Renzetti | DEI wins the midterms

2026/11/06 Leave a comment

Nice turn of events after all the nastiness:

…It’s not surprising that the women who won gubernatorial races ran on platforms of restoring public education and opposing data centres. They listened to constituents who are worried about their children’s futures and feel powerless to stop big money rushing in to buy up land in their states. Each of the candidates promoted a people-centred vision of what the future could look like.

These candidates didn’t run solely on their identities. They might even disavow the term DEI, which has been effectively degraded to the status of a leper’s bell — but they represent its value anyway. They ran on economic populism, affordability, the price of groceries, protecting reproductive choice, shoring up education. Each of them spent years in the trenches of public service — serving on school boards, public-health agencies, municipal councils. Not one of them is a billionaire. That’s identity too.

The last decade has been exhausting, watching our southern neighbours turn on each other, and on their most vulnerable. We’ve been forced to watch Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue on an endless loop. It seemed like jackal politics might be in the ascendant forever.

That’s why it was so joyful to wake up to new faces, and new possibilities. Big money got defeated in this election, alongside big tech. Expertise, hustle and lived experience won. A different vision of power won.

Source: Opinion | DEI wins the midterms

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Rob Breakenridge: Danielle Smith bans DEI hiring, daring the NDP to oppose

2026/10/30 2 Comments

Virtue signalling as much as substance:

In the current political climate, it’s not likely a coincidence that the Alberta government is prioritizing the fight against woke, progressive politics — specifically, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

As we’ve observed through previous policy initiatives, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is no fan of DEI ideology. Tuesday’s announcement that the government has tabled Bill 33, the justice statutes amendment act, is the latest — and most significant — step to rid the public sector and other government agencies of woke policies.

Among other things, it mandates merit-based hiring within the public sector and other regulated provincial bodies — including post-secondary institutions, municipalities and, potentially, organizations that receive government funding.

The Alberta Human Rights Act will be amended to remove Section 10.1, which currently allows for hiring practices aimed at “the amelioration of the conditions of disadvantaged persons or classes of disadvantaged persons.”

Instead, hiring and promotion decisions will be based on merit and job requirements, with certain, limited exceptions — basically a situation where a specific characteristic is deemed to be a bona fide occupational requirement….

The United Conservatives are more than happy to engage on this political turf, and they’re almost daring the NDP to oppose this bill and to publicly align themselves with DEI policies. It remains to be seen whether the Opposition will take the bait, but it could put New Democrats on the defensive if their aim is to restore such hiring policies and mandates.

Again, the government would seem to have public opinion on its side, and the pendulum is already swinging away from the more aggressive implementation of these policies in recent years.

In fact, that backlash may be so pronounced that the push-back against Bill 33 could turn out to be relatively muted. That would mean a smoother implementation of what the government sees as better policy, but it would also defuse the potency of this issue as a culture war rallying cry for Smith and the UCP.

Source: Rob Breakenridge: Danielle Smith bans DEI hiring, daring the NDP to oppose

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Christopher Dummitt: Racism accusations can’t stifle the truth about diversity

2026/09/14 Leave a comment

Of note (and having read both the Usher and Kaufmann pieces, Kaufmann did control for career length and discipline:

…To be fair, there are real criticisms to make of the report. Usher’s point that the MLI press release foregrounds numbers more dramatic than what the full report supports is a legitimate complaint about framing. But it is definitely not evidence of “the worst piece of social science” anyone has ever seen.

What the MLI report is doing is useful: engaging openly with a debate that much of higher education won’t admit is a debate at all. My guess is plenty of academics privately entertain the possibility that equity doesn’t automatically produce excellence, but they don’t publicly say so because it means risking your reputation. As a result, the only people left asking are on the political right, who can then be dismissed, as Usher shows, simply with an accusation of racism, a charge that delegitimizes the question before it’s even considered.

Usher did exactly this to another MLI report four years ago, one I co-authored with Zachary Patterson of Concordia University. That report surveyed ideological conformity and self-censorship in Canadian universities, including whether professors believed diversity should be valued over their discipline’s core intellectual standards.

For asking that question, we too were accused of racism. Usher published a critique alleging assorted methodological problems; when we replied, showing he’d missed the sections addressing every one of them, he simply didn’t respond.

In the case of my report, and again now with MLI’s “The Equity Excellence Trade-Off,” Usher didn’t fact-check the report. He fact-checked the room — and the room agreed with him. Why wouldn’t it, given what we know, on average, about the ideological make-up of the profession?”

