Black and Griffith: Visible minority women are still sidelined in competitive ridings

2026/02/18 2 Comments

Our latest. Conclusion:

…In other words, party candidate selection incorporates affinity effects that give preference to visible minority candidates for all major parties in these ridings. Given this, it is less surprising that studies of election outcomes indicate that affinity effects are less important than “candidate competitiveness, Canada’s first past the post electoral system, and local context,” Elections Canada says, because those effects are effectively baked in at the candidate nomination stage.

This indicates positive discrimination for visible minority candidates in these ridings and the possible converse in ridings with lower numbers of visible minorities, largely rural ridings.

While one can make the crude case that nominating more visible minority women candidates would allow federal political parties to tick off two diversity boxes at once, the evidence indicates that this is not the case: women visible minority candidates do indeed have a higher percentage chance of being sacrificial lambs. This suggests they do experience biases in the political process across two fronts, as both women and visible minorities.

To encourage improved representation, the political parties should adopt a transparency approach similar to Senate Bill S-283 would require each party to provide annual information on the policies and programs they have enacted to increase the representation of designated groups (women, visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples and persons with disabilities).

This could be accomplished by the chief electoral officer administering a voluntary self-identification questionnaire to nominated candidates, thus allowing for post-election reporting on candidate and MP diversity.

Canada’s federal political parties may resist this transparency-based approach, but its use in federally regulated industries and the public service for close to 30 years has proven effective.

Source: Visible minority women are still sidelined in competitive ridings

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HESA: Merit Wars

2026/02/10 Leave a comment

.To watch:

..…The question is: how is the Ford Government going to approach all of this?


As near as I can tell, it has four options.

It can take stock of the full variety of pathways and adjudication of merit and say “eh, this is all too complicated/post-secondary institutes are doing a decent job”. It should go without saying that this is almost certainly the least likely outcome.

It can leave contextualized admissions alone but try to limit the practice of special pathways for Indigenous, racialized or otherwise underserved students. That is, it might give a pass to programs where 10-20% of places are reserved for certain underserved groups, but at the same time say “75% in reserved pathways (as TMU proposes) is too much”. I suspect this is the likeliest option.

It can leave contextualized admissions alone but eliminate pathways entirely. This would mean eliminating things like the U of T’s Indigenous Student Application Program and many other programs like it. My read of Conservatives’ views on this is that they tend to be warier of Indigeneity initiatives than they are of critiquing EDI as a whole, seeing more justice in the claims advanced by Indigenous communities than they do for Black ones (for instance). I think this is less likely than option 2 but would not rule it out.

It could seek to eliminate both pathways and contextualized admissions and tell institutions that the only thing they should use is high school grades.  

That last one might sound radical, but pay attention to what the Ford government has been doing in secondary schools, and in particular the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which runs a large number of schools which were formerly selective (e.g. Schools of the Arts, Special STEM focus schools, International Baccalaureates, etc.). The selectivity process, naturally, was criticized because marks are often correlated with family income, and so 3 years ago, at the peak of the EDI wave, the TDSB decided to abandon selections and make all these schools lottery-based, which in theory at least would make access to these programs more equitable.

I have no idea whether this policy met its goal or not; to my knowledge there has not been a publicly released study on this. But it caused a number of people to freak out. Accusations of penalizing students who worked hard, of “devaluing merit” began to circulate. And there was some force to those arguments, particularly (IMHO) for elite Fine Arts programs where students no longer had to submit portfolios as evidence of talent/interest, which I think is a bit odd. I have never seen any surveys about this issue, but my guess is that it rankled particularly hard among parents in the entitled upper-middle class and aspirational Chinese families, since these are the groups that tend to do best in a “marks-only” system (for more on how Chinese parents view contextual ideas of merit, do listen to my podcast interview with Ruixue Jia, co-author of The Highest Exam from last fall).

And so, Ford government to the rescue! The government instructed the TDSB to ditch the policy, to loud applause from Trustee Weidong Pei, who gained office campaigning against lotteries. Replacing the lottery system? Well, according to the TDSB “Applicants will be seated based on their overall applicant score; a combination of select report card marks connected to their program of choice and an evaluated demonstration of knowledge and skills”, which sounds a lot like the previous marks-only based system, with all the class-and culture-based biases that brings. 

In other words, if the TDSB’s experience is anything to go by, the Ford government will go straight to option 4. And if that happens, it will be a seriously contentious affair since almost certainly it will mean a big reduction in students from underserved groups getting into high-demand programs. 

Now, none of this is going to happen in this admissions cycle (at least I bloody hope not). The likeliest scenario is that the government makes a move in the spring or summer, in order to put new rules in place – whatever those rules end up being – in place for the fall 2027 admissions cycle. So, we have a few months left before the wars start. But when they start, it won’t be pretty.

