I say no. I congratulate Mr. Nenshi for saying what everybody knows. Immigrants, visible minorities, Aboriginal, and women are having difficulties getting well-paid management municipal jobs. We need more people like him to raise awareness on this issue and promote diversity not only for the business case sake but because many groups have been deprived of opportunities for so long that sometimes quotes are not a bad way to go to establish new or expanded pools of candidates who are not your usual suspects (able-bodied, Canadian-born and educated, white, straight man).

Shame on some of the comment contributors though! This is exactly why we need more people like Calgary’s Mayor to stand up and speak to racists and homophobic Canadians. See for yourself:

That’s all well and good, but if I’m buying steel girders to build a structure, and I’m required to purchase girders only supplied by brown-skinned, one-legged, bilingual, vegetarian lesbians, what guarantees would I be able to provide that the steel girders actually meet the engineered requirements?
Yes, that’s an exaggeration, but in every case where you modify standards in order to meet goals not germaine to the task at hand, it is mathematically inevitable that you will be faced with exactly the type of scenario I’ve just presented.
The problem is that the very moment you choose to ignore the written policy in order to meet the real requirements of the task at hand you’ll be accused of racism or sexism or some other kind of distatsteful “ism”. So, you bow to the pressure of political correctness and pray that you have enough insurance to cover the lawsuits when the steel girders supllied by the brown-skinned, one-legged, bilingual, vegetarian lesbian collapse on a classroom full of French-immersion ESL kindergardener’s.es it obvious that it is lip service.

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