Source: Christopher Dummitt: Racism accusations can’t stifle the truth about diversity

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Key government jobs, such as safety inspectors and intelligence analysts, being prioritized by race

2026/09/04 Leave a comment

Aristotle Foundation continues its critique of Canadian DEI practices without acknowledging the need for government to be more broadly representative of the population it serves. Most recent data highlights increases of visible minorities in particular, reflecting both the EE Act reporting requirements as well as these preferences.

No solid evidence regarding whether quality has suffered or not:

Applicants to some of the most critical jobs in the Canadian federal government, including safety inspectors and intelligence agents, are now being explicitly told that they might be rejected if they don’t fit within an “equity-deserving” identity category.

And in some key federal government departments, 100 per cent of new hires are being screened based on race and identity.

This is all according to a new report by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.

Report authors analyzed 301 government job openings advertised between February and July, 2026. Of those, 42 per cent were subject to “explicit or potential prioritization based on group identity.”

“These postings go beyond signalling an inclusive workplace culture or encouraging applications from particular communities,” it read. “They explicitly disclose that certain groups may or will receive priority consideration in the selection process.” …

According to the Aristotle report, “the expansion of identity-based selection practices risks undermining both the integrity and perceived legitimacy of the federal staffing system.”

The new report is very similar to a 2025 analysis by the Aristotle Foundation that examined hiring practices at Canadian universities.

In that instance, report authors examined 489 university job postings, and found only 12 that didn’t make explicit mention of how identity would be a factor in candidate selection.

“In other words, 98 per cent of academic postings … directly or indirectly discriminated against non-minorities,” it concluded.

While the Government of Canada has tried to encourage the recruitment of women and minority candidates since at least the 1980s, it’s only been within the past 10 years that this has taken the form of mandatory hiring quotas based on race, gender and other “identity” characteristics….

Source: Key government jobs, such as safety inspectors and intelligence analysts, being prioritized by race

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Eric Kaufmann: It costs Canada millions to discriminate against white male academics

2026/09/03 2 Comments

Sensationalist, even if backed up by by available data using the h-index. But there was a need to improve the balance within academia as previous hiring reflected historical patterns and arguably biases, and again arguably going too far in doing so.

That being said, Kaufmann’s point of activist academics in the social sciences has merit:

…The systematic hiring of lower-achieving minorities and women affects the performance of organizations and programs. In order to assess this, we examined the prestigious federal Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program. This is the pinnacle of Canada’s research system, spending $300 million annually on renewable seven-year awards of between $100,000 and $200,000 per year.

Beginning in 2003, and accelerating after 2017, the CRC program implemented an aggressive regime of diversity targets in which institutions that did not meet their quotas for female, minority and Indigenous chairs were threatened with losing their chair allocations. Canada’s Constitution allows for race and sex discrimination, thus CRC openings routinely state that able-bodied straight white males need not apply.

The effects have been dramatic. In 2000, 80 per cent of CRCs were white men. By 2025, just 20 per cent were. Between 2017, when unvarnished EDI was implemented, and 2025, the female share doubled from 30 to 60 per cent while the Black and Indigenous component jumped from two per cent to between 10 and 15 per cent.

We measured the research productivity of Black, Indigenous and female scholars between 2016 and 2025 and discovered that whites and Asians averaged an h-index of 34, Blacks 23 and Indigenous scholars 15. Men averaged 38 to women’s 28. Blacks, First Nations and women are significantly less productive even after controlling for length of career, tier of chair, discipline and year of award. This echoes American results. Moving from a white or Asian chair to a Black or Indigenous chair, or from a male to a female, results in 12 to 15 per cent less research impact.

The effect on the CRC program has been severe. The Canadian government pays chairs to produce research, and — taking into account differences in citing practices by discipline — the h-index is the best unbiased indicator of its impact. Assigning a dollar value to each h-index point, we estimate that EDI hiring costs the CRC program $18 million a year, or six per cent of its budget….

We calculate that money diverted to scholar activism in the social sciences and humanities costs a further six per cent of the CRC budget — and this excludes the tab for administering EDI. This means that around 12 per cent — $36 million of the program’s $300 million annual budget — is wasted on equity and diversity. The EDI “tax” across the Tri-Council agencies’ entire budget of $4.5 billion, not to mention the wider higher education sector, is enormous….

Source: Eric Kaufmann: It costs Canada millions to discriminate against white male academics

Filed under Aboriginal, DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

The Jason Arday story was never going to be just about him. That’s a shame

2026/08/17 1 Comment

Well, it never is. And yes, the focus should be on the institutional failure, not just the individual. Media organizations and commentators need to be more careful, both those on the left defending and those on the right criticizing:

…Black scholars know how a white scholar’s error tends to remain a story about that individual, while a Black scholar’s error often becomes a collective indictment, used to question Black presence in elite institutions more broadly. For some Black scholars, that generalization is part of a co-ordinated political campaign rooted in the belief that Black people do not belong there. Accountability therefore cannot stop with Mr. Arday. Cambridge must answer for its appointment, oversight and response; media organizations and commentators must answer for how allegations and speculation are framed and amplified; and political actors who extend one case to Black scholars collectively must answer for the wider harm they help produce. 

