When Rwanda-born Odile Sanabaso first arrived at Air Canada in 2008, she watched the interactions in her workplace and, thinking about herself as a visible minority, complained about….absolutely nothing.
“I did not feel treated any differently,” says Sanabaso, now HR applications and analytics manager. “Our team was very diverse. I guess that’s one of the reasons I really like working at Air Canada. I can hardly see myself going somewhere else.”
Indeed, Montréal-based Air Canada has long had a strong reputation for supporting diversity, notably in promoting women, in extending benefits to same-sex partners well before a key court decision, and in its multicultural cabin crews and frontline staff. Sanabaso says that when she started as an accounting coordinator her team included Asians, Europeans and people from the Black community as well as Canadian natives. It was a place to feel safe.
All the sadder, then, that Sanabaso waited years before she began confiding to some of her co-workers that she had experienced the worst of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide at age 9. A Tutsi, she lost her parents and all her locally resident siblings in the horrific massacres by extremist Hutus, escaping by hiding out in forests until it was over. Older siblings from Montréal then arrived to bring her to Canada.
She says it was only after she was interviewed on CBC Radio’s “The Current” in 2017, and again in 2019, that she began coming to terms with memories she had avoided for many years. “Now, because I can talk more about it, I feel much better inside,” she says. “I can live with it and go forward.”
But she was certainly sensitized when the Black Lives Matter protests broke out in North America and around the world. “Last year’s events were an awakening on issues that Black people encounter,” she says. She reached out to her diversity manager and suggested that the company needed to do some internal messaging.
Mark Olivier, senior director of talent, engagement and diversity, was hearing the same thing from other employees, already stressed by the COVID-19 pandemic that has led to severe downsizing at the airline. “We had a very good record on diversity,” he says, “but what they said to us was, elevate your game.” And they did. The company held a series of online town halls, ran focus groups and mounted a detailed survey on diversity and inclusion, all of which gained strong response.
The D&I team foresee different employee initiatives based on feedback collected from a poll, which Olivier says the company will strongly support. Air Canada has also committed to the BlackNorth Initiative pledge against anti-Black systemic racism and has expanded scholarships for Black youth.
Sanabaso says she’s pleased by the responses, both at Air Canada and in Canadian society. “I feel like there’s hope,” she says. “It’s unfortunate that that had to happen last year, but I’m hoping for a better future given the awareness. A lot of effort is being put in place, including in our group at Air Canada.”
