OTTAWA — Current and former Global Affairs Canada (GAC) employees who are Black say the department routinely fails to take racism complaints seriously, allowing discrimination to persist unchecked within Canada’s diplomatic corps.
“I was representing Canada, but Canada did not represent me,” said Madina Iltireh, a veteran GAC employee who worked more than 20 years on international aid programs. Iltireh, who is Black and wears a hijab, described her three-year posting as “toxic” and “suffocating.”
She spoke Wednesday at a Parliament Hill news conference organized by the Black Class Action Secretariat, which is pursuing legal challenges alleging systemic racism across the federal public service. The group says multiple GAC employees had their complaints dismissed internally — only to have them later upheld by external bodies or courts.
In Iltireh’s case, a court-ordered investigation earlier this year found the head of Canada’s embassy in Kuwait had bullied her and adopted discriminatory practices, confirming that she had not been provided a healthy work environment.
Secretariat executive director Nicholas Marcus Thompson said GAC’s internal complaint system “blocks” justice for employees of colour. “Workers are silenced … and while those workers are held back, the leaders advance,” he said, adding that racism within GAC is “as bad as we’ve found in other departments.”
Thompson cited another case in which a GAC executive accused of assaulting and berating staff was only disciplined after the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner intervened — long after internal channels had dismissed earlier complaints.
The department has pointed to reforms under its Future of Diplomacy initiative, launched in 2022, which aims to improve transparency, well-being, and promotion fairness within the foreign service. But Thompson said the measures amount to “Band-Aid solutions” that fail to tackle deep-rooted discrimination.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand responded Wednesday, saying that any form of discrimination is “unacceptable.” “We need a public service where inclusivity and diversity make our government and our country stronger,” she said, adding that she is reviewing at least one of the cases highlighted by the Secretariat.