If they fail to do so, there will be lasting damage, because one controversy can easily harden into a presumption about who belongs in the academy.

Malinda S. Smith is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary. Debra Thompson is an associate professor of political science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University.

Source: The Jason Arday story was never going to be just about him. That’s a shame

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Abela | Of course my employers need certain private information — but their questions are getting more uncomfortable, and I think I know why

2026/07/20 Leave a comment

Good distinction between census and employer questions:

…All in, one could perhaps be excused for thinking the right way to answer my employer’s question concerning my “pattern of sexual, emotional, and/or romantic attraction to men, women, and/or people of other genders” is not to tick the “I prefer not to answer” box but to opt instead for a respectful “none of your business” write-in.

Are there places where the reservations I’ve suggested don’t come into view?

Yes: the Canadian census, for example, asks some similarly probing questions — but from my perspective, it has a different standing. The information it requests is part of the relationship of citizenship, in which the government has obligations to the citizenry, and the citizenry has reciprocal obligations to the government. Census data can be crucial for governments to effectively discharge their democratic obligations, as well as to materially and legally protect personhood and dignity. And this data is, in the aggregate, also made available to the broader public.

No such symmetry of right and obligation in an original social contract exists between employees and employers. Within the enabling constraints of law, I sell labour to my employer — nothing more, nothing less.

Perhaps we have here a case of competing interests colliding, with no easy reconciliation in sight between protecting the personal sphere and creating a more just working environment. Even still, we owe it to ourselves not to be blind to the casual erosion of the personal sphere.

Paul Abela is an associate professor of philosophy at Acadia University.

Source: Opinion | Of course my employers need certain private information — but their questions are getting more uncomfortable, and I think I know why

Filed under DEI, employment equity, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Advocates push for ‘central tracking’ of job cuts by equity group as union warns public service gains at risk

2026/05/04 2 Comments

Have forthcoming analysis of the 2024-25 EE desegregated data, representation, hirings, separations, promotions that demonstrates that no negative impact compared to the previous year. So warnings may be overstated and public service may already considering equity impact:

As the public service moves to shed thousands of jobs, unions and a newly formed national coalition say equity gains may be more fragile than they appear, and warn leaving departments to monitor representation creates a “serious gap” in tracking where the cuts fall.

The federal public service entered 2026 looking more representative than it did a decade ago, according to the government’s latest Employment Equity Annual Report. The March report showed racialized workers made up 23.9 per cent of the core public administration in 2024-25, slightly above the 22.7 per cent workforce-availability benchmark. Black employees accounted for 5.1 per cent of the public service, up from 2.8 per cent in 2016-17.

Unions and advocates say the latest report can offer a useful snapshot, but it may not fully capture if employment equity efforts have been damaged. Their concern is less about whether the public service still looks representative on paper than about which workers are most exposed as job cuts deepen.

A newly formed group, the National Employment Equity Council, is calling on the government to require mandatory equity impact assessments before any further staffing decisions. Nicholas Marcus Thompson, its co-chair, warns the government’s current approach means signs of inequities tied to job losses may arrive “too late.”

Though departments have sent workforce adjustment notices tied to 17,000 job cuts, the federal government has not publicly released data to show if equity-seeking groups will be affected….

Andrew Griffith, a former senior federal official who has analyzed Treasury Board employment equity data for years, said the latest data does not support the conclusion that racialized public servants are being disproportionately harmed.

Representation of visible minorities rose slightly in 2024–25, while hiring rates for visible minorities and Indigenous staff remained above their internal representation.

Still, advocates say the TBS response to The Hill Times suggests a worrying approach.

“This doesn’t address the concern,” Thompson said by email. 

“It leaves departments to monitor themselves, with no central tracking, under a law the government has acknowledged is outdated. That’s how inequities continue, and by the time we see it, it’s too late.”…

The council’s central demand is implementation of the 2023 Employment Equity Act Task Force report, including formal recognition of Black workers and 2SLGBTQI+ people as distinct designated groups under the law.

For Thompson, one of the most urgent unresolved issues is how Black workers remain folded into the broader visible minorities category. Under that approach, the government can meet aggregate targets while leaving subgroup disparities untouched, he argued.

“When it is lumped in with everyone else, Black people almost always get left behind,” Thompson said.

