Juno News - November 13, 2025BC universities are recruiting, but only if you’re black
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Summary
In this episode, I'm joined by Mark Mielke, president of the Aristotle Foundation, to discuss why Canada is a racist society, and why diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a systemically racist policy.
Transcript
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Black-only hiring? Well, that was a first one for me. Simon Fraser University is currently
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looking to fill 15 faculty and 15 staff positions, but only if you're Black. And apparently,
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the BC Human Rights Commission fully endorses discrimination if they believe that it'll
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right past wrongs. Whatever you do, don't call it discrimination, though. I'm joined today by
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Mark Mielke, president of the Aristotle Foundation, to examine why this matters. The Aristotle
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Foundation have conducted some really great studies on the topic of DEI and systemic racism,
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so I thought it'd be interesting to talk to them. The real question is, again,
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is Canada really systemically racist? I'm Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.
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Mark, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really looking forward to talking about DEI.
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So the Aristotle Foundation has done some really great work on DEI hiring, specifically in academia,
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and the reason I invited you on today is because I saw something that was new to me,
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which was a job posting at Simon Fraser University, which essentially is race-restricted. So I'd seen
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where it might be we're encouraging people to apply who are maybe from a minority category,
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so gender identity, sexuality, and so forth. But this was, for me personally, the first time that I saw
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this job advertising for self-identified Black people, and to apply this tenure-track position,
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which was in the Department of Philosophy, the applicants had to do an applicant demographic
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survey, so they had to, I guess, identify as Black, and I presume that if you identified as something
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else, you would get rejected. So at the first point of call, your race seems to be the first
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criteria, even though it does say that that will be considered amongst other things,
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like people's experience and qualifications. So the Aristotle Foundation, back in January,
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did a really interesting study looking at nearly, I think it was nearly 500 academic job postings,
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where 98%, I believe, of the posting directly or indirectly discriminated against certain groups.
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So I want to talk about that. But before, I know I talk about DEI a lot on this show,
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but I would love you or us to set our terms, and if you would describe what DEI means to you and to
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the study. Sure. Well, diversity, equity, and inclusion is kind of a modern version of what in
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Canada was called employment equity, started in the 1980s by the Brian Mulroney government,
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which was, in essence, another form of affirmative action, which is a US term, of course, for
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post civil rights era policy that is preferential in hiring. All of it, in my view, comes from,
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I think, mostly people who are sincere, and good hearted and think, listen, there's been
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discrimination in history, somehow we need to make up for it. I disagree with the last part,
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or mostly you can't make up for discrimination that happened 50 years ago, or 100 years ago,
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or 200 years ago, the people that discriminated and those discriminated against are long gone.
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And so preferential hiring policy in the present just creates new victims of discrimination. That's
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the problem with modern DEI movement or policy. Plus, there's assumptions of the economy is kind
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of a fixed pie, therefore, past success or privilege must mean that people today are benefiting from that.
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And my response to that is, sure, if you're the great granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller,
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I guess past privilege means something. But for most of us, really, the choices we make in our
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lives or our parents' choices are much more impactful. And lastly, look, there's a lot of
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conflation between personal prejudice and what's called institutional discrimination or systemic racism,
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right? So advocates of DEI say we are systemically racist or we're institutionally racist. And I think,
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and I think it's quite clear when you read their work, including the scholarly work, what they do is they
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conflate personal prejudice. You can find a bigot online or in your personal life. They conflate personal
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prejudice with actual institutional discrimination. And there are many examples of institutional
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discrimination in history. The best example or clearest example is 100 years ago. If you were Chinese in San
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Francisco of Chinese ancestry, even if you're an American citizen and you were born in the United
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States, whites would discriminate against you. You couldn't go to their hospital in San Francisco.
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The Chinese community built their own hospital. So that sort of thing is institutional discrimination.
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The 1950s in Canada, before the early 1950s, you could discriminate against someone who's black and
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housing and accommodation. But Ontario began to pass laws against that in the early 1950s.
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And yet, in 2025, we still have people say Canada is a systemically racist society. No.
