Juno News - BC universities are recruiting, but only if you’re black

00:00:00.000 Black-only hiring? Well, that was a first one for me. Simon Fraser University is currently

00:00:05.980 looking to fill 15 faculty and 15 staff positions, but only if you're Black. And apparently, 0.72

00:00:13.340 the BC Human Rights Commission fully endorses discrimination if they believe that it'll

00:00:18.600 right past wrongs. Whatever you do, don't call it discrimination, though. I'm joined today by

00:00:24.600 Mark Mielke, president of the Aristotle Foundation, to examine why this matters. The Aristotle

00:00:30.680 Foundation have conducted some really great studies on the topic of DEI and systemic racism,

00:00:34.880 so I thought it'd be interesting to talk to them. The real question is, again,

00:00:39.880 is Canada really systemically racist? I'm Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.

00:00:45.020 Mark, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really looking forward to talking about DEI.

00:01:01.060 Thanks for having me, Melanie.

00:01:02.880 So the Aristotle Foundation has done some really great work on DEI hiring, specifically in academia,

00:01:09.880 and the reason I invited you on today is because I saw something that was new to me,

00:01:15.620 which was a job posting at Simon Fraser University, which essentially is race-restricted. So I'd seen

00:01:22.640 where it might be we're encouraging people to apply who are maybe from a minority category,

00:01:29.100 so gender identity, sexuality, and so forth. But this was, for me personally, the first time that I saw

00:01:33.560 this job advertising for self-identified Black people, and to apply this tenure-track position,

00:01:40.380 which was in the Department of Philosophy, the applicants had to do an applicant demographic

00:01:46.120 survey, so they had to, I guess, identify as Black, and I presume that if you identified as something

00:01:52.140 else, you would get rejected. So at the first point of call, your race seems to be the first 0.87

00:01:56.340 criteria, even though it does say that that will be considered amongst other things,

00:02:02.000 like people's experience and qualifications. So the Aristotle Foundation, back in January,

00:02:08.940 did a really interesting study looking at nearly, I think it was nearly 500 academic job postings,

00:02:16.380 where 98%, I believe, of the posting directly or indirectly discriminated against certain groups.

00:02:24.920 So I want to talk about that. But before, I know I talk about DEI a lot on this show,

00:02:30.200 but I would love you or us to set our terms, and if you would describe what DEI means to you and to

00:02:36.860 the study. Sure. Well, diversity, equity, and inclusion is kind of a modern version of what in

00:02:45.740 Canada was called employment equity, started in the 1980s by the Brian Mulroney government,

00:02:49.720 which was, in essence, another form of affirmative action, which is a US term, of course, for

00:02:55.120 post civil rights era policy that is preferential in hiring. All of it, in my view, comes from,

00:03:01.340 I think, mostly people who are sincere, and good hearted and think, listen, there's been

00:03:05.640 discrimination in history, somehow we need to make up for it. I disagree with the last part,

00:03:09.660 or mostly you can't make up for discrimination that happened 50 years ago, or 100 years ago,

00:03:13.560 or 200 years ago, the people that discriminated and those discriminated against are long gone.

00:03:18.040 And so preferential hiring policy in the present just creates new victims of discrimination. That's

00:03:26.120 the problem with modern DEI movement or policy. Plus, there's assumptions of the economy is kind

00:03:35.540 of a fixed pie, therefore, past success or privilege must mean that people today are benefiting from that.

00:03:41.840 And my response to that is, sure, if you're the great granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller,

00:03:45.860 I guess past privilege means something. But for most of us, really, the choices we make in our

00:03:52.740 lives or our parents' choices are much more impactful. And lastly, look, there's a lot of

00:03:59.440 conflation between personal prejudice and what's called institutional discrimination or systemic racism,

00:04:06.040 right? So advocates of DEI say we are systemically racist or we're institutionally racist. And I think,

00:04:14.260 and I think it's quite clear when you read their work, including the scholarly work, what they do is they

00:04:19.200 conflate personal prejudice. You can find a bigot online or in your personal life. They conflate personal

00:04:24.500 prejudice with actual institutional discrimination. And there are many examples of institutional

00:04:29.300 discrimination in history. The best example or clearest example is 100 years ago. If you were Chinese in San

00:04:35.640 Francisco of Chinese ancestry, even if you're an American citizen and you were born in the United

00:04:40.220 States, whites would discriminate against you. You couldn't go to their hospital in San Francisco.

00:04:45.320 The Chinese community built their own hospital. So that sort of thing is institutional discrimination.

