A week ago I met a gal in the drug store. I was stocking up on diabetes supplies and chatting with the pharmacist who has a son thinking about teaching overseas. I was telling him about all the good stuff because, despite all the bitching, whinging, and bellyaching I've done on this blog to the contrary, overall I loved teaching overseas and I am hoping to return to it in the spring in Taiwan, UAE, Korea some lucky country. While the pharmacist was talking with me a lady waiting in line behind me asked, "Are you a teacher?" I turned around and replied, "Yeah." She says, "You sound like you'd be perfect for the job I'm doing. It's with the school board. They're hiring teacher assistants." I had actually applied for that very job about a month prior to our conversation. I saw it when I was living in Calgary and applied for it a few days ahead of my Jan. 10th arrival in Trail where I am now. So I said, "Is that the job for T/A's who are supposed to be like inclusion officers?" She said that was exactly what she did. Then she told me they were "crying for people to fill MANY positions!" I can't tell you how many times I've heard this. "CRYING for teachers." Crying for teachers... if I had a nickel for every time someone has said that to me in a place where I couldn't even get work as a teacher assistant...
When I was in the States they were "crying for teachers" so loudly that they hired 20,000 of them without certification but FOR SOME REASON I couldn't get in on that action. I'm always told they're "crying for teachers" here too but every time I answer ads, send resumes, apply, I get ghosted. And now here I am in Canada again where prior to my 25-year teaching career I actually WAS a T/A in Smithers, BC. This is while working as a guard at the RCMP jail, working at the recycling depot, and doing seasonal work diamond drilling and working at a welding shop. I couldn't find anything full time all year round despite being young, right out of university, in peak physical condition, and still full of youthful positivity. Check out THIS relic from the archives:
So, I was working as a T/A 30 years ago folks. And I don't mind telling you when this gal (her name was Wanda) started telling me that all the girls she works with were getting lots of hours; they've even hired some girls right outta high school; you're younger than me with way more experience than I have - they'd be crazy not to hire you, and so on, I was getting excited. This is a 30-dollar-an-hour job. It would be the best job I EVER had in Canada and I was perfect for it! It's about DEI and the problems with exclusion that have recently been in the news. I told Wanda I actually wrote a capstone project proposal for my master's on EXACTLY that! Why, here is the intro to it:
Part 1: Establish a need.
The Education Access Society in British Columbia, Canada has made
exclusion data in British Columbia schools available online. They say about
their report on data collected between 2018 and 2022 that BC children and youth
with disabilities missed thousands of days of school, were left without support
or instruction, were left out of field trips, clubs, and events, were secluded
and restrained, and these number have not improved over 4 years of collecting
data (BCEd Access
Society, 2018). As recently as January of 2025 an investigation by BC
ombudsperson Jay Chalke has been launched into allegations that children who
are deemed disruptive or who have disabilities are being excluded and even sent
home from school multiple times a week(Judd &
Lazatin, 2025).
According to the BC School Act, students with
disabilities or diverse abilities must be provided with an education within a
classroom in which that student is integrated with students who do not have
disabilities or diverse abilities unless the educational needs of the student
with disabilities or diverse abilities indicate that education should be
provided otherwise (School
Act, 1996, 75 & 168 section). Should Jay Chalke’s
investigation reveal that there is no better alternative to diversity, equity,
and inclusion in the educations of BC students who have disabilities, diverse
abilities, or are disruptive in some way, this would indicate a need for agents
of change to intervene and establish more effective acceptance and practice of
DEI in the public schools of BC.
It goes on to describe what skills such "agents of change" would require and something called "Empathetic Design" that leverages social belonging, human connection, project-based learning and team building skills to satisfy the typical "identity vs. role confusion" needs that most adolescents, including those with disorders that can cause learning impairment and anxiety, ELL's from different cultures, and an other self-segregators are experiencing. This is all stuff I've studied and experienced throughout my career and it's probably a lot MORE than School District #20 (Kootenay/Columbia) was expecting from any person who answered the ad. And yet I'd been ghosted again.