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Again, you can find a few bigots. It's not the same thing. So I think we have to be very careful
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about how we're defining diversity, equity, and inclusion. Because again, even the term diversity,
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who could be against diversity? Do I want someone not here from another country who doesn't look like
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me? No. I think immigration is a reality of human history in most cases is beneficial. Not all
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distinctions need to be made. But DEI as a policy has basically become what you just described at SFU,
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a way to discriminate against someone who's the wrong skin color in today's society, as opposed to
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what the wrong skin color was a century ago. It's all illiberal then and now. It's anti-merit. It's
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Yeah, I want to touch on this idea of systemic discrimination, because we're told this is to
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rectify systemic discrimination. But even in the advert, it refers to the BC Human Rights Code
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section 42, which I was a bit unfamiliar with the BC Code. So I had a look. And it's apparently
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colloquially known as the Affirmative Action Programs section of the BC Human Rights Code. And it's not
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considered discrimination in this section. If a program or a selection criteria for employment,
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for example, is designed to improve conditions for disadvantaged groups. But the key point here
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being groups, so disadvantaged groups of people. But is that not creating systemic discrimination
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in and of itself by doing that? But the other question is, are these people who are applying for
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a tenure track position, so these are people with PhDs, a lot of education, a lot of opportunities,
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Well, there's a couple of things going on there. So again, I think getting a little bit into the
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data weeds helps here. Look, it's ironic that Simon Fraser University would choose Black Canadians
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as the marginalized group. The history of actually most Black immigration to Canada,
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it was mostly not slavery, it was those escaping slavery. Even in California, or British Columbia,
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ironically, the James Douglas, who later became governor of the colony of British Columbia.
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But at the time, I believe, I can't remember the exact title, but you know, it was living in
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Victoria and was, you know, whatever the title was given to him of the day. Black Californians,
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there was about, and I wrote about this in a number of places, but there was like 30 or 40 Black
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Californians that emigrated to British Columbia in the late 1850s, early 1960s. They came there
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because they were escaping discrimination in California. And they wrote to their friends back
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in California, what a wonderful place Victoria was. They met the Archbishop, they met James Douglas.
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In two years, I believe they could become full citizens, because this was a British colony,
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right? British Columbia was. And they didn't like discrimination against Black Americans or anyone.
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And so that was the early history of pre-colony or pre-province British Columbia. And so for Simon
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Fraser University now to say, you know, this is a historically marginalized group is actually
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not totally accurate when it comes to Black Canadians. Now, the other part of this is people
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will look at averages, Melanie, and say, well, okay, but Black Canadians on average earn less than
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white Canadians. Yes. And the same is true of Indigenous Canadians. But at the top of the heap in
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terms of incomes and wealth in Canada are Asian Canadians or those of Asian, you know, ethnicity or
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ancestry in Canada. But why the difference between the averages? And the averages tell you very little,
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by the way. And this is where people get the mistaken impression. If you account for, if you adjust for
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education or immigration status, right, or rural versus urban, you will find that the divide, the income
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divide pretty much disappears. Let me give you a clear example. Indigenous Canadians versus other
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Canadians. If you're a full-time in your 20s, you work full year, full-time, you get a bachelor's
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degree, there is no difference between your income and that of other Canadians. The averages don't help
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because, for example, a greater proportion of Indigenous Canadians live in rural areas. And people in
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rural areas on average always make less. White, Indigenous, Black, Asian ancestry, so on and so forth.
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And education levels, the most highly educated cohort in Canada are those of Asian ethnicity,
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Japanese Canadians, Chinese Canadians historically. And so you have to account for those inputs, so to
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speak. It becomes a bit, you know, wonky, but you have to look at that. If you just look at averages and
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say that group must be discriminated against, let's suppose we get, you know, a million immigrants from,
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you know, country purple in the next year and it's a very poor country and they don't have an education
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and they don't know English or French, we would expect their incomes to be lower than other
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Canadians or even other new immigrants as opposed to someone coming from, say, Hong Kong or Singapore.
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So the problem with DEI and Simon Fraser's picking up people based on ethnicity, skin color in this
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case, et cetera, et cetera, is that they don't look at the reasons why there are differences in the
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averages. And once you do that, it's not that discrimination could never impact incomes. I mean,
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Thomas Old has written about this a lot in the United States, most famously. But you tease out
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the data and it doesn't show. Yeah. Well, it's not just Simon Fraser. BC does seem to be a hub for
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race-restricted hiring. UBC and the aerosol... It's across the country. Well, according to a study
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from January, a lot of the race restriction comes primarily from BC, UBC being one out of every five
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applicants, one out of every five academic job posting explicitly restricting to race. So we're
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not talking about DEI strategies or anything like that, but race-restricting or identity restrictions.
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And I'm curious, in the study, it also explains that this threatens academic freedom. But why would
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that matter to the average person? Okay. So universities are hiring base, restricting race,
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and academics are complaining that it's restricting their academic freedom. But why does that matter to
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the average person? Sure. Well, there's a number of things. Yes. In the reference to the study we did
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in January, you're correct. UBC was probably the worst offender in terms of active discrimination.
