Woke Hermit Kingdom: Canada Doubles Down on DEI

By Geoff Horsman and David Millard Haskell

This piece was originally published at Minding the Campus and is republished here with permission.

While the United States dismantles “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), Canada still clings desperately to this cult of mediocrity. Sensing an impending cultural shift, Canadian DEI professionals are scrambling to mount a defense reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal.” While Swift suggested eating children to solve poverty, diversicrats deploy discrimination in their moral crusade to exorcise racism.

One such proposal, by McGill University political scientist Debra Thompson, appeared in Canada’s elite newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail. In “The name can change, but the work must not: why Canada still needs DEI,” Thompson, holder of the prestigious Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality, argued that DEI is “economically and morally” sound. Exemplifying the woke penchant for logical inconsistency, she admits that DEI “promote[s] hiring and advancement of racial minorities” before claiming it “does no such thing” and “there are no diversity quotas.”

The Ontario student barred from a summer program for being white might disagree. So would white male professors deemed unemployable by explicit diversity quotas. Some form of DEI taints 98 percent of job postings at Canadian public universities; nearly one in five postings at the University of British Columbia explicitly restrict applicants by group identities like race. Quotas for non-white Canada Research Chairs persist despite wildly surpassing targets.

This dismal “morality”, rooted in racial discrimination, is further undermined by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against diversity quotas—deemed racist against whites and Asians—and the ensuing lawsuits against companies prioritizing identity over merit.

Thompson’s “economic” case is equally tenuous. Asserting that diverse workplaces “perform better on every metric,” she relies on those whose jobs depend on DEI, like the director of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Diversity Institute. For their part, the institute cites a discredited McKinsey & Company study touting a 35 percent financial return on racial diversity. But economists couldn’t replicate McKinsey’s work, dryly noting it “should not be relied upon.”

The McKinsey debunking is among only the latest of such findings. In 2017, Wharton’s Katherine Klein found that women on corporate boards don’t improve firm performance. A 2012 Quarterly Journal of Economics study showed that Norwegian gender quotas diminished profits. A Harvard Business Review article in 2020 reported no gains from gender or racial diversity, citing increased tensions and conflict.

Diversity training fares no better—a 2022 meta-analysis found it “outpaced the available evidence” of effectiveness. While Thompson suggests it can sometimes work, the sociologists she cites concluded that “antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behaviour or change the workplace.” They also note that “asking people to suppress stereotypes tends to reinforce them–making them more cognitively accessible.” Even worse, the University of Toronto’s Lisa Legault found that DEI-style training can activate bigotry.

So much for morality and economics.

Bereft of evidence, DEI advocates retreat to metaphysical justifications, conjuring invisible “systemic discrimination” by societies supposedly established to advantage white men. Without identifying specific policies, they simply assert that disparities are evidence of racism.

Again, this claim is inconsistent with facts.

A 2023 analysis by Matthew Lau showed that many visible minorities earn more, are more educated, and are overrepresented in professional occupations. Moreover, disparities often disappear after controlling for education—indigenous Canadians with graduate or professional degrees earn more than their non-indigenous counterparts. A massive 2021 study of racial disparities in the UK concluded that geography, family, and culture contribute far more than racism.

These results echo the “success sequence” for avoiding poverty in Western countries: graduate high school, get a full-time job, and marry before having children. Stanford economist Thomas Sowell notes that while American black families face higher poverty, black married-couple families have poverty rates below the national average. He asks, “If black family poverty is caused by ‘systemic racism,’ do racists make an exception for blacks who are married?” Our benighted woke clerics studiously avoid answering, let alone acknowledging, such questions.

These simple, logical arguments are not new—they’ve long been available to anyone valuing reason over faith. We don’t obsessively categorize people by height, hair color, or beauty—why do it for skin color? DEI advocates eagerly claim the benefits of freedom while disregarding its foundation. As the United States nurtures liberty and leads the West back towards merit, Canada remains the Phil Connors of countries—trapped, Groundhog Day-like, in an endless re-enactment of 2021.

But perhaps persuasion has run its course. As Swift might have said, you cannot reason someone out of something they never reasoned into. And in Canada’s incipient DEI hermit kingdom, Swift’s satire feels more like reality with each passing day.