So I chatted with Wanda who turned out to be the older sister of a guy I went to high school with. Evidently he and his wife had been shot by their neighbour recently so I had stuck my foot in my mouth asking how he was. But in a small town I figured it couldn't hurt having a personal connection like that. I then asked Wanda for a name. She gave me the name Marcy VanKoughnett who I looked up online, got the correct email and sent ANOTHER application directly to her. She's the HR manager who does the hiring for the position. A week later (actually FIVE weeks after my first application) I'm still being ghosted.
A good buddy posted on his website today a cartoon and comment about DEI. Here's the cartoon:
I know, I know... there's a grammar mistake. Shame on you Calvin! THEY were put in place... But aside from that this is a bit difficult for me to agree with and I've blogged about why. My recent situation described above gives me little doubt about the situation in Canada that started in my high school graduation year (1986 Grade 13) the year I first joined the job market and the cause of the 4 decades of futility I have experienced in it. Let's be brutally honest about this even though there are those whose sensitivities have been trained to shy away from such honesty, Equity carried past the point of Equality is no longer either.
I believe in some cases including the Canadian Employment Equity Act the word "equity" is chosen due to its relation to the word equality and the positivity that it evokes. The word equity usurps a lot of those warm, fuzzy feelings when it really should NOT. The Act was brought about with the purposes of creating equality in the workplace and putting an end to hiring based on gender, race, culture or other things like that. THAT would be equality. Equity is trying to bring about equality by hiring based on gender, race, culture or other things... for a while until things even out. So even though there will be people who try to mount arguments against this absolute fact, employment equity in Canada created unfair hiring practices based on criteria the legislation and its supporters were trying to do away with. And I am not saying that in a bad way. It sound like I disagree with that but I don't. Back in 1986 if there was a need to hire people even if they WERE less qualified based on these horrible criteria, HEY, white dudes would have accepted it a helluva lot more readily if you hadn't tried to piss on us and tell us it was raining beer. For almost 4 decades we've been lied to. We've been told things like "They're crying for workers" in many areas including teaching but that crying was not meant for the ears of "white" Canadian males. Okay. I actually have done okay and I don't mind being the generation that was used to even things out in Canada. But are you now lying to me even more and telling me that things still haven't evened out after 40 years of this? I think that's exactly what Canada is doing.
I blogged on this before and there are statistics. The ones I used in the blog were from 2019 I think and since then there have been immigration records broken so the numbers will have white males as an even MORE significant "visible minority" in Canada now than then. So why am I still being dogged by the Employment Equity Act? Things have swung WAAAAY past equality here in Canada and yet the habit of looking at a white man applying for a job like Charles Manson applying for parole lives on with HR workers all over the country.
Here is part two. It only got 17 hits. That's because the white males of Canada are like shelter dogs. They reckon if anyone sees them reading shit like this they'll lose the shitty jobs they have or worse, their wives, female friends, even MALE friends. Don't be a shelter dog. Read it. See if you can find any mistakes.
I know it's difficult to hear stuff like this about Canada but let me repeat the point of the post: Equity carried beyond Equality is no longer either.
So, what I will be proposing to the students I work with if I ever become an officer of inclusion will be equality NOT equity. Equity probably was a decent idea in Canada to a point but we're past that point. As I say in one of the above articles I was never for it because I expected exactly what we got. I was for instituting equality. At the time I thought that with just equality in practice it would take a decade or two to even out the workforce. I guess there's no way of knowing. But we've had almost 4 decades of UNequal equity and we are STILL unequal. It gives me little to no consolation that the INequality we now have is in favour of the people who got the shitty end of the stick back in the 80's. I dislike inequality no matter who the winners and losers are and I don't think there is an ethical argument against that principle. What we have is 4 decades of socialization and opinion providing to overcome in the collective consciousness of Canada to recognize our failure to grasp this principle.
Meanwhile... I'm still getting ghosted by employers offering jobs that I'd be AWESOME at. The hiring practices employment equity has promulgated over the years are not the cause of all of my employment woes, but I submitted some applications using false female and native Canadian names and THEY were not ignored so I am positive I've taken some hits here. I'm okay with that for the cause of equality but it's time to abolish the discriminatory hiring policies that are the employment equity laws in Canada.
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