Sahar N.
Jan 14, 2026
On January 1st, 2026 job-hunting in Canada became, at least on its face, more transparent, humane, and technologically accountable. New rules now require salary ranges in most postings, prohibit “ghosting,” mandate disclosure when AI is used to screen candidates, ensure postings reflect real vacancies, and finally retire “Canadian experience required” as a gatekeeper. Widely praised as overdue common sense, these reforms nonetheless raise persistent questions about fairness, power, and the uneasy gap between policy and practice in modern work.
At first glance, these rules address unmistakable ethical gaps. The philosopher John Rawls, who imagined a society with a true “veil of ignorance,” would surely recognize the importance of making workplaces more navigable and less arbitrary for job-seekers. The intent, reducing information asymmetry, protecting dignity, constraining corporate habits that long seemed invulnerable, is commendable. It is hard to argue against an end to the Kafkaesque cruelty of “ghosting”, this kind of bewildering, absurd, and often impersonal suffering inflicted by bureaucratic or institutional systems, or to object to salary information, which offers candidates a chance to negotiate on equal footing.
Requiring employers to reveal if a job is real (rather than a disguised resume-farming expedition) is an unambiguous blow against cynicism, and the death of Canadian experience requirements, so often considered a disguise for subtle discrimination, affirms a principle: ability, not address history, should decide who works.
These measures did not materialize from a vacuum; they reflect broader social anxieties about labor, automation, and trust. The pandemic and its mass disruptions exposed once and for all the precarity of “meritocracy” and the frailty of job security. The explosive growth of digital hiring platforms has rendered the search for work more alienating than ever, and the steady advance of AI in hiring (algorithms quietly scoring resumes) often in secret, has added new layers of opacity.
Recent worker activism, research showing persistent bias in AI hiring algorithms as reported by MIT Technology Review, and viral horror stories of job-hunting indignities have all fueled the sense that something is fundamentally broken. These reforms, then, are government’s attempt to restore order and faith, a bid to slow the future, or at least domesticate it.
But the deeper question lingers: are these rules an unalloyed good, and for whom? It is easy to legislate fairness, more difficult to secure it.
Take pay transparency. Posting salary ranges reduces information monopolies and may help close gender and minority wage gaps, according to Stanford economist Myra Strober. Yet “a range within 50K” leaves ample room for employers to manipulate expectations and maintain opacity for higher earners. Is it truly transparent for a job to offer “between 75,000 and 125,000”? What end of the range, and who decides? Furthermore, if salary bands are wide, some applicants may be discouraged while others become pawns in opaque, behind-the-scenes negotiations.
The “no ghosting” rule, compelling a response within 45 days, is a response to the dehumanizing silence that has become the norm in recruiting. Still, does a superficial, automated rejection “we have made a decision”, restore dignity, or merely fulfill the letter of the rule? Philosophers like Martin Buber, who wrote on “I-Thou” relationships, might argue that formal acknowledgment is not the same as genuine respect.
Required disclosure of AI use has been billed as a triumph of technological transparency, but the bar is set low: notification is due only if AI actively screens, not if it drafts postings or nudges managers toward certain profiles. In other words: you will be told if an algorithm passes judgment, but not if it stacks the deck behind the scenes. Meanwhile, as labor law professor Ifeoma Ajunwa warns, flagged AI use may simply shift discrimination or bias from one part of the process to another.
The requirement that job postings describe real roles and not “resume farming” is clearly a step forward, cutting back on employer practices that trade hope for data harvested from earnest applicants. Yet the policing of such requirements is another matter. How will authorities ensure companies do not dress corporate “talent pipelines” in the borrowed clothes of real opportunity?
Finally, the prohibition on Canadian experience requirements echoes decades of criticism that such clauses bar newcomers, deepen inequality, and reinforce isolationism under the guise of competence. Yet any recruiter determined to maintain the status quo can simply rephrase the requirement (“must know the local market,” “strong Canadian network preferred”). The backs of discrimination are rarely broken by words in a statute.
In practice, then, these reforms may succeed mainly in choreographing a new, more sophisticated hiring masquerade. Employers will comply with the surface of the law. They will send rejections in bulk, post broad salary bands, and craft job descriptions with the right disclaimers. AI will loom, always present, but now with a footnote. Discretion will not disappear; it will simply get more creative.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek warns that today’s capitalism specializes in “cynical reason”: rules polish appearances, but power finds a way around the letter. Actual fairness requires will and culture, not merely compliance.
Inevitably, critics will label these reforms a step forward, and in many respects they are. When standards are set, abuses retreat at least a little. Job-seekers will be slightly less vulnerable, the powerful slightly more accountable, and workplaces inch closer to ideals theorized in philosophy seminars.
Yet progress is not linear, and formal equality is not the same as justice. Gaps remain. The rules invite resistance or compliance, and their enforcement, always the weak hand of such regulation, will determine whether they deliver their promise or merely craft more elaborate illusions.
Work, after all, is more than rules. If the next phase of progress is to become real rather than rhetorical, it will need to challenge not only the opacity of hiring, but also the deeper dynamics of power, bias, and value that rules so often only veil.
S.N