10 minute read
Q&A WITH KASARI GOVENDER
Q&A: KASARI GOVENDER
A little over two years ago, Kasari Govender assumed office as British Columbia’s first independent Human Rights Commissioner, a role dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights in B.C. Previously, Govender held leadership positions at the legal education and action fund West Coast LEAF from 2008 until 2019. She also played a pivotal role in establishing the non-profit Rise Women’s Legal Centre.Earlier this year, Govender joined Business in Vancouver’s equity, diversity and inclusion podcast ‘EDI on BIV’ to talk about the work of her office. That conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF HOW YOUR
OFFICE PROMOTES AND PROTECTS HUMAN
RIGHTS IN B.C., AND ARE THERE ANY SPECIFIC AREAS YOU’RE FOCUSED ON?
We have a number of tools in our tool belt. We’ve got a big, broad mandate to promote and protect human rights, and there’s some ways to whittle that down to make that more practical. There’s a big focus on education in our work. That includes doing research and building our body of knowledge and thinking about human rights in the province. It includes doing policy and law reform work, so advocacy for changes to how our government makes decisions.
But our mandate is much broader than government. Our mandate is really everybody in the province. Everybody is a stakeholder in human rights, both as rights holders, and also as duty bearers as people who have responsibilities under the Human Rights Code and human rights law more generally.
Another couple of tools in our tool belt are more legal in nature. Intervening in cases, meaning getting involved as a third party in ongoing litigation, to talk about some of the systemic implications of a case, as well as doing inquiries and investigations into narrow areas of human rights or big, broad areas of human rights. I’ve got a fair amount of discretion to decide what those are.
There are a number of strategic priorities that we’ve defined for my term in office, and that includes poverty as both cause and effect of inequality and injustice in the province. It includes the rights of those who are detained by the state, whether that’s in the criminal justice system or in the mental health system. And it includes the rise of hate and white supremacy, which was an issue before the pandemic, and has been in the news and brought to our attention in much more dramatic ways during this pandemic. It also includes decolonization as a key priority for my office, as well as dealing with discrimination as defined by the Human Rights Code, which is really in the context of employment, in the context of services, that are usually available to the public: what are the responsibilities of businesses, as employers, as service providers and potentially as housing providers? WHAT GAPS EXIST FOR THE PEOPLE THAT
YOU SERVE? WHAT IS COMING OUT OF YOUR
RESEARCH AROUND INCLUSION?
I think there’s a couple of different ways to look at that question. And I think, from my perspective, talking about equity, inclusion, diversity issues is very important. It’s also important to do that in not too narrow a way. It is important that employers, service providers, governments, big businesses, think about reflecting the people they serve and the people who work at those offices. But it’s also broader than that. I think really doing equity, diversity and inclusion work well entails understanding how racism, sexism and ableism might play out in your workforce, and understanding that these issues have systemic roots. Hiring people is an important step, but it won’t actually make your workforce anti-racist, for example. That takes further steps. That’s the way I’d like to think of your question: having some concrete deliverables, but also having deeper roots below that that take some deeper thinking.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THOSE CONCRETE STEPS?
We’re starting to delve much more deeply into the areas of employment. Next year or so we’ll be producing some more comprehensive guidance around what employment equity steps all different kinds of employers might be able to take around the full range of steps around employment: recruitment, hiring, retention, progress through the levels of your organization, how to ensure that people in these roles reflect those you serve or those in our communities, and to think about that a little bit more comprehensively than we have traditionally.
Kasari Govender
was appointed B.C.’s
first Human Rights
Commissioner in
September 2019
• SUBMITTED
For example, having territorial acknowledgments in the front of your space. I don’t want to get into territory acknowledgments as purely virtue signalling. But what I’ve heard from Indigenous people who I’ve hired or I’ve worked with, is they want to know that they’re welcome in this space; that Indigenous people are seen for their strengths and what they bring to work. There’s some ways to signal that through how you develop your office space.
Also, how accessible is your office space? If you try to go out and hire people with disabilities, but you don’t think about what font size are we using, what tools are we using and how accessible are those to people who have sight impairments or other sensory impairments? There’s a lot of devil in the details here, and we’re trying to build that in. We have both the privilege and burden of building an organization from scratch, and that allows us to be learning from our own successes and mistakes along the way.
That’s why we’re putting this work in the next year or so, going back through all of our hiring to analyze – did we attract people to apply to organization from these diverse groups? When did we lose them along the way? If we lost them, what’s the attrition rate? What’s happening after hiring? And then we’re going to bring that knowledge of what we’re doing in our organization to this larger piece of research to put out in the world.
