00:05:44.900So you're left with do they either not care about these data, do they not care about these findings, or is the motivation actually something else?
00:05:54.720Now, I'm inclined to say it's probably the latter, but I'm curious where you land on this.
00:07:48.160You don't want to find reasons why what you're promoting are wrong when you're making that kind of money.
00:07:54.300But from a business standpoint as well, I think there's motivation among corporations to really push DEI because it diverts attention from other things.
00:08:05.760I remember when there were the 1% riots or the Occupy Wall Street riots going on, and they were looking at corporate corruption.
00:08:17.460Well, it was shortly after that that DEI suddenly became something very favored among corporations.
00:08:23.140It was like, don't look over here, but I want you to look over here.
00:08:29.220So from a corporate point of view, it makes a lot of sense to turn attention to something else that has a lot of popular appetite.
00:08:37.040But then you come to those people who maybe they know that it does do harm, and again, we can talk about the studies that actually show it does do harm, and maybe they're okay with that.
00:08:54.380Maybe they are motivated by a desire to see society unravel so they can remake it in an image they like better.
00:09:02.560You know, one of the things I remember from my old, you know, research methods classes in university, if I'm recalling correctly, is this idea called conceptual stretching, where you kind of morph and, you know, move around a concept so it fits what you're researching.
00:09:18.300Now, maybe there's a justification for this, but one of the most extreme examples that you bring up in your piece is the idea of changing what white means to adapt to the pre-existing conclusion.
00:09:29.940Now, normally, in a course of scientific research, you test a hypothesis.
00:09:34.300If you are finding that's not true, you go back and you can question why, but you don't start changing around the language to make your conclusions fit what you want.
00:09:43.640We see this with Asians who are ethnic minorities.
00:09:46.680There's no denying they're ethnic minorities.
00:09:48.780They tend to have very, very high performance scores in academia, in society.
00:10:06.860Well, again, you begin digging into this stuff and you see that there have been school boards in the United States that have actually removed the category of Asian and they just lumped them in with white.
00:10:16.460And that's DEI, and that's DEI writ large, because what it essentially is doing, it's saying that we're going to create groups of oppressor and oppressed.
00:10:27.520And as soon as you perform beyond whatever the expectations are of the average or however they define it, suddenly you get into trouble.
00:10:37.620So, we see that these Asian students in high schools across or in a couple school boards in the U.S., they got lumped in with whites.
00:10:46.560But we also saw it just recently in the last year with the elite schools like Harvard and North Carolina.
00:10:56.000They were also being discriminatory against Asian students.
00:11:00.660They were making sure that they couldn't get in to, couldn't enroll at places like Harvard.
00:11:07.480They had to have almost perfect test scores.
00:11:10.240And the rationale, again, this is coming from the DEI office, was there.
00:11:19.220Oh, we have, we made it for the first few minutes, but we've had a freeze on David's end there.
00:11:25.760We'll try to get that sorted out and get him back on.
00:11:30.420And this was, again, something we saw specifically in the context of U.S. academia, where the idea of, again, just lumping Asians in with whites, because otherwise you can't actually find a way to let the conclusion work.
00:11:52.660I'm just talking about what was happening at the elite universities like Harvard, where they were actually making it more difficult for Asian students to get in.
00:12:01.420They had to have a near perfect test score in order to get in.
00:12:06.000The people involved in this actually took it to the Supreme Court and won.
00:12:10.060They said, you can't discriminate against us like this.
00:12:12.860But the notion that they could be discriminated against was pumped directly out of the DEI offices at these elite universities.
00:12:20.780And what their justification was, we can't allow merit alone to allow to let these Asian American students in because there would be too many.
00:12:32.600And that wouldn't be the right kind of diversity.
00:12:36.020Well, that begs the question, what is the right kind of diversity?
00:12:38.940Is there this golden mean or golden model that's in the heads of these DEI professionals that they get to decide who gets to be part of something and who doesn't?
00:12:54.660And it was definitely a good decision by the Supreme Court to say that this shouldn't be happening.
00:13:00.220I think now we just need to have more universities realizing that all DEI, based on the evidence, needs to go.
00:13:06.480One of the dangers that I would see in this is that some people could look at the findings and say, the problem isn't with the core premise.
00:13:16.160The problem is just with, it's like the real communism hasn't been tried approach to this.
00:13:20.860Say, no, no, no, real DEI hasn't been tried yet.
00:13:25.060But I think there are two issues there.
00:13:26.760Number one, you mentioned that there's this massive demand for DEI right now.
00:13:31.580I don't really think there's any rigorous investigation into the qualifications of the people that are doing these programs.
00:13:39.380I think if you say the right things and you put up a splashy website, it's probably pretty easy to get a major contract from Coca-Cola, which doesn't want to be accused of being racist just to pull a company out of thin air.
00:13:50.220But also, I think you have people that are in this space that are really making it up as they go along.
00:13:57.700And I fear that the takeaway from some of the studies you've pointed to and even your own work is, okay, we've got to try to find a way to make this more rigorous instead of going back to the basics and saying, maybe this is just a fundamentally flawed premise.
00:14:10.040Yeah, and I would just go back to the basics, because the basics were actually working.
