Staley: The idea of equity deserves to die

While I remain critical of the role of these envoys and believe that Amira Elghawaby’s activist background was not helpful compared to the more professional approach of Deborah Lyons (activists obviously disagree), this criticism is over the top. And not even mentioning her name?

And greater equity, not just equality, should be the objective, but without some of the excesses of previous and current policies:

Mercifully and at long last, the corrosive movement of DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) seems to be dying in Canadian public life.

Last week, the federal government announced the elimination of the Special Representative for Combatting Islamophobia, along with the federal office for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, which had sat vacant since its last special envoy, Deborah Lyons, left the role last July. Both positions are to be replaced by a new Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion.

To be clear, it is more likely than not that the new advisory council becomes an unproductive mess, and the government is clearly not doing enough to combat antisemitism in particular. Ottawa has never lacked for panels that generate language rather than outcomes. Still, despite that likelihood, there are reasons for optimism.

The first is that the former Special Representative for Combatting Islamophobia had become emblematic of the Liberal government’s equivocal moral relativism when it came to tackling the surge in antisemitic hate post-October 7th. Rather than acknowledge that reality, the Trudeau government appointed a provocateur who consistently downplayed antisemitic incidents, advocated for harsher criticism by the government against Jewish organizations, and advocated for radical and corrosive “anti-Palestinian racism” training….

She was a divisive and corrosive figure whom Canadian taxpayers should never have been footing the bill for.

The second reason for optimism lies in the government’s quiet replacement of the term “equity” in its new advisory council with the older, more conventional “equality.”

Equity is not an extension of equality, but rather a perversion of it.

For centuries, democratic and pluralistic societies moved haltingly toward a simple moral standard. That people should be judged as individuals. The law should be blind to race, religion, and background. Citizens should rise or fall based on the content of their character rather than the circumstances of their birth.

Equity inverted that standard.

Under equity, individuals were reclassified as representatives of groups. Moral judgment shifted from conduct to identity. Group grievance replaced personal responsibility. Group blame replaced individual guilt. The very idea of a shared civic identity gave way to a system of competing moral claims, mediated by mobs of activists, and increasingly, by the state.

The Islamophobia file crystallized this inversion. One form of prejudice was elevated into a bespoke federal portfolio, while others were absorbed into broader categories or left to existing law. The distinction was never coherently justified. Its effect was to teach Canadians that equality before the law was no longer the governing principle.¹

The removal of the Islamophobia envoy matters because it signals a retreat from that model, and the elimination of one of the most prominent and corrosive examples of moral relativism of the Trudeau era.

The new Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion may disappoint. It may produce vague language, cautious recommendations, or even foster more division. But the symbolic shift away from equity, and away from offices designed to institutionalize group grievance, still matters.

DIE is ending because it reversed the moral logic of liberal democracy and, in so doing, exhausted its credibility.

Bad ideas rarely die the public death they deserve. They simply stop being defended, then stop being funded, then stop being mentioned.

That, for now, is progress.

Source: The idea of equity deserves to die