April Hicke is the founder and CEO of tech recruitment and HR platform Toast.
Alberta’s Bill 33 isn’t a bill to foster hiring based on merit; it’s a signal, and the province’s tech sector will pay for it.
On Tuesday, Alberta Minister of Justice Mickey Amery tabled the Justice Statutes Amendment Act. If it passes, municipalities, school boards, universities, colleges, Crown corporations, and public agencies will be barred from using diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in hiring and promotion, and mandatory DEI training will be banned. Officials have already floated extending it to non-profits that receive provincial grants. Premier Danielle Smith says the bill will put merit back at the centre of hiring. Back? By the government’s own account, Alberta’s public service already hires on merit. This bill doesn’t fix a hiring problem. It manufactures a culture war.
“This bill doesn’t fix a hiring problem. It manufactures a culture war.”
April Hicke, Toast
DEI was never the opposite of merit. I’ve spent more than four years building Toast, which started as a recruitment firm placing women in tech. Now, it runs a talent marketplace software of more than 35,000 women. In that time I’ve talked to roughly 500 companies about hiring, and not one, not once, has asked me for a quota. That’s a fantasy invented by people who have never sat in a hiring meeting.
What actually happens is far less dramatic. A company posts a senior engineering role, and, often, almost every single applicant is a man. That company calls us because they want a full data set before they make a decision. We add qualified women to the pool. They hire the best person. Every time. That isn’t lowering the bar, it’s making sure the bar gets applied to everyone who can clear it.
Whether we like to admit it or not, the bar is not applied evenly. We all have bias; hiring is full of moments where it sneaks in, and in Canada we’ve measured it. University of Toronto economist Philip Oreopoulos sent nearly 13,000 resumes to Toronto employers. When applicants swapped an English-sounding name for an Indian, Pakistani, or Chinese one, but kept everything else identical, including Canadian education and Canadian experience, callbacks dropped 28 percent. Applicants with Asian names and master’s degrees got fewer callbacks than English-named applicants without one. Read that again: more qualified applicants, yet fewer interviews, based on the recruiter or hiring manager’s perception of their race. That’s not merit. Structured interviews, balanced candidate slates, and bias training exist to catch exactly this problem.
This isn’t only about fairness, either. It’s about whether Alberta can compete. Innovation comes from the Latin innovare, “to make new.” You cannot make new things with a room full of people who all see the world the same way. When people hear “diversity,” they think race, gender, and sexual orientation, and those matter. But what innovation actually runs on is diversity of thought: different instincts for attacking a problem, which come from living different lives. Put 10 people with the same life story at a table, and you’ll likely get one idea ten times.
Boston Consulting Group studied more than 1,700 companies in eight countries and found those with above-average diversity in leadership earned 45 percent of their revenue from innovation, compared with 26 percent for firms with average or below-average diversity. McKinsey’s 2023 analysis of more than 1,200 companies across 23 countries found executive teams in the top quartile for gender diversity were 39 percent more likely to financially outperform those in the bottom quartile. The late Columbia Business School researcher Katherine Phillips showed in controlled experiments that racially diverse groups significantly outperformed homogeneous groups at solving problems; working alongside someone different makes everyone sharper.
.Canada already has a problem here. Women are nearly half of our workforce, yet are still less than 30 percent of our tech workers, a number that hasn’t budged in over a decade. Alberta claims it wants to be an AI, tech, and energy innovation hub. If so, we are competing with every province and every country on earth for the people who can build those companies. Our universities and colleges are the pipeline. Our cities are anchor employers. This bill tells them to stop ensuring they’ve cast their net wide enough. Do we honestly think the engineers, founders, and investors deciding where to build won’t notice?
This province is already divided over immigration. Most Canadian workers support equity efforts; a 2025 report found just 16 percent view them negatively. So who is this for? When a government brands removing barriers as “ideology,” it hands a green light to those who never wanted everyone at the table in the first place.
Alberta does not have to choose between merit and inclusion. The companies I work with prove every week that you can have both. If we want to make new things, we need people who see the world differently, and we need to make sure they actually get through the door. Bill 33 pushes that door closer to shut.
The opinions and analysis expressed in the above article are those of its author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of BetaKit or its editorial staff. It has been edited for clarity, length, and style.
Feature image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.