Gérard Étienne
THE REACTION
“You’re presumed incompetent”
Étienne says two things about the case bother him:
First, accountability. He argues HR staff who felt pressured or concerned about Charles’s hiring should have formalized their objections — spoken truth to power and put it in writing. “If nobody did, then at some level the organization accepted what was happening,” he said. “They can’t now come back and argue she acted entirely on her own.”
Second, proportionality. If Fox faces dismissal for hiring an unqualified acquaintance, Étienne argues that much of the executive ranks should face the same scrutiny. “This is common practice in the public service. There’s not one deputy ADM, director general or executive director who at some point didn’t favour someone they knew in some way.”
He explores both themes in an essay on the illusion of merit. The ethics commissioner’s report, however, found Fox’s involvement went beyond the informal favouritism Étienne describes.
Étienne believes the reaction to Fox reflects how Black executives are often treated in the public service — judged more harshly and presumed less competent. “If you’re Black, you’re presumed incompetent,” he said. “If she had brought in someone who was white, I don’t know if the outcome would have been the same.”
But what troubles him most is the defence. “If anybody understood what people now call the lived experience of Black employees, you could not have had a better person than Chris Fox,” he said. “Her defence is the undoing of all the good work she did. She was looking at her own survival — and she sacrificed us for that survival.”
CAUTION AHEAD
Fears of a chill set in
Racialized public servants already face skepticism about their hiring and advancement, and some fear the Fox report will deepen it.
One long-time bureaucrat worries Fox’s defence “throws all racialized employees under the bus” and could set DEI efforts back years at a time of growing anti-woke pushback.
Etienne worries the report will put a chill on the sponsorship urged in the Call to Action. It could make executives more cautious about opening doors for Black employees or backing them for stretch assignments and promotions for fear of being accused of favouritism.
Is DEI dying — or just losing political momentum? As a slogan, brand or institutional trend, DEI is fading. But Sharpe said he never bought into much of the "fluff" around DEI in the first place.
In his view, corporate-style branding exercises or politically fashionable language are never a real protection against discrimination. Equity lasts only when it is rooted in law. That includes the Charter, human-rights legislation, labour protections and employment equity rules, which can be measured, tested and used to hold institutions accountable.
That way, when political rhetoric fades, legal obligations remain.
The Call to Action was discretionary, which made it vulnerable to what happened with Fox: good intentions, ad hoc execution and weak guardrails, Thompson said.
Modernizing the Employment Equity Act would change that by making obligations statutory, process-driven and tied to documented workforce gaps. Merit would not be waived. It would remain the baseline.
Key proposed reforms include recognizing Black workers as an equity group of their own and replacing the term “visible minority” with the names of specific racial groups, making discrimination easier to measure and employers more accountable.
Thompson is co-chair of the National Employment Equity Council, which is lobbying for those reforms. As he put it, they amount to “the legal route to the clerk’s Call to Action.”
BREACHES
Is there one set of rules — or two?
Fox was found in breach. The government has said nothing. That silence is its own signal.
For Rachel Zellars, the Fox report is symbolic of the “utter failure of accountability in Canada,” which she wrote about in a LinkedIn commentary that circulated widely in the public service.
Zellers isn’t pushing for a firing. She says there should be consequences — and an apology.
“The system is behaving exactly as those of us who study power and race would expect,” she said. “There is a double standard for white leaders at the top.”
Canada has seen ethics breaches before. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau and Dominic LeBlanc were found in violation of ethics rules in separate incidents while in office. Neither lost his job.
So, holding a deputy minister to a different standard would raise an uncomfortable question: are the rules applied equally across the system, or does accountability depend on where you sit?
The average public servant would likely face suspension, reprimand or dismissal for similar breaches under the values-and-ethics code. And don’t think that doesn’t strike a nerve.
“Put it this way,” one senior bureaucrat said. “The only consequence so far (for Fox): she got promoted. Full stop.”
Fox has risen quickly through the public service, holding about half a dozen deputy-minister posts in a decade. Her latest promotion, to DM-4, came days before she submitted her March 13 response to the commissioner’s final report.
Étienne argues the ethics report should have focused less on Fox and more on the staffing culture that enables preferential treatment.
“Don’t make it about Ms. Fox,” he wrote. “It will not change the system. Make it about the white institution.”
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