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But what we found is out of the 500 job ads across the country, the 10 largest universities,
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one in each province, we found that, yeah, as you mentioned earlier, about 98% have some mention of
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DEI, either just as a, you know, what's your view on this, when you apply, give us a statement,
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or we adhere to this. But active discrimination, yeah, UBC was right up there at the top.
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Why should it matter to the average person? Well, for a number of reasons.
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One, you should not be discriminated against as an individual. Let's suppose you're 22,
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25, and you're the wrong skin color, and you can't get into med school,
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medical school, as is happening at Toronto's Metropolitan University.
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They discriminate based on skin color ethnicity. And so you accept people with a lower MCAT score.
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Do you care about that when you're under the knife by a surgeon? Would you prefer, you know,
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you've got the most capable person? So that's a problem. A friend of mine, Dr. Mark Marazic at the
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University of Alberta in the education faculty once told me a couple years ago now that he's a
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neuroscientist, PhD in neuroscience from the University of Georgia. He's at the University of
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Alberta in education now, though. A couple of years ago, he and his committee, or he and his
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scholars applied for a grant from the university to study brain injury in children. They were turned
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down. And the reason was their scholars weren't diverse enough. And he's like, do you know how rare
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the field is for neuroscience and the specialties in terms of, you know, what they were looking at,
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brain injury in children? And they were turned down for a grant. So that's the problem with
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discrimination. And frankly, it ramps up tribalism. Again, look, I don't care if, you know,
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I don't care if an entire faculty is all black, all Japanese Canadian, all East Indian, all
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indigenous Canadian. If they're the most competent people, they are exactly who should be hired.
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So, but that's where you want to go is getting people's attention off of, oh, we, you know,
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we think you had some historic discrimination and not to be, not to be blasé or a flip about it.
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But look, discrimination has been pretty much a big part of the world until about the 1950s and
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the 1960s. And it was in the Anglosphere, Canada, the United States, the UK, that we really tried
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to root this out for a whole bunch of reasons, way ahead of the rest of the world. And now that's
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being used as kind of a, there was some historic discrimination then. Okay. Again, it's been outlawed
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in the Anglosphere in most countries I'm aware of in the Anglosphere for 70 years.
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Yeah. So you touched on something that's been worrying me a little bit is unintended consequences
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from some of these policies, tribalism being one of them. If it's, if people perceive that certain
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groups of people are being elevated on the basis of their ethnicity, skin color, sexuality, and so on,
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so forth. I mean, it's a human instinct to be like, well, why are they getting something we're not?
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And I, and I worry that we're starting, well, we are seeing things like that on the street. I mean,
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just, just yesterday, Francis Whittowson and Jim McMurtry were in BC at Kamloops talking about
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the residential school mass graves. And we, you know, they were just shouted down. There's just
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like a thought stopping cliches. And on the, the topic of, of this, this idea that woke is dead,
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right? So these DEI policies, all this woke is dead. In America, we're seeing it fade a little bit.
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There seems to be going out of favor in some places. But in Canada, I'm not seeing any evidence
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of this. I could be wrong. Maybe you are. But the fact that we're still seeing, you know,
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almost a year on from your Aristotle study, we're still seeing the same race restrictions.
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I don't see any sign of it letting up. We're seeing, you know, in Toronto from Remembrance Day,
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it wasn't just a land acknowledgement. It was a, and I know this is slightly tangential,
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but a land acknowledgement with an ancestral acknowledgement, where I think they, they
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were talking about, you know, for indigenous people and newcoming settlers and immigrants and
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people who suffered from the transatlantic slave trade and so on and so forth. And so,
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I don't know, are you seeing it let up in any way? Do you, do you have any hope that this is sort
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not really? No, not really. I mean, occasionally you might see university executives say,
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oh, we don't discriminate. And then you look at the job ads very carefully. It's, you know,
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discrimination under a different name now or something like that. But no, and even the United
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States, I gave a talk to the, the FAIR that, you know, I forget the, what the acronym means,
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but it's, it's a group of university academics across North America and they have local chapters,
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but FAIR, FAIR Canada several months back and with some U.S. scholars on it as well. And they said,
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don't think that DEI is really going away that much. Again, it's being renamed, hidden, rebrand,
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whatever you want to call it. You know, so people that want to discriminate, in this case,
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they think they're right to do so, are endlessly creative in finding ways to do so. Again, I think
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it's, you know, wrong. I think it's anti-merit and illiberal, as I've mentioned, but no.
