, ten years?
The other question I have for you is, a lot of what we've noticed with Black equity and social justice, a lot of it can be a fad where it captures the moment and then it kind of goes away. How do you make sure that this doesn't happen this time?
Richard D. Sharpe: So, that's a great question because I think that some people think we've arrived because we have a couple of Black deputy ministers and some ADMs, so we've arrived. But as we see in a lot of places, when you hire some of these people and you don't do any succession, some of these folks are being hired and put in place into senior roles, and then they're retiring in a minute. And then, you have that vacuum. Who's replacing them? More white folk or other racialized people. So, for it to be a fad, we need to be able to make sure it's measurable. So, everything that we do, even every engagement, every community engagement, what are the outcomes? How are we measuring it? Who's accountable to making sure that it gets done? When? Can we report back and engage people on it? And then, hit repeat.
And so, at Justice, we built this framework, this anti-racism, anti-discrimination results framework, that is complex enough and simple enough that you can have work going for the next couple of years, right? It's my plan to do something like that. I'm in the process of releasing that in the Ontario Public Service to inculcate Black equity into everything that we do. When I first came here in 2019, I talked about Black inclusion. How is Black inclusion being inculcated into our policy frameworks programs, how we do people management? Yeah, so in order to make sure it's not a fad, as you say, you start building it into this thing and you make sure that you have representation, not just any Black folk or Brown folk or Indigenous folk but people who have the knowledge, people who have been in the trenches, people who understand the lived experience and are willing to go to bat for saying and doing the right things around those senior management tables. So, if you have those things in place and the right people in place, you're going to head off to the races.
So, I've only seen that a couple of times. I actually enjoyed that at Justice, where I'm given the space to do my work and bring in and build up a team that could help us do that. I'm doing the same thing in the OPS. So, we'll see. I'm hoping that we're the best in class at all things addressing anti-Black racism and Black inclusion, I'll call it Black inclusion, across Canada. I will kind of sidestep the federal public service, sorry guys, sidestep you guys, and go off to do some work with the UN, because other nation states, not even so much the Western nations but other nations, are also interested. The ones that were colonized are interested in how to build up their public services so that they're better represented in a meaningful way. So, it's good work. I enjoy doing it.
Serge Bijimine: And I think it does need to happen just in order to just have better policy development capacity, same way as we will need to incorporate A.I. in policy development. We'll need to incorporate (inaudible). We'll need to incorporate Indigenous reconciliation. So, all of those things will need to form part of what and how we do policy going forward. I'll go to the one question on the screen and then I'll have one question for myself.
Richard D. Sharpe: Sure.
Serge Bijimine: The question on the screen, ‘What advice do you have for all the current DMs and non-Black senior leadership out there in the GOC when it comes to better supporting Black federal public service employees, I guess?
Richard D. Sharpe: That's a good question. I can name a couple of things but I'll try to be really brief. There are some troubling things that are happening now, and I would challenge our deputy minister cadre to be aware of what's happening on the people management front, especially when it comes to Black leaders and particularly Black women who are facing a disproportionate number... facing these investigations for, ironically, (inaudible) and ethics issues. So, suddenly these things are popping up. I call it the Black Purge. After a lot of the work that we've done, there's this pushback and the system sometimes tries to reset itself. I'm very well aware of what happened in past years with program reviews and so on and so forth, where Black folk and other racialized people were the last hired and first fired.
So, I think it's unacceptable, after the gains that we've made, that people might be using policies and systems and processes to roll back some of those gains. So, I would say just really be mindful and attentive to the kinds of results that you're trying to achieve with respects to representation, well-being in the workplace, and break down your data. Continue to ask for disaggregated employment equity data so you know exactly who is being impacted by policies, complaints, departures, hires, right? If we do that on a regular basis and you're tracking that within your organization, then you can build in accountabilities. If you don't do that and you just kind of go along like you've always been going along, then we're going to lose people. We're going to lose good people that we spend a lot of time and effort getting into some of these positions of power and influence to help influence policy development and all that good stuff.
So, that's just one of many things, but DMs should not... and then making themselves aware is to have those conversations directly with employees and Black executives within your institutions. You will be filtered. You will have information sanitized. The Deputy Minister, ‘Everything is wonderful. The Black people are happy.' No, they're not happy, and they actually may be suffering, and if you don't have a direct pipeline to them, if you're not creating opportunities to engage them, then you'll be missing out on that talent that you were talking about not being fully utilized.
Serge Bijimine: Perfect.
And I have one last question, and I'll put myself on the spot. So, as a senior leader, senior Black leader, I always want to know what is it I could do to help support more people in a better way? How can I be held accountable?
Richard D. Sharpe: So, you can't put yourself on the spot because I know what you're doing behind the scenes.
Serge Bijimine: Don't worry about that.
(Laughter)
Richard D. Sharpe: So, for Black leaders, and I try to do this myself, when we... I can't believe I'm saying this because I never believed that I'd be an executive in the federal public service. I used to say that at Justice, and my ADM would say, ‘Don't say that. People will think that you don't believe you're qualified.' But that's not it at all. I just didn't think... why are they going to put me in this place? I'm going to break the place up, right? So, in my role now, my role is to help bring others, create space to bring others to reach back and pull others up. It's to help lay the ground with my leadership cadre. I have a very diverse leadership cadre at the Ontario Public Service, but in the leadership cadres that Black leaders may have here where it's not so diverse, it's to lay the ground for your colleagues to hire, promote, develop, coach, sponsor. Those things is what we should do as Black leaders for our communities and we encourage other leaders to do within their organizations to support Black aspirations within the workplace.
Serge Bijimine: Perfect.
And with that being said, Richard, thank you, on behalf of everyone here and the 3,000 people on the screen. And for the folks here and the folks on the screen, if you're wondering what true inclusion looks like, Richard just gave a masterclass on how to do it.
Again, thank you very much, Richard.
[00:44:21 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:44:25 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