Source: Merit Wars

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“How Trudeau Liberals’ DEI obsession helped kill Canadian culture”

2026/01/26 Leave a comment



Good long and disturbing read:

…Some blamed a misreading of DEI as “Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion,” or the Canada Council’s zealous “decolonization” agenda; others noted that with only about 25 per cent of editorial staff male, female editors naturally preferred female perspectives; and some disputed that White male authors were disadvantaged at all, or, if true, that it mattered. Whatever the cause, male writers appear to have fallen out of fashion. The 2025 Sobey Arts Award shortlisted twenty-six women and twelve Indigenous artists among thirty nominees — none of the four men were White. Recent Giller and Governor General’s prizes show similar trends: roughly two-thirds of winners were women, and only one White man among them. These results likely reflect publishing priorities rather than overt bias, yet they signal a profound cultural shift.

Fundamental to any program to resurrect Canada’s book business is the necessity to reform its major cultural institutions. Over the last decade or more, they have become deeply politicized, pursuing a specific and polarizing social and economic agenda. They have turned it into a wedge that excludes certain people from consideration, certain forms of address from polite society, and certain manners of speaking as incompatible with good behaviour. The penalties for violating these often ambiguous standards can be devastating. These strictures have narrowed the boundaries of discourse and cast a chill on what can be said, written, or shown, radically restricting artists’ freedom of expression.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion were never supposed to evolve in this direction. Properly understood, it is not a negative, punishing exercise in ideological purity, but a formula for discovering and celebrating what had previously been arbitrarily suppressed. Murray Sinclair, the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, made the point explicitly when he explained that reconciliation was not about tearing down the statues of John A. Macdonald, but raising up statues to Big Bear. It is a program that calls for a deep understanding of both the good and the bad in historical figures and events. It assumes that people are sufficiently sophisticated to hold two thoughts in their heads at the same time. Some of the things Macdonald did were good; some were bad. There is no need to choose sides, only to see clearly what happened. That is precisely why it was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

When major funders like the Canada Council set out to “decolonize” Canadian literature, they are pursuing a political agenda as surely as the censors of the Soviet Union insisting that all writing conform to the dictates of “socialist realism.” When tenured bureaucrats can harass people for wrongthink, and when it’s possible to lose essential public support for straying beyond the boundaries of correct and morally appropriate thinking, creators and cultural workers will be cautious, often second-guessing themselves. Great work flourishes in environments where people can take risks, knowing that the worst consequence will be failure, not penury and banishment.

The DEI project in Canada’s cultural agencies, government, publishing houses, and media needs to be recalibrated. It needs to focus on its original aims of combatting racism, sexism, and intolerance. It needs to seek truth, not for the purpose of punishment, but for learning. When mistakes are made, when the wrong word or hurtful language is thoughtlessly used, it needs to be treated as a teachable moment, not as a call to puritanical vengeance. It needs to start from an assumption that the overwhelming majority of Canadians are people of good will. Do they sometimes make cruel mistakes? Of course. The important thing is to learn together and bank the fires of self-righteous rage.

— A former executive vice-president of the CBC, Richard Stursberg has written widely on Canadian media and cultural policy. His previous books include The Tower of Babble, named by the Globe & Mail as one of the best books of the year, and The Tangled Garden, which was short-listed for the Donner Prize for the best book on public policy written by a Canadian.

Source: “How Trudeau Liberals’ DEI obsession helped kill Canadian culture”

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ICYMI – Jamie Sarkonak: The CRTC’s top-down diversity mandate comes for Big Streaming ICYMI

2025/12/03 2 Comments

While some like Sarkonak find this ill-thought, there is a history behind these initiatives as many government programs overly favoured previous beneficiaries or incumbents rather than ensuring better representation. And having good or better data is a basic (the Employment Equity Act relative success is arguably largely based on public diversity reporting:

…In addition, the Broadcasting Act now states that the broadcasting system should support programming created by and for non-white communities. While it didn’t outright state that quotas and demographic tracking were now required, that’s increasingly how it’s being interpreted.

In its decision to mandate the collection of diversity statistics, the CRTC notes that some television and radio broadcasters are currently required to include statistics on the presence of women in “key production roles” and track spending on content by Indigenous and official language minority producers.

It considers those data collection initiatives a success, and thus, “the Commission is of the view that the report lends itself well to be expanded to gather information on all equity-deserving groups (specifically, racialized people, people with disabilities and individuals who identify as 2SLGBTQI+, in addition to women).”

Big online streamers operating in Canada under this new regime will have to submit these diversity statistics as part of this. The current lack of data, the CRTC complained, “results in a partial picture of production spending and representation of equity-deserving groups in the production sector.” That information is important because it helps to “monitor compliance and trends and to ensure policy goals are met, especially when it comes to representation of equity-deserving groups.”