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And in Canada particular, it's pretty entrenched and has been since the 1980s, but also because
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of the constitution. We have a different constitutional setup. So section 15.1 of the
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constitution is the equality clause. You're supposed to be treated equally as an individual.
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Section 15.2 was kind of the escape clause from that though. The, you know, I'll paraphrase the
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language, but historically marginalized groups, you know, for the purpose of ameliorating historic
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discrimination, et cetera, et cetera. Section 15.2 allows.
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And professor Bruce Party at Queens University, a professor of law, wrote a study for us as
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well about a year ago on this very thing, where the courts are even interpreting section 15.1,
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the equality clause, as an equity clause. And again, it gets into the weeds of it, but your
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audience should know this. Equity is kind of like the old Marxist concept of equal outcomes,
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right? As opposed to equal opportunity, where equality is supposed to be about equality of
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opportunity in treating people as individuals. And Bruce Party found that the courts are starting
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to interpret section 15.1, even as equity, not equality of opportunity. So literally you could
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not go to the court and end up at the Supreme Court and say, I'm discriminated against because
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of my skin color. This should not be allowed to stand because the court would look at you and say
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section 15.2. And they might also say section 15.1. And in fact, this has happened. Let me give you a
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clear example from British Columbia. It goes back some ways, but I think it's poignant. 20 years ago,
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I did a lot of work with a group called the BC Fisheries Survival Coalition. Briefly, the commercial
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fishery in British Columbia, which existed for at least a century or more, was made up of all sorts
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of people, including 30% native Canadians, native British Columbians. The federal government in the late
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90s decided it needed to start having a native-only fishing day on the West Coast. The problem with
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that is some days there's only one day to fish on the West Coast. And so if there was a native-only
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fishing day, the commercial fishery, which had everybody, including natives, could not fish that
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year and you had no income. And eventually this was taken to the Supreme Court. Before it was,
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though, I talked to a lady who was part of, you know, non-native in the commercial fishery. And she gave
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a poignant historical example. She said, my grandfather, who was Japanese ancestry, as am I,
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was discriminated against in the 1920s by whites because he was not indigenous, or sorry, not white.
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100 years later, 80 years later, this was the early 2000s, she said, same thing's happening to me. I can't
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fish today on this native-only fishery day because I'm not native. That's the problem. And yet this went to the
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Supreme Court. And guess what? They said section 15-2. There was no need for this. Again, the
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commercial fishery was integrated, 30% native, people got along, division was created. This is
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the problem with DEI policy is again, and frankly, it's condescending. I had just this past weekend,
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someone write to me from Ontario. He's 84 years old. He came from South Africa and he was discriminated
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against under the apartheid regime because he's black. He said, don't go down this road, Canada.
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Literally, this is, I'm paraphrasing again, but this is what he wrote. He was disturbed by what
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he's seen in Canada on this. Yeah, there's so many Canadians from countries who've suffered under
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various awful policies that have been trying to raise the alarm, and it doesn't seem that anybody's
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really listening. So I appreciate that. Is there anything interesting coming up with Aristotle
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foundation that people should know about? Well, we're going to do a lot more work on DEI
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precisely because it's illiberal, it's anti-merit, it's anti-individual. And again,
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it doesn't matter what your background is. Our vision of Canada is one where we look at each other
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based on merit and character, the old Martin Luther King vision, even though the postscript there is
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Martin Luther King even favored affirmative action. And again, I can quasi understand why. But anyway,
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but I think he was absolutely right that we should value character above all else and merit.
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And so that's really where policy should go. We just think Canadians need to understand and
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not look at people as part of a collective first, but treat people as individuals because we're all
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wonderfully, you know, unique. And, you know, we can't go on in today, Melanie, but there's reasons
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why you want to, in some cases, make up for the past, right? If it's the 1950s, you want to pay
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Japanese Canadians compensation for putting them in internment camps. It was utterly wrong what the
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government did, stealing land and property and putting people in internment camps because of how
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they looked or their, you know, original ethnicity. There are times where you do compensate people for
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past wrongs. But DEI is way too broad in terms of policy. And it assumes racism really explains most outcomes
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when it explains very little in a modern, open, liberal democracy.
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Yeah, well, I for one will be looking forward to that. So thank you so much for joining me today, Mark.
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I don't think DEI or even woke culture is going anywhere for now. And as it poodles on,
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I don't think that I'm the only one predicting growing division between groups caused by illiberal
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idealism. In the meantime, I'm definitely going to keep following the research developments from
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think tanks like the Aristotle Foundation and others. And if you enjoyed this breakdown,
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don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes.