Watchdog condemns lack of diversity in CSIS senior staff

Valid observations but in the context of other security-related agencies, the RCMP and the Canadian Forces, CSIS looks good as indicated in the above chart:

The federal government’s human-rights watchdog has repeatedly admonished the Canadian Security Intelligence Service over a lack of diversity in its upper echelons, according to newly disclosed reports.

Records obtained by The Globe and Mail show that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has conducted two employment equity audits of CSIS over the past decade and, on both occasions, the spy agency was criticized because it had not hired a sufficient number of visible minorities, people with disabilities and indigenous Canadians.

The 2014 and 2011 audits found that none of CSIS’s senior managers were indigenous or visible minorities, and only 17 per cent are women, a decrease of 13 per cent since 2009. “Your organization has a lower overall EE [employment equity] result when compared to separate agencies and is therefore considered to be a less successful employer with respect to EE,” the commission wrote, urging the agency to close gaps in its hiring practices. One of its main challenges, the commission noted, was to increase the diversity of its managerial staff.

Formed three decades ago from a former RCMP intelligence division, CSIS is a $500-million-a-year organization with 3,000 employees. Many of its staff are intelligence officers who work to identify terrorists and other threats to national security. Such work has sometimes led to tensions with indigenous and Muslim groups, who have accused the agency of racial profiling.

The documents, obtained under Access to Information laws, offer a sober assessment of an agency that has at times struggled to attract recruits from varied backgrounds, and sheds new light on the workplace culture of the country’s secretive spy service.

One of the areas in which CSIS exceeded the commission’s targets, which are based on the availability of people from different groups in the work force, is gender equity across its departments. According to a 2014 equity report, 48 per cent of CSIS employees are women, a figure that is above the government average.

And over all, 2 per cent of its employees are indigenous, 3.6 per cent have disabilities and 14.4 per cent are visible minorities. Those numbers are generally representative of the country’s population, but they are slightly below the commission’s targets.

A spokeswoman for CSIS said the agency sees diversity as a “core business strategy,” one that allows its agents to “better understand the demographics of the Canadian communities we protect, therefore better equipping us to collect relevant and accurate intelligence.” The human-rights commission investigates government departments that are less diverse than their peers. Under federal law, every department and agency with at least 500 employees is subject to a review of its work force every three years. If a group of Canadians is not well represented, an audit is done.

The documents also suggest visible minorities and indigenous people were sometimes undervalued within CSIS. Members of those groups faced “attitudinal barriers” from colleagues and did not always receive the training needed to “advance to a higher level either due to lack of time, funding or management support,” a report said.

Source: Watchdog condemns lack of diversity in CSIS senior staff – The Globe and Mail