00:14:17.160So if you look from the 1960s up into the 1980s, there was a significant drop in real racism.
00:14:25.680And now DEI, it can look at race or it can look at gender and sexuality.
00:14:33.060But let me just talk a little bit about what we know about the reality of racism.
00:14:37.560Any sociological data that you look at from the 1960s into the 1990s, into the 2000s, in fact, showed every measure was going down in terms of racism and going up in terms of acceptance between racial groups.
00:14:55.860And some of the things that were evidence of that, we often ask questions as sociologists, would you mind if someone of a different race lived next to you?
00:15:05.840Year after year after year after year, more people were saying, no problem, absolutely.
00:15:12.460Then another question we ask is, would you be all right if your son or daughter married someone of another race?
00:15:18.220Again, year after year after year, we were seeing that go up, that people were very accepting.
00:15:25.580So these were real measures that racism was going down.
00:15:30.180And what were we doing at those times to make it happen?
00:15:32.920We were simply saying, treat each other equally.
00:15:35.980Judge people by the content of their character.
00:15:39.220And now we've got a DEI industry that is actually encouraging discrimination.
00:15:46.560We have people like Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote How to Be Anti-Racist, actually saying that the only cure for past discrimination is present discrimination.
00:16:23.120Now, I wanted to move to a different issue entirely, although you might even be able to apply the same findings,
00:16:28.180which is that the thing that's presented to us as a harm reduction tool is not, in fact, limiting or mitigating harm,
00:16:35.400and in some cases, maybe exacerbating it.
00:16:37.760But before we get into this, I want to share this clip of a rather insane exchange that took place on the margins of a Richmond council meeting in British Columbia,
00:16:48.440where several people from the community, including this lovely, mild-mannered Asian man you'll see on the left of this video,
00:16:54.460were there to protest the council's advancing of a proposal to put a safe injection site in a neighbourhood in Richmond.
00:32:03.720and that's only because their projections go out five years and that's where they end
00:32:07.720so you know other reports from the PBO show it's going to be longer than that
00:32:11.720so we really need to start talking about actual solutions here
00:32:14.720rather than just kicking the can down the road and hoping this goes away somehow
00:32:18.720I know there's often a difference between you know politics and policy
00:32:22.720and I think both sides tend to be annoyed with the other
00:32:25.720because they say that the other doesn't you know understand how things are
00:32:28.720I'm aware of the challenge that there isn't just a line item in the federal budget called waste
00:32:33.720that you can look at and say all right well let's just cut waste waste is buried and embedded in a lot of different departments
00:32:40.720so how easy would it be or how difficult would it be to really go in and find ways that you could make some of these adjustments that you're talking about
00:32:47.720without taking a hatchet to entire programs or departments which politically tend to be very difficult to justify doing
00:32:54.720well I think they should take the approach that the Kretchen government took in the 1990s
00:32:59.720they really had a six-step process to evaluate programs and services on a case-by-case basis
00:33:04.720you know so it was about you know is this an appropriate role for government to be involved in
00:33:09.720are we running this program or service as efficiently as possible
00:33:13.720so they had a whole set of criteria that they were looking at
00:33:16.720and they're not just you know chopping for the sake of chopping
00:33:19.720they're actually evaluating these programs on whether or not they're actually effective
00:33:23.720and whether they're serving what what the program actually is trying or intending to do
00:33:28.720so I think that's a similar approach that the federal government could take now
00:33:32.720but we know that you know over the years there's many examples of government fiscal waste
00:33:36.720you know we had one report that looked at auditor general reports between the 1980s and 2013
00:33:43.720and it found that you know mismanagement or waste of government was well over a hundred billion dollars during that time
00:33:50.720according to those auditor general reports
00:33:52.720so we know that this is an area where the government can certainly make changes
00:33:57.720is cutting back on that fiscal waste or removing it entirely
00:34:01.720yeah and what you're talking about here largely looks like a question of efficiency not extraneous programs
00:34:07.720you're not saying we need to cut this or cut that in a sense that would it looks like have a huge effect on service delivery are you?
00:34:15.720no exactly I mean that and that's just the whole point here
00:34:18.720it's actually about having effective spending too
00:34:21.720you know there is a role for government there is a role for programs and services ultimately
00:34:26.720but the government also needs to have physical objectives
00:34:28.720they need to have goals and anchors keeping them you know on a certain track as well
00:34:33.720you know right now we just kind of have policy that isn't even following the government's own self-imposed rules
00:34:39.720they're not following their fiscal anchors you know or the fiscal goals or fiscal rules however you want to phrase it
00:34:45.720and so we don't really have anything containing government finances right now
00:34:49.720so we really need a plan moving forward about not only what we're spending the money on
00:34:54.720but also taking that bigger picture look at government spending as well
00:34:58.720who says fiscal policy can't be interesting as we head into our weekend here Jake Fuss
00:35:03.720director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute
00:35:05.720the study in question is called a case for spending restraint in Canada
00:35:09.720how the federal government can balance the budget
00:35:12.720so I think the real takeaway it can be done if you don't do it
00:35:15.720it's just because you decided not to so that would be the warning I'd put at the feet of any federal lawmakers here
00:35:20.720Jake always a pleasure thanks for coming on today