There is a provision in the Human Rights Code, which is the enabling legislation for my office, and it is called the special programs provisions. What it does is encourages employers in particular, but actually all duty bearers, to put into place programs where they treat people differently according to different needs and identities in order to fulfill the equality and non-discrimination provisions in the code. We have many school boards, for example, applying to us to say we want to have somebody as an Indigenous educator or programs provider that’s going to provide mentorship for Indigenous students, but we don’t want to be sued under the Human Rights Code for harbouring an Indigenous-only hire, because we’ve excluded non-Indigenous people from that position. Under this provision in the code, I can grant an application and say you are allowed to do this and no one can sue you under the code. There are indicators of success that you need to show us to show that this is actually working – we are actually building equity in your workforce. That’s another way businesses can engage in this work.
MANY COMPANIES TALK ABOUT EQUITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION (EDI) . ARE YOU ENCOURAGED THAT THERE ARE MEANINGFUL STEPS BEING TAKEN? OR
DO YOU THINK WE’RE NOT SEEING ENOUGH ON
THIS FROM THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY?
Maybe a bit of both. I think EDI is encouraging. And I think we are in this watershed moment in a much longer movement around anti-racism in particular. The last year or so has been a time when even more people have had this conversation and had these issues in the forefront of their minds, grappled with the tragedies that can emerge from racism, and also thinking about the ways in which that shows up in so many aspects of our own lives. We all have to own up to our stereotypes and biases that we have. This isn’t necessarily something out there that’s so extreme, it’s also on a full scale.
I think that I’m encouraged by the fact that this is so present for so many of us, and being brought into institutions or businesses in a way that it never has before. The concerns I have are to make sure that that doesn’t become commitments in words only, or commitments in Band-Aid solutions – that it goes deeper than that. That’s why I started talking about equity, diversity and inclusion. These are really positive goals, but they can’t stop at the superficial level. They have to go deeper, they require deep thought and they require educating ourselves in a way that is ongoing, that is thoughtful and that seeks to put our own shame or guilt aside so that we can actually self-interrogate as individuals, but also as institutions and businesses.
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR FOLKS WHO ARE
UNSURE ABOUT HOW TO NAVIGATE THIS IN A COR-
PORATE ENVIRONMENT?
I think one piece is to think about what world you want to live in. And however much it’s been said: what world do you want your children to live in? Inequality impacts all of us; all of us suffer from these stereotypes in one way or another. To think about what world you want to live in – I think that allows us to have more brave conversations as opposed to starting from a deficit position of, ‘What’s wrong with me? What system have I participated in?’ ‘What systems have I participated in’ is an important question, but I think the starting point needs to be a place of hopefulness. I think that’s a much more motivating factor than a place of shame. So let’s hope for that kind of world and move from that place.
On a more pragmatic level, there are business benefits to doing this work. This is a conversation that more and more and more people care about and want to see reflected in their institutions and in their businesses. All of us as duty bearers need to be thinking about that as well. What do the people we serve want to see in our institutional actions? And how do we reflect the concerns that are very present for so many people in the world today in the business we do? WHAT ARE YOU FOCUSING ON IN THE YEAR AHEAD?
DO YOU NEED MORE DATA TO MAKE DECISIONS
AND PROVIDE RECOMMENDATIONS?
A significant piece of our work over the last year has been on this data question. Last June, I was asked by the premier to provide some advice about how to collect race-based and other disaggregated data to support the creation of law and policy and practice that will start to work against the systemic forces, trying to unpack systemic racism and sexism and so on, but in a way that doesn’t reinforce stigma.
We wrote a report called The grandmother perspective and released that to the legislature last September. And I have to say, I’ve been overwhelmed by the interest from every sector. There has been interest from large institutions like universities, there has been interest from the business community, from the non-profit community. So many sectors have reached out to us to say, ‘We want to think about how to do this data collection well.’ The key piece of that is to do that in consultation with community and not just in consultation, but in deep consultation, meaning the community needs to have some ownership and control over what happens to their data.
There’s this continual question, ‘How do we do this without causing harm?’ Well, ask the very people whose data you are collecting how they want to see that data collected. And that’s the key to what the grandmother perspective is. We were gifted a very important perspective, which was from a woman named Gwen Phillips, a First Nations data governance expert. And she talked about how this data needs to be collected because institutions care, in much the way that a grandmother cares about her family. So use that model when you’re collecting data.
One of the key initiatives going forward is certainly to keep inventing and working with government on how to bring these recommendations forward. But also some employment equity work that we talked about. In the fall, we will be running another campaign on a different area of equality. This fall, we have many, many plans in our pocket, and I look forward to rolling them out over the next year.”