00:04:51.600 The 1950s in Canada, before the early 1950s, you could discriminate against someone who's black and

00:04:57.480 housing and accommodation. But Ontario began to pass laws against that in the early 1950s.

00:05:03.300 And yet, in 2025, we still have people say Canada is a systemically racist society. No.

00:05:10.260 Again, you can find a few bigots. It's not the same thing. So I think we have to be very careful

00:05:14.740 about how we're defining diversity, equity, and inclusion. Because again, even the term diversity,

00:05:20.120 who could be against diversity? Do I want someone not here from another country who doesn't look like 1.00

00:05:24.800 me? No. I think immigration is a reality of human history in most cases is beneficial. Not all 1.00

00:05:30.620 distinctions need to be made. But DEI as a policy has basically become what you just described at SFU,

00:05:37.100 a way to discriminate against someone who's the wrong skin color in today's society, as opposed to

00:05:42.320 what the wrong skin color was a century ago. It's all illiberal then and now. It's anti-merit. It's 1.00

00:05:48.180 anti-individual.

00:05:49.320 Yeah, I want to touch on this idea of systemic discrimination, because we're told this is to

00:05:54.540 rectify systemic discrimination. But even in the advert, it refers to the BC Human Rights Code

00:06:00.620 section 42, which I was a bit unfamiliar with the BC Code. So I had a look. And it's apparently

00:06:06.060 colloquially known as the Affirmative Action Programs section of the BC Human Rights Code. And it's not

00:06:11.940 considered discrimination in this section. If a program or a selection criteria for employment,

00:06:17.140 for example, is designed to improve conditions for disadvantaged groups. But the key point here

00:06:22.860 being groups, so disadvantaged groups of people. But is that not creating systemic discrimination

00:06:31.620 in and of itself by doing that? But the other question is, are these people who are applying for

00:06:38.860 a tenure track position, so these are people with PhDs, a lot of education, a lot of opportunities,

00:06:44.820 are they really disadvantaged at this point?

00:06:49.540 Well, there's a couple of things going on there. So again, I think getting a little bit into the

00:06:56.300 data weeds helps here. Look, it's ironic that Simon Fraser University would choose Black Canadians 1.00

00:07:05.720 as the marginalized group. The history of actually most Black immigration to Canada,

00:07:12.000 it was mostly not slavery, it was those escaping slavery. Even in California, or British Columbia,

00:07:18.620 ironically, the James Douglas, who later became governor of the colony of British Columbia.

00:07:25.700 But at the time, I believe, I can't remember the exact title, but you know, it was living in

00:07:29.420 Victoria and was, you know, whatever the title was given to him of the day. Black Californians,

00:07:34.340 there was about, and I wrote about this in a number of places, but there was like 30 or 40 Black

00:07:40.180 Californians that emigrated to British Columbia in the late 1850s, early 1960s. They came there

00:07:45.960 because they were escaping discrimination in California. And they wrote to their friends back

00:07:50.080 in California, what a wonderful place Victoria was. They met the Archbishop, they met James Douglas.

00:07:56.420 In two years, I believe they could become full citizens, because this was a British colony,

00:08:00.880 right? British Columbia was. And they didn't like discrimination against Black Americans or anyone.

00:08:05.540 And so that was the early history of pre-colony or pre-province British Columbia. And so for Simon

00:08:12.280 Fraser University now to say, you know, this is a historically marginalized group is actually

00:08:16.180 not totally accurate when it comes to Black Canadians. Now, the other part of this is people 0.99

00:08:21.300 will look at averages, Melanie, and say, well, okay, but Black Canadians on average earn less than

00:08:26.460 white Canadians. Yes. And the same is true of Indigenous Canadians. But at the top of the heap in

00:08:32.280 terms of incomes and wealth in Canada are Asian Canadians or those of Asian, you know, ethnicity or

00:08:37.840 ancestry in Canada. But why the difference between the averages? And the averages tell you very little,

00:08:44.060 by the way. And this is where people get the mistaken impression. If you account for, if you adjust for

00:08:49.400 education or immigration status, right, or rural versus urban, you will find that the divide, the income

00:08:58.440 divide pretty much disappears. Let me give you a clear example. Indigenous Canadians versus other 1.00

00:09:02.940 Canadians. If you're a full-time in your 20s, you work full year, full-time, you get a bachelor's

00:09:08.580 degree, there is no difference between your income and that of other Canadians. The averages don't help

00:09:14.740 because, for example, a greater proportion of Indigenous Canadians live in rural areas. And people in

00:09:19.000 rural areas on average always make less. White, Indigenous, Black, Asian ancestry, so on and so forth.

