KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – Halifax CAO Jacques Dubé was getting a bit carried away when he told CBC yesterday that “we’re making good progress” to rid the Municipal Operations workplace of racism, misogyny and ableism.

That’s not what the African Nova Scotian workers thought when they rallied at City Hall, and it also isn’t what the numbers suggest.

in February 2017 the Nova Scotia Advocate acquired the same spreadsheet used to measure progress that Halifax now put in the public domain. We did it the hard way, through a Freedom of Information request.

At that time, some 16 month ago, 44 recommendations were completed. Now we sit at 55 completed recommendations, a mere 11% improvement, and 35 more to go. The recommendations were issued in January 2016.

I call that crawling along.

As well, sometimes completed doesn’t mean what you’d think.

The recommendation, that job seekers only be asked about criminal convictions when there is a good reason, triggered no substantive changes. Yet the progress report shows it as completed. We wrote about this in August 2017.

Earlier Equity Watch and, most recently, former Councillor Jackie Barkhouse, called for a public and transparent enquiry into these horrendous workplace issues at HRM.

HRM, given its inclination to spin, has once again demonstrated that it can not be trusted to manage such an enquiry.

See also: Racism at City Hall, an update (August 2016)

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