We aren’t at the point where the CRTC is ordering Netflix, HBO and Paramount+ to spend a minimum proportion of their production budgets on “diverse” shows and production teams, but we’re awfully close. In 2022, the CRTC ordered the CBC to do just that with its budget for commissioned TV and documentary programs. This year, the English side of CBC was required to dedicate 30 per cent of spending in that category to “diverse” production teams.

Last year, the CRTC also announced that it would be taking a five per cent cut from online streamers to redistribute to industry groups in Canada whose missions include the advancement of DEI in broadcasting. And in July, the CRTC tweaked its funding formula for online news to incentivize coverage of “diverse” communities….

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The CRTC’s top-down diversity mandate comes for Big Streaming

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Conservative MPs denounce ‘Liberal racism’ and DEI during Jamil Jivani event

2025/11/21 Leave a comment

Good example of some conservative perspectives on DEI, mirroring some of excesses of liberal perspectives:

….Jivani’s Tuesday event was primarily a broadside at progressive ideologies writ large, but it also referenced federal programs and initiatives. The Prime Minister’s Office was not immediately available for comment on the event, though Jivani said all Liberal MPs were invited to attend his forum, however none took part. 

Jivani — who spoke about his upbringing as the son of an Irish-Scottish mother and a Kenyan father — said people like him “should not be treated as charity cases” and should not be subjected to “lowered” standards to access opportunities.

“I also stand here in opposition to Liberal racism because I completely reject the twisted narrative of Canadian history that liberal elites use to justify the open discrimination against Canadians of European descent and their children. Your heritage in this country should never be used as a weapon against you,” the Bowmanville—Oshawa North MP said, eliciting applause. 

“It’s also my belief that together, we can end Liberal racism by speaking very truthfully and bluntly about what it is, and highlighting the ways that it manipulates our society and divides people against one another.”

In service of that goal, Jivani ceded the stage to three Conservative MPs to share their views on the subject: Calgary’s Shuvaloy Majumdar and two rising stars within Tory caucus, Newmarket-Aurora’s Sandra Cobena and Richmond Hill South’s Vincent Neil Ho….

Source: Conservative MPs denounce ‘Liberal racism’ and DEI during Jamil Jivani event

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Parkin: Spot the backlash [DEI]

2025/11/12 Leave a comment

More interesting analysis that bucks some of the commentary:

…But maybe we’re not looking closely enough. Thanks to the support of our survey partners at the Diversity Institute and the Future Skills Centre, the survey sample allows us to narrow the focus. Follow along in the chart below, which starts with the responses for employed adults in general, but then zeroes in on gender, racial identity, sexual orientation and age.2

Can you see the backlash taking shape? No, me neither.

Certainly, opinions are influenced by age. Older people are less likely to say that they’ve been positively affected by DEI policies (this holds true for older people in general, not just older white men). But opinions mostly shift to the neutral position (no impact). The proportion of white, heterosexual men age 50 and older who say their own opportunities have suffered as a result of DEI is only five percentage points higher than the average.

Source: Spot the backlash

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Jamie Sarkonak: Carney’s budget is more subtle on wokeness, but the agenda is still strong

2025/11/06 Leave a comment

Noting the change but discounting the extent:

Tuesday’s budget wasn’t like those of the high Trudeau years, encrusted with identity politics at every turn. But the spirit of the old regime lives on under Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has opted for a deficit of $78.3 billion along with the continuation of social justice programs and diversity mandates.

This year, one-time “investments” are numerous. The federal anti-racism secretariat — the entity that spurred a government-wide clampdown on forced diversity and hiring quotas in Ottawa in 2021, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement — is getting $2 million in 2025-26, and nothing else after that. The Canadian Heritage program for DEI in sport is getting $8 million in 2025-26, and, again, nothing afterwards.

Even better, the Liberals are spending $28 million over the next two years on Canadian Heritage’s Digital Citizen Initiative, which has been around for years now. It could arguably be called a propaganda program, as it essentially involves funding government-aligned influencers to dispel “disinformation” and researchers to track “anti-Liberal” media, among other things. This budget claims that the funding tap will shut off in 2027 … but we’ll see about that.

The National Film Board, which restricts non-Indigenous individuals from using archive footage for commercial purposes, is getting a $4 million bonus next year. Federal museums, which have been slammed with diversity mandates in the Liberal era, will get $12 million.

Identity-based business funding is back, as well. The federal women’s entrepreneurship program is supposed to get $39 million next year, with nothing to come after. Black entrepreneurs, meanwhile, were told in September that they were getting another $189 million over the next five years for race-based business funding (this wasn’t written into the budget documents, however).

How many of these programs will actually end in a year or two, it’s hard to say. It’s easy for the government change its mind next budget season — better, even, because doing this helps keep the projected deficit lower….