00:09:24.800 And education levels, the most highly educated cohort in Canada are those of Asian ethnicity,

00:09:31.420 Japanese Canadians, Chinese Canadians historically. And so you have to account for those inputs, so to

00:09:37.460 speak. It becomes a bit, you know, wonky, but you have to look at that. If you just look at averages and

00:09:42.180 say that group must be discriminated against, let's suppose we get, you know, a million immigrants from,

00:09:47.880 you know, country purple in the next year and it's a very poor country and they don't have an education

00:09:52.680 and they don't know English or French, we would expect their incomes to be lower than other

00:09:57.300 Canadians or even other new immigrants as opposed to someone coming from, say, Hong Kong or Singapore.

00:10:03.800 So the problem with DEI and Simon Fraser's picking up people based on ethnicity, skin color in this

00:10:11.480 case, et cetera, et cetera, is that they don't look at the reasons why there are differences in the

00:10:16.160 averages. And once you do that, it's not that discrimination could never impact incomes. I mean,

00:10:20.920 Thomas Old has written about this a lot in the United States, most famously. But you tease out

00:10:27.900 the data and it doesn't show. Yeah. Well, it's not just Simon Fraser. BC does seem to be a hub for

00:10:32.540 race-restricted hiring. UBC and the aerosol... It's across the country. Well, according to a study

00:10:38.880 from January, a lot of the race restriction comes primarily from BC, UBC being one out of every five

00:10:45.740 applicants, one out of every five academic job posting explicitly restricting to race. So we're

00:10:53.580 not talking about DEI strategies or anything like that, but race-restricting or identity restrictions.

00:10:58.540 And I'm curious, in the study, it also explains that this threatens academic freedom. But why would

00:11:04.620 that matter to the average person? Okay. So universities are hiring base, restricting race, 0.90

00:11:09.260 and academics are complaining that it's restricting their academic freedom. But why does that matter to

00:11:13.200 the average person? Sure. Well, there's a number of things. Yes. In the reference to the study we did

00:11:19.140 in January, you're correct. UBC was probably the worst offender in terms of active discrimination.

00:11:23.200 But what we found is out of the 500 job ads across the country, the 10 largest universities,

00:11:30.180 one in each province, we found that, yeah, as you mentioned earlier, about 98% have some mention of

00:11:35.700 DEI, either just as a, you know, what's your view on this, when you apply, give us a statement,

00:11:40.400 or we adhere to this. But active discrimination, yeah, UBC was right up there at the top.

00:11:47.220 Why should it matter to the average person? Well, for a number of reasons.

00:11:50.280 One, you should not be discriminated against as an individual. Let's suppose you're 22,

00:11:55.020 25, and you're the wrong skin color, and you can't get into med school,

00:11:58.780 medical school, as is happening at Toronto's Metropolitan University.

00:12:01.900 They discriminate based on skin color ethnicity. And so you accept people with a lower MCAT score. 0.63

00:12:08.720 Do you care about that when you're under the knife by a surgeon? Would you prefer, you know,

00:12:13.000 you've got the most capable person? So that's a problem. A friend of mine, Dr. Mark Marazic at the

00:12:20.180 University of Alberta in the education faculty once told me a couple years ago now that he's a

00:12:25.260 neuroscientist, PhD in neuroscience from the University of Georgia. He's at the University of

00:12:30.640 Alberta in education now, though. A couple of years ago, he and his committee, or he and his

00:12:35.040 scholars applied for a grant from the university to study brain injury in children. They were turned

00:12:41.660 down. And the reason was their scholars weren't diverse enough. And he's like, do you know how rare

00:12:46.420 the field is for neuroscience and the specialties in terms of, you know, what they were looking at,

00:12:51.560 brain injury in children? And they were turned down for a grant. So that's the problem with

00:12:57.560 discrimination. And frankly, it ramps up tribalism. Again, look, I don't care if, you know,

00:13:02.920 I don't care if an entire faculty is all black, all Japanese Canadian, all East Indian, all 0.90

00:13:09.200 indigenous Canadian. If they're the most competent people, they are exactly who should be hired.

00:13:15.000 So, but that's where you want to go is getting people's attention off of, oh, we, you know,

00:13:19.500 we think you had some historic discrimination and not to be, not to be blasé or a flip about it.

