Leaked federal training says equal treatment can be discriminatory
Mandatory ESDC course instructs public servants to apply “Black-Centric Lens”; experts question evidence behind claims.
Author: Melanie Bennet
Employment and Social Development Canada require public servants to apply a “Black-Centric Lens” across all their work, according to mandatory training leaked to Juno News.
The self-paced course tells employees that “formal equality” — treating people the same — can itself be discriminatory. True fairness, it says, means “substantive equality” or equal outcomes produced by privileging people based on their race.
The training links today’s gaps in employment, education, housing and income directly to Canada’s history of slavery and colonialism. It asserts that systemic anti-Black racism and unconscious bias continue to block Black Canadians from equal opportunity.
Matthew Lau, senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, examined the claims.
“No examples of any policies that are biased against Black students are presented,” he said, responding to the course’s statement that “Policies in schools even in the 2000s continue to reflect biases and disproportionally impact Black students” and that “anti-Black racism is present in the entire continuum of education.”
Lau says the course assumes that statistical disparities are proof of systemic racism. He calls this a logical error.
“We cannot infer from differences in outcomes, whether in educational attainment, income, or anything else, that there is discrimination,” Lau said. “If we did, we would have to conclude Canadian society has been biased against men for more than a century” because women live longer.
He notes that Canadian-born workers of Japanese, Korean, South Asian and Chinese backgrounds earn more on average than the White population. “That would suggest the system is biased in favour of those groups.”
Lau rejects the training’s attempt to tie current outcomes to slavery, abolished in Canada in 1834.
“Trying to link slavery, which was abolished in 1834, to outcomes today is a huge stretch,” he said. Chinese-Canadians faced a head tax from 1885 to 1923 and Japanese-Canadians were interned and dispossessed during the Second World War, more recent and larger-scale injustices, yet both groups now outperform the national average in education and earnings.
Stephen Reich, a University of Toronto OISE PhD student who has researched the spread of critical race theory in Ontario’s education system, reviewed the training.
“The whole document is based on Critical Race Theory,” Reich said. “It’s ideological and relies on narratives.”
He shared concerns that it relies on “substantive equality” for its formal recommendations.
These include hiring managers who “value the lived experiences of diverse employees,” prioritizing Black leaders, seeking employees with “subject matter expertise in Black Canadian Sociology,” providing tailored coaching for Black employees, mandating more anti-racism and trauma-informed training, collecting disaggregated data by intersecting identities, and crafting targeted outreach to Black communities.
But Black Canadians make up 4.3 per cent of the population, the majority of whom have immigrated to Canada since the 1970s.
Reich observes that many of the “systemic barriers” listed in the course, like lack of trust in government institutions, opaque funding processes, and difficult application software, are not unique to any group.
“They have no racial component,” he said.
For Reich, there are some unanswered contradictions in the training data. Second-generation Black women have exceptionally high educational attainment, according to him, and over half hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. That amounts to 16 percentage points above non-racialized second-generation women and 25 points above third-generation-plus women. Yet these women still face employment gaps.
“If there’s prevalent anti-Black racism in Canada, why do African-origin second-generation women have particularly high levels of education … but lower employment?” Reich asked. “That is never answered.”
The federal government is directing millions of dollars exclusively to programs for Black Canadians and Black-led organizations, mostly under Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy and the UN International Decade for People of African Descent.
For example, the 2024 Fall Economic Statement committed $36 million for 2025–26 to the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative to build capacity for Black-led non-profits.
The feds also renewed the Black Entrepreneurship Program with $189 million over five years to provide loans, mentorship, and ecosystem support.
Due to the “lingering effects of colonialism and slavery,” the government allocated $77.9 million over two years starting in 2025–26 for Canada’s Black Justice Strategy, including $23.6 million to the Department of Justice for Black-specific court services, youth diversion programs, and victim supports.
Additional targeted grants, such as the $8.6 million announced in April 2026 for justice navigation and community programming, continue to flow through these streams.
Taken together, this race-restricted funding amounts to over $50 million per year in dedicated federal spending.
A previous set of Diversity Equity and Inclusion training materials obtained by Juno News share some insight into the mind of the training developers.
In a transcript from the fifth session of the Government of Canada Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Conference in 2022, the trainers from the ESDC introduced the “Black centric lens.”
Tina Walter who “grew up in Jamaica” before immigrating to Canada do her “Masters thesis.” She said she learned “the history of enslavement system in Jamaica” in high school in her home country.
She said the training was “in part driven by the murder of Mr. George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada. “Discomfort is required in order to make meaningful change,” she said.
The other driver, she said was “White nationalism, or far right extremism” which she believes was a influenced by Trump and social media. “The belief that cancel culture is a planned strategy is being adopted and espoused by some Canadians,” she said.
Walter said the training was signed off by MP Ahmed Hussen, the minister who launched the Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s education toolkit in 2022, praising them as “an organization that I respect very much.”
Aissatou Keita, who “worked very closely with Tina,” described his background as “African from West Africa” who arrived in Canada with his parents.
Keita said that “Black populations are not homogeneous; they are heterogeneous,” and that his analysis draws on both quantitative and qualitative data examining “different socio-economic disparities and the racism experienced by these different Black populations.”
The transcript was stamped as current as of January 14, 2026.
While ESDC’s media team told Juno News they would provide a comment about the training, no comment was received.