Perhaps most disappointing of all is the continued existence of Women and Gender Equality Canada, which will be getting $500 million over the years 2026 to 2030. The department exists to funnel government money to Liberal-aligned social justice organizations and create new crises relating to menstruation, among other things, and really doesn’t have a point in an age where gender equality has largely been achieved.

Regardless of any spending cuts, the core philosophy of the Liberal government has remained the same since 2015: spend on the mosaic model of culture; prioritize supports on the basis of identity and privilege. Under Carney, it’s no different.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Carney’s budget is more subtle on wokeness, but the agenda is still strong

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Jamie Sarkonak: Liberal diversity mandates must end if we’re to solve the judge shortage

2025/11/03 2 Comments

Not sure if there is real evidence for the assertion “focus on diversity necessarily comes at the expense of excellence” and citing one example rather than a broader sample does not cut it. The shortages assertion may or may not be true, as the government has a record in many areas of not meeting targets and levels:

…This tends to involve standard-bending because the pool of bench-eligible senior lawyers is going to be more white and more male than the country as a whole. The senior tiers of any profession reflect the demographics of students in professional schools 40 years ago, not today. While excellent candidates can be found from all walks of life, the Liberal focus on diversity necessarily comes at the expense of excellence. And because the Liberals are obsessed with maintaining an acceptable ratio of white male to “diverse” appointees, we can infer that they’d rather leave some seats empty until a correct number of diverse judges can be put forward at the same time. Shortages ensue….

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Liberal diversity mandates must end if we’re to solve the judge shortage

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CBC hired 84 percent racialized, Indigenous, or disabled while having job vacancies for top talent: Internal report

2025/10/31 Leave a comment

Telling that the commentary only mentions the overall diversity numbers for context at the bottom of the article, highlighting the representation gaps that CBC like other organizations are trying to address:

The CBC far exceeded its “equity representation” target in the last fiscal year, with 84.1 percent of new hires being “Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, and racialized people,” according to the public broadcaster’s new corporate report. In the “reflecting contemporary Canada” subsection, the report shows the CBC had aimed for 65 percent of new hires to fall within the three groups, but surpassed it by 19 percentage points.

Some employment lawyers believe the CBC’s fixation on race and disabilities in its hiring process is limiting the broadcaster from accurately reflecting the Canadian population, and could fall into hiring discrimination.

“Moving away from merit-based hiring is a disaster no matter what the makeup of your organization is,” said Puneet Tiwari, a Toronto-based employment lawyer. “If an employer wants a more diverse workplace, it should be an equal opportunity employer, but still hire based on merit. As an Indo-Canadian whose grandparents came here in the 60s, I’ve seen more representation across all media outlets.”

CBC hiring doesn’t appear to reflect the overall ethnic demographics of the country. Canada’s most recent census data from 2021 showed that approximately 4.9 percent of Canadians were Indigenous, 26.5 were visible minorities (with 67.4 percent being white), and 27 percent had disabilities. The country’s demographics and population has dramatically changed in the last four years through immigration, however, increasing from 38.1 million in 2021 to 41.7 million in 2025.

…Out of CBC’s total workforce as of June 2025, employees self-identifying as Indigenous were 2.1 percent, 11.3 percent were persons with disabilities, and 20.7 were visible minorities….

Source: CBC hired 84 percent racialized, Indigenous, or disabled while having job vacancies for top talent: Internal report

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Most Canadian workers support equity efforts despite some backlash: report

2025/10/31 Leave a comment

Of note. Not clear from the article if any significant variations by types and sectors of employment:

A majority of Canadian workers say they view equity, diversity and inclusion favourably, according to a new report, even in the face of some backlash. 

The report from the Future Skills Centre and researchers at the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University found that 54 per cent of Canadian workers view EDI favourably, while 27 per cent were neutral, and 16 per cent viewed it negatively. The survey was conducted by Environics Institute.

Workplace EDI initiatives in Canada and the U.S. have faced “intensifying scrutiny and backlash” amid policy shifts in the U.S., which have had spillover effects in Canada, the report said.

“Most Canadians do not view it (EDI) as a matter of political correctness or wokeness. They view it as an important foundation of Canadian values and culture,” said Wendy Cukier, one of the report’s authors and a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing evidence that most businesses and non-profits and government organizations recognize that it’s fundamental to their success, particularly in times of disruptions.”  

In January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order putting a stop to diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the U.S. government.

Some companies have scaled back equity-related efforts as well, the report said, highlighting moves by Meta, Amazon and Target in the U.S. In Canada, the authors highlighted changes Shopify Inc. made by disbanding its dedicated diversity team and law firm McCarthy Tétrault pausing a specialized hiring program for Black and Indigenous law students. …

Source: Most Canadian workers support equity efforts despite some backlash: report

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