00:13:24.280 But look, discrimination has been pretty much a big part of the world until about the 1950s and

00:13:29.860 the 1960s. And it was in the Anglosphere, Canada, the United States, the UK, that we really tried

00:13:35.160 to root this out for a whole bunch of reasons, way ahead of the rest of the world. And now that's

00:13:41.500 being used as kind of a, there was some historic discrimination then. Okay. Again, it's been outlawed

00:13:49.220 in the Anglosphere in most countries I'm aware of in the Anglosphere for 70 years.

00:13:53.560 Yeah. So you touched on something that's been worrying me a little bit is unintended consequences

00:13:59.100 from some of these policies, tribalism being one of them. If it's, if people perceive that certain

00:14:04.940 groups of people are being elevated on the basis of their ethnicity, skin color, sexuality, and so on,

00:14:10.240 so forth. I mean, it's a human instinct to be like, well, why are they getting something we're not?

00:14:13.940 And I, and I worry that we're starting, well, we are seeing things like that on the street. I mean,

00:14:18.200 just, just yesterday, Francis Whittowson and Jim McMurtry were in BC at Kamloops talking about

00:14:23.140 the residential school mass graves. And we, you know, they were just shouted down. There's just

00:14:29.020 like a thought stopping cliches. And on the, the topic of, of this, this idea that woke is dead,

00:14:36.300 right? So these DEI policies, all this woke is dead. In America, we're seeing it fade a little bit.

00:14:42.060 There seems to be going out of favor in some places. But in Canada, I'm not seeing any evidence

00:14:47.920 of this. I could be wrong. Maybe you are. But the fact that we're still seeing, you know,

00:14:54.120 almost a year on from your Aristotle study, we're still seeing the same race restrictions.

00:14:58.940 I don't see any sign of it letting up. We're seeing, you know, in Toronto from Remembrance Day,

00:15:05.480 it wasn't just a land acknowledgement. It was a, and I know this is slightly tangential,

00:15:09.160 but a land acknowledgement with an ancestral acknowledgement, where I think they, they

00:15:13.620 were talking about, you know, for indigenous people and newcoming settlers and immigrants and

00:15:20.840 people who suffered from the transatlantic slave trade and so on and so forth. And so,

00:15:26.440 I don't know, are you seeing it let up in any way? Do you, do you have any hope that this is sort

00:15:31.100 not really? No, not really. I mean, occasionally you might see university executives say,

00:15:36.500 oh, we don't discriminate. And then you look at the job ads very carefully. It's, you know,

00:15:40.180 discrimination under a different name now or something like that. But no, and even the United

00:15:44.140 States, I gave a talk to the, the FAIR that, you know, I forget the, what the acronym means,

00:15:50.740 but it's, it's a group of university academics across North America and they have local chapters,

00:15:55.440 but FAIR, FAIR Canada several months back and with some U.S. scholars on it as well. And they said,

00:16:01.760 don't think that DEI is really going away that much. Again, it's being renamed, hidden, rebrand,

00:16:07.440 whatever you want to call it. You know, so people that want to discriminate, in this case,

00:16:12.780 they think they're right to do so, are endlessly creative in finding ways to do so. Again, I think

00:16:17.760 it's, you know, wrong. I think it's anti-merit and illiberal, as I've mentioned, but no.

00:16:22.080 And in Canada particular, it's pretty entrenched and has been since the 1980s, but also because

00:16:27.160 of the constitution. We have a different constitutional setup. So section 15.1 of the

00:16:31.700 constitution is the equality clause. You're supposed to be treated equally as an individual.

00:16:36.560 Section 15.2 was kind of the escape clause from that though. The, you know, I'll paraphrase the

00:16:41.600 language, but historically marginalized groups, you know, for the purpose of ameliorating historic

00:16:47.420 discrimination, et cetera, et cetera. Section 15.2 allows.

00:16:52.080 And professor Bruce Party at Queens University, a professor of law, wrote a study for us as

00:16:58.080 well about a year ago on this very thing, where the courts are even interpreting section 15.1,

00:17:03.040 the equality clause, as an equity clause. And again, it gets into the weeds of it, but your

00:17:07.240 audience should know this. Equity is kind of like the old Marxist concept of equal outcomes,

00:17:11.980 right? As opposed to equal opportunity, where equality is supposed to be about equality of

00:17:16.300 opportunity in treating people as individuals. And Bruce Party found that the courts are starting

00:17:23.380 to interpret section 15.1, even as equity, not equality of opportunity. So literally you could

00:17:28.880 not go to the court and end up at the Supreme Court and say, I'm discriminated against because

