Juno News - November 11, 2023


No, Canada is not systemically racist (ft. Mark Milke)

Mentioned
Matthew Lau Mark Milkey Andrew Lawton Show Thomas Sewell George Floyd Justin Trudeau
Former Muslim explains why she left Islam Why Alberta is taking aim at Trudeau’s gun grab

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Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

182.48

Word count

1,945

Sentence count

107

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Firearms Talk, we will close the book on Firearms Talk and move on to an issue that I find to be a fascinating one because internalized hatred of your own country has become a like a real epidemic in Canada. We ve seen the Department of National Defense talk about how Canada s foundations have a white supremacy woven into them, the fabric of Canadian society. So is Canada a systemically racist country? And what does that mean? Well, our friends at the Aristotle Foundation, specifically Matthew Lau, did a deep dive into it and found that, not at all, is this accusation true.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We will close the book on Firearms Talk for today and move on to an issue that I find to be a
00:00:14.500 fascinating one because internalized hatred of your own country has become this like real epidemic
00:00:20.520 in Canada. One of the things we love doing here is importing American cultural battles. So when
00:00:26.500 the George Floyd protests were waging in the United States, Canada also became very introspective.
00:00:32.640 And we started to see all of these accusations that were based on these things that didn't quite
00:00:39.040 make sense to a lot of people, like Canada is a deeply systemically racist country. But this wasn't
00:00:45.080 just being shouted by a bunch of rabid left-wing activists. This was actually embedded in Justin
00:00:50.700 Trudeau's mandate letters to his ministers. In December 2021, he put this following line
00:00:56.960 in his ministerial mandate letters, profound systemic inequities and disparities that remain
00:01:02.840 present in the core fabric of our society, including our core institutions. We've had
00:01:09.000 the RCMP commissioner forced to testify on the stand of a parliamentary committee to the RCMP
00:01:14.440 being filled with systemic racism. We've seen the Department of National Defense talk about
00:01:18.960 how Canada's foundations have a white supremacy woven into them, the fabric of Canadian society.
00:01:26.320 So is Canada a systemically racist country? And what does that mean? Well, our friends at the
00:01:31.280 Aristotle Foundation, specifically Matthew Lau, did a deep dive into it. And they looked at a number of
00:01:36.720 key metrics and found that in fact, not at all is this accusation true. Joining me is the founder and
00:01:44.240 president of the Aristotle Foundation, Mark Mielke. Mark, good to talk to you as always, sir. Thanks
00:01:48.900 for coming on today. Thanks for having me on, Andrew. So let's, let's start off firstly with why
00:01:53.700 the Aristotle Foundation went into this issue in the first place and, and why Matthew did this study.
00:01:59.780 Sure. Well, for years, as you've pointed out, we've heard this notion that Canada is systemically racist,
00:02:05.060 institutionally racist, and you have to unpack that. You can meet bigots anywhere, any age.
00:02:11.320 But I wrote in this some time ago, in my last book, The Victim Cult, Matthew wrote about it in a
00:02:16.800 chapter for the 1867 project, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled. And you and I talked
00:02:21.780 about that, as did Matthew a couple of months ago, that chapter. But this accusation that Canada is
00:02:27.580 systemically racist really needs to be unpacked. And you mentioned American influence a moment ago.
00:02:33.060 Well, Thomas Sowell has done a lot of great analysis in this United States, right? But we found that there
00:02:37.840 wasn't a lot of good analysis kind of challenging this narrative, you know, that United States in
00:02:42.920 Sowell's case, or Canada in this case, is systemically racist. And I can tell you, some of the research I
00:02:47.780 did in my previous book, and that Matthew has done, shows, you know, shows it's nonsensical. As one
00:02:54.660 example, Ontario in the early 1950s began to pass laws against discrimination based on gender or
00:03:00.900 ethnicity in the early 1950s for accommodation for employment, that sort of thing. Prior to the 1950s,
00:03:07.600 if you were black, or if you're a woman, you may be denied accommodation or a certain job.
00:03:11.440 Post early 1950s, 70 years ago, that was outlawed. So what Matthew has done in a new paper for the
00:03:18.640 Aristotle Foundation is unpack this even more. Yeah, and I think the one thing that's important
00:03:23.960 to point out here is that no one is saying that racism does not exist in Canada. There are individual
00:03:29.160 racists, there are individual racism incidents. But when you say systemic racism, that carries a lot
00:03:35.700 of weight, because you're saying that it's embedded in institutions, it's baked into institutions.
00:03:39.460 And how do you go about disproving that? How do you go about proving the negative in a way that,
00:03:44.680 you know, systemic racism is not present? Well, first of all, start to define it clearly. So you
00:03:50.640 read the definitions from the federal government at the outset of the show. And what you have to do is
00:03:55.920 unpack that again. So systemic racism literally does an institution discriminate against you because
00:04:02.160 of your color, your gender, this sort of thing. We have clear examples in history. If you were Jewish 0.97
00:04:06.780 at a certain point in Canadian and American history, you might not have been allowed into certain
00:04:10.900 colleges, or at least not above a certain percentage of the population. Chinese people in San Francisco
00:04:16.620 were not allowed at white hospitals because they were white. The Chinese of San Francisco literally 1.00
00:04:21.640 had to set up their own hospitals. That was institutional discrimination. Pre-1960s in the American
00:04:27.240 South, you could not be on the bus. At the front of the bus, if you were black, you had to be at the back. 1.00
00:04:31.780 The system, the institution literally discriminated against you, whether it was a hospital, a busing
00:04:37.780 authority, a landlord, so on and so forth. But much of that has been outlawed for 60 or 70 years.
00:04:44.000 So that's very different than meeting a bigot on the street today, who may be anti-Semitic,
00:04:50.320 by the way. That seems to be the latest popular prejudice out there, which should be attacked. So
00:04:55.740 you can meet bigots, but that's not the same thing as saying the system is rigged against you.
00:04:59.680 So what Matthew does in his paper for the Aristotle Foundation, asking about this question, and you can
00:05:05.380 find it at AristotleFoundation.org, is he compares incomes, for example, and says, okay, if we're
00:05:10.880 actually a systemically racist society, shouldn't that show up in the data? So as one example, he goes
00:05:17.200 to Statistics Canada, and he uses the data that tries to equalize for, you know, people that work
00:05:22.680 full year, full time, look at income by ethnicity. Well, what does he find? If you've got skin color like me
00:05:28.600 and you, Andrew, we're in the middle of the pack, right? Males or females. And you find, you know,
00:05:34.120 some portions of ethnic Canada, if you're Japanese Canadian or Korean Canadian, if that's your ancestry,
00:05:40.500 you've actually got higher weekly average earnings or median earnings, rather. So that matters because
00:05:47.020 as Matthew points out in his paper for the Aristotle Foundation, do you say, for example,
00:05:53.460 that if you're, say, Latin American, in some cases, and your income is, you know, lower than the average white
00:05:58.660 Canadian, does that mean somehow the system is rigged against you as a Latin American, but not as a Korean
00:06:03.460 Canadian or Chinese Canadian? So he brings up the absurdity, again, of this claim. You'd think, for example,
00:06:09.500 that, you know, white Canadians should have incomes that are higher than anybody else, if this claim is true. 0.86
00:06:17.360 So what Matthew does is he goes through this, and he also uses some other interesting stats. So for
00:06:21.740 example, South Asian Canadians make up about 8% of the working age population, but he finds they make
00:06:27.800 up something like, I think it was 19% of physicians in the country, or engineers, rather. And he has other
00:06:33.800 statistics to that effect. So again, you know, if the claim is that there's an institutional bias
00:06:39.200 against certain minority Canadians, I despise that term, but certain Canadians who are considered
00:06:45.120 minorities by the government, you'd expect that consistently in the data for incomes or jobs, that you would find
00:06:52.880 minority Canadians at the bottom of the pack. But, you know, Asian Canadians, for example, do incredibly well, which is a
00:06:58.880 good thing in incomes and assets in degrees. And that's something Matthew tries to point out as well, including, by the
00:07:05.440 way, for indigenous Canadians, that if you have an education, a bachelor's degree, for example, as an indigenous
00:07:12.640 Canadian, you make almost as much as any other Canadian. And if you have a slightly higher than a bachelor's degree, maybe a
00:07:18.880 master's degree, you will actually make $2,000 more working full year full time as an indigenous Canadian, than a non 0.97
00:07:26.320 indigenous Canadian. So again, Matthew unpacks this notion that Canada is systemically racist, again, institutions, literally
00:07:33.160 discriminating. And I think that's an important tight point to make that Matthew does in his paper.
00:07:37.480 Well, and one of the things that I wondered when I was first started out reading this is if a big part of the
00:07:43.480 problem has been that equality of outcome has been pushed by a lot of people more than equality of
00:07:49.560 opportunity. And that, you know, in Canada, we do not have any, you know, direct systemic racial barriers
00:07:55.240 that work against people of color that in less someone wishes to correct me. Now, there are some positions
00:08:00.600 that we see that are for jobs that, you know, are specifically for those people and not for white people. And,
00:08:06.600 you know, whether affirmative action is, is right or wrong, people can determine for themselves.
00:08:10.360 But if there are disparities that are coming about on an outcome side, they don't seem to be caused by
00:08:16.760 anything that the institutions themselves have set up. No. And in fact, they're related to other
00:08:22.440 factors such as education or geography. And a good example is First Nations reserves. The average or
00:08:29.180 median First Nation income, again, when you don't do the apple to apple comparison, right, full time,
00:08:33.680 full year, bachelor's degree, that sort of thing. When you don't do those comparisons, yeah, the
00:08:38.320 averages and medians look a lot lower than other Canadians. But why is that? Because a greater 0.99
00:08:43.120 proportion of First Nations people or indigenous people live in remote areas, often on reserves,
00:08:47.920 where there's not great access to education, at least higher education, there's not great access
00:08:52.400 to great jobs. That makes a difference, as does the average education level, which is lower for
00:08:57.440 indigenous Canadians vis-a-vis other Canadians. So education makes a difference. But the American
00:09:02.800 economist Thomas Sowell has a wonderful example explaining the folly of saying everyone should
00:09:07.280 have an equal outcome or every group should. And if it's not, then it must be due to racism. He talks
00:09:11.760 about how historically Italians dominated the fishing fleet worldwide, unlike the Swiss. Does this mean
00:09:18.400 the fishing industry is systemically biased and racist against Swiss, you know, the Swiss? And Thomas
00:09:24.160 Sowell makes the obvious point. No, it's because the Swiss don't have coastlines. The Italians have 1.00
00:09:28.800 coastlines. Of course, growing up around the coast will help you know how to fish and get involved in
00:09:33.360 the fishing sector. And then you emigrate from Italy over the last 100 years, you're going to dominate 0.97
00:09:37.840 the fishing fleets around the world because of that