Ask most public sector employees who is responsible for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in their organization and they will point — almost instinctively — toward the HR department. Perhaps a dedicated diversity office. Maybe a committee.
Rarely do they point to the top.
That instinct reveals something important about how DEI has been structurally positioned inside Canadian public institutions. It has been framed as an administrative function—something to be managed, reported on and delegated—rather than a core leadership responsibility. And that framing, more than any policy gap, may be the single greatest obstacle to genuine inclusion.
My research consistently surfaces this pattern. Organizations invest in diversity training, establish employee resource groups and publish annual equity reports. But when inclusion fails—when racialized immigrant employees are passed over for promotion, when workplace cultures remain hostile to difference, when the numbers plateau year after year—accountability rarely reaches the executive level. The diversity office absorbs the concern. A new initiative is announced. The cycle continues.
This is not accidental. It reflects a deeper assumption embedded in how public institutions understand DEI: that inclusion is a problem of process, not of power.
But power is precisely what determines whether inclusion happens. Who gets hired into leadership pipelines? Whose concerns get elevated in executive decision-making? Which employees are trusted with high-visibility assignments that build careers? These are not HR decisions. They are leadership decisions—made daily, often informally, by the people at the top of organizational hierarchies.
Research on representative bureaucracy in the Canadian public service supports this. Having diverse employees in an organization produces equitable outcomes only when those employees hold positions with real decision-making authority. Passive representation—diversity in the room without power at the table—does not move the needle on inclusion.
What would genuine leadership accountability for DEI look like? It would mean that deputy ministers and senior executives are evaluated on inclusion outcomes the same way they are evaluated on program delivery and fiscal performance. It would mean that performance management frameworks include disaggregated equity metrics—not as a footnote, but as a core indicator. It would mean that when racialized employees report barriers, those reports trigger leadership review, not just HR documentation.
Some Canadian institutions are beginning to move in this direction. The Federal Employment Equity Act has long required employers to identify and remove systemic barriers—but enforcement has historically been uneven. More recent efforts, including the Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion issued by the Clerk of the Privy Council, signal a growing recognition that accountability must reach the top of the public service hierarchy.
But recognition is not yet practice. The gap between stating that leaders are accountable and building systems that make them accountable remains significant.
Closing that gap is not just an organizational challenge. It is a democratic one. Public institutions derive their legitimacy from the public they serve—and in a country as diverse as Canada, that legitimacy depends on whether all employees, including those who arrived here from somewhere else, can genuinely thrive within them.
DEI will not become real until the people with the most power in our institutions are the ones most answerable for its outcomes. That is not an HR mandate. It is a leadership imperative.
Next in this series: Accountability requires data—but not just any data. In my next post, I explore what disaggregated workforce data reveals about inclusion in Canada’s public sector and why the numbers we collect may be obscuring more than they show.