00:17:35.540 of my skin color. This should not be allowed to stand because the court would look at you and say

00:17:39.700 section 15.2. And they might also say section 15.1. And in fact, this has happened. Let me give you a

00:17:46.320 clear example from British Columbia. It goes back some ways, but I think it's poignant. 20 years ago,

00:17:51.920 I did a lot of work with a group called the BC Fisheries Survival Coalition. Briefly, the commercial

00:17:56.400 fishery in British Columbia, which existed for at least a century or more, was made up of all sorts

00:18:01.320 of people, including 30% native Canadians, native British Columbians. The federal government in the late

00:18:06.600 90s decided it needed to start having a native-only fishing day on the West Coast. The problem with

00:18:13.160 that is some days there's only one day to fish on the West Coast. And so if there was a native-only

00:18:17.940 fishing day, the commercial fishery, which had everybody, including natives, could not fish that 0.94

00:18:22.340 year and you had no income. And eventually this was taken to the Supreme Court. Before it was,

00:18:28.240 though, I talked to a lady who was part of, you know, non-native in the commercial fishery. And she gave

00:18:34.500 a poignant historical example. She said, my grandfather, who was Japanese ancestry, as am I,

00:18:41.140 was discriminated against in the 1920s by whites because he was not indigenous, or sorry, not white.

00:18:48.420 100 years later, 80 years later, this was the early 2000s, she said, same thing's happening to me. I can't

00:18:53.700 fish today on this native-only fishery day because I'm not native. That's the problem. And yet this went to the

00:19:00.040 Supreme Court. And guess what? They said section 15-2. There was no need for this. Again, the

00:19:05.920 commercial fishery was integrated, 30% native, people got along, division was created. This is

00:19:12.440 the problem with DEI policy is again, and frankly, it's condescending. I had just this past weekend,

00:19:19.520 someone write to me from Ontario. He's 84 years old. He came from South Africa and he was discriminated

00:19:24.820 against under the apartheid regime because he's black. He said, don't go down this road, Canada.

00:19:30.760 Literally, this is, I'm paraphrasing again, but this is what he wrote. He was disturbed by what

00:19:35.020 he's seen in Canada on this. Yeah, there's so many Canadians from countries who've suffered under

00:19:40.520 various awful policies that have been trying to raise the alarm, and it doesn't seem that anybody's

00:19:44.860 really listening. So I appreciate that. Is there anything interesting coming up with Aristotle

00:19:49.880 foundation that people should know about? Well, we're going to do a lot more work on DEI

00:19:56.100 precisely because it's illiberal, it's anti-merit, it's anti-individual. And again,

00:20:02.720 it doesn't matter what your background is. Our vision of Canada is one where we look at each other

00:20:08.300 based on merit and character, the old Martin Luther King vision, even though the postscript there is

00:20:13.360 Martin Luther King even favored affirmative action. And again, I can quasi understand why. But anyway, 0.88

00:20:19.120 but I think he was absolutely right that we should value character above all else and merit.

00:20:24.000 And so that's really where policy should go. We just think Canadians need to understand and

00:20:30.220 not look at people as part of a collective first, but treat people as individuals because we're all

00:20:37.400 wonderfully, you know, unique. And, you know, we can't go on in today, Melanie, but there's reasons

00:20:44.240 why you want to, in some cases, make up for the past, right? If it's the 1950s, you want to pay

00:20:49.340 Japanese Canadians compensation for putting them in internment camps. It was utterly wrong what the 0.97

00:20:53.780 government did, stealing land and property and putting people in internment camps because of how

00:20:58.980 they looked or their, you know, original ethnicity. There are times where you do compensate people for

00:21:03.600 past wrongs. But DEI is way too broad in terms of policy. And it assumes racism really explains most outcomes

00:21:11.520 when it explains very little in a modern, open, liberal democracy.

00:21:16.020 Yeah, well, I for one will be looking forward to that. So thank you so much for joining me today, Mark.

00:21:20.640 I don't think DEI or even woke culture is going anywhere for now. And as it poodles on,

00:21:27.520 I don't think that I'm the only one predicting growing division between groups caused by illiberal

00:21:35.780 idealism. In the meantime, I'm definitely going to keep following the research developments from

00:21:41.400 think tanks like the Aristotle Foundation and others. And if you enjoyed this breakdown,

00:21:46.200 don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes.

00:21:49.660 For True North, I'm Melanie Bennett.

Juno News - November 13, 2025

BC universities are recruiting, but only if you’re black

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