Due to ongoing cuts, Thompson said Black workers contacting the council have described fear, declining trust in internal systems, and frustration with what they see as a lack of clarity and transparency in how restructuring decisions are being made….

Source: Advocates push for ‘central tracking’ of job cuts by equity group as union warns public service gains at risk

Filed under DEI, Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

2026/04/20 Leave a comment

Arguing for purges and inspired by Orban and Trump. Countering one set of excesses by a reverse set of excesses not helpful:

…It can be overcome, but that starts close to home, with provincial governments actively taking back what is rightfully theirs and installing onside allies — not thoughtless centrist donors who fear alienation from their Liberal-voting friends more than they want to win. It takes a careful and concerted effort to take back professional schools, not by defunding them, but by funding academic chairs to break the monoculture, provide role models to onside students, and provide alternative experts to lean on during contentious policy debates. The federal party can’t do much of this, but it can certainly build relationships with onside provinces to make it happen — or hammer them for failing to live up to their responsibility.

It means firing every activist and replacing every Liberal appointee at the top of any public department, every member of a public board, and abolishing those that exist only to prop up Liberal ideology. That means abandoning gender and anti-racism initiatives, something that even Alberta and Ontario struggle to do.

At this point, defund-everything libertarianism is a gambling strategy: it puts all the movement’s eggs into the basket that is the party’s election platform, and takes a crisis in the Liberal party to have any viability at all. In the off-chance it does result in victory, it is incapable of perpetuating itself.

Aimless tax and budget cuts don’t build movements or develop the careers of up-and-comers; they actually impede your future performance by depriving you of the necessary pipeline of manpower required to run complex institutions for years to come. “Just go to the private sector” doesn’t work, by the way, when the major corporations and companies have some kind of Liberal dependency, which is true for all the major consulting firms, law firms, pipeline companies and banks.

The wisdom that institutional control is the easy path to victory was internalized by the Liberals long ago. It’s time Conservatives started thinking the same way. It won’t deliver overnight, but that’s what it’s going to take to build a machine that can win in the absence of a catastrophic Liberal mistake. Anything less is just rolling the dice.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

The right should not shy away from doing this when they regain power, which is hopefully a matter of when, not if. A government that refuses to stack the deck with its own people is effectively subsidizing a sort of Viet Cong within the state it supposedly heads. As the Americans learned painfully in the Vietnam War, merely shrinking the size of the Viet Cong with napalm did not eliminate the threat. Familiar or friendly and trusted people can be empowered a great deal within the bounds of the law.

Allies should be rewarded, and parallel institutions should supplant or compete with those that already exist. For example, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper made the mistake of not doing more to support the Sun News Network, which might have blossomed into a true conservative institution in the private sector.

§source: Geoff Russ: Orbán gave Conservatives a blueprint for capturing institutions

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

2025 Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey

2026/04/20 Leave a comment

Ironic timing, released at the same time as the Fox ethics scandal:

…Fairness

In 2025, more than three quarters (76%) of employees agreed that the process of selecting a person for a position is done fairly, consistent with 2023 (77%).

Employees who perceived the selection process as unfair were asked to describe how. The main reasons cited were a perception that appointments in their work unit are not transparent, that they are based on “who you know” and that some appointees have benefitted from nepotism or favoritism.

Expanding on the perceptions of fairness in staffing processes, a new question on non-advertised appointments was introduced in 2025. Overall, 71% of employees agreed that non-advertised appointments are done fairly. The main reasons cited by respondents who perceived non-advertised appointments as unfair were that non-advertised appointments depend on who you know (74%) and that they are not transparent (70%).

Statements related to fairness20232025
Process of selecting a person for a position is done fairly77%76%
Non-advertised appointments are done fairlyn/a71%
Reasons2025
Non-advertised appointments depend on who you know74%
Non-advertised appointments are not transparent70%
Non-advertised appointments are not based on merit48%
Non-advertised appointments are never fair30%
Non-advertised appointments are not inclusive28%
Other12%

Employment equity and equity-seeking groups’ perceptions on fairness

With the exception of women, all employment equity groups expressed less positive perceptions than their respective comparator groups.

Employees identifying as two-spirit and intersex had less positive perceptions of both statements related to fairness compared to all other identities

Employees identifying as another gender had the least positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process of all groups

Members of visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples and persons with disabilities had less positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process than their respective comparator groups

Members of religious communities had less positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process compared with employees who are not members of religious communities

Employees who are separated, divorced or widowed had less positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process compared with employees who are married, living common-law or single

Employees identifying as asexual and pansexual had less positive perceptions of fairness compared with all other sexual orientations

Source: 2025 Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey

Filed under DEI, Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts