Several federal government departments may have violated human rights law by age-restricting access to their job ads posted to Facebook, according to Conservative MP Peter Kent.
Several federal government departments may have violated human rights law by age-restricting access to their job ads posted to Facebook, according to Conservative MP Peter Kent.
The agencies include the Canada Border Services Agency, the Correctional Service of Canada and the RCMP, CBC reported.
Documents tabled in the House of Commons showed that CBSA ran four job ads on Facebook since March 2017, three of which could be seen only by Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 34. Correctional Service Canada ran 11 ads on Facebook since September 2018, all viewable only by people aged 18 to 35 years old.
Meanwhile, two ads from the RCMP also contained age restrictions. One in January 2017 was directed at 18- to 24-year-olds, while a second one in January 2018 was for ages 18 to 34.
While the ads’ texts made no mention of age, the settings that determined which Facebook users would see them left out older workers.
According to Kent, the federal government must not exclude Canadians from viewing job opportunities.
“It is fundamentally against the law,” Kent was quoted as saying by CBC. “The government has to explain itself now; those departments that placed those inappropriate micro-targeted ads on the basis of age and gender have to explain themselves. And perhaps those postings, if they have not yet been filled, should be reviewed, revisited and perhaps some of those postings should be reopened.”
Kent also said that the government agencies’ decisions to exclude some Canadians from seeing the job ads could leave them open to lawsuits.
“I would think that there would probably be cause for legal action by any who felt that they were discriminated against in terms of applying for what should be an open, equal-opportunity position,” Kent said.
NDP MP Charlie Angus agreed, saying that age discrimination in job ads is unacceptable, particularly with older Canadians being forced to return to the workforce or live on contract work after having been downsized from their previous jobs.
“That's not acceptable in Canada and it's not acceptable under the laws that we have,” he said.
