[amscanne]

Putting aside anything relating to the underlying goals, the questions of employment law are really interesting.

In Canada (unless it’s changed since I was there), you are allowed to state that a position has a preference for four specific groups: women, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and visible minorities. These are defined by the Employment Equity Act, and certain companies (those that are federally regulated) are required to implement proactive practices to increase the representation of those groups.

So you’d think this would create clarity, right? Nope! The Canadian Human Rights Act is still in force and makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, race and other protected categories. So those companies must somehow balance proactive employment practices without any kind of discrimination. I’m pretty sure even though you could state that preference, a decision not to hire someone exclusively on the basis of one of the classes would still be illegal. (And to be clear, I also believe that stating such a preference would also be illegal unless it was specifically to further representation of those groups. This comes up in the context of e.g. a preference for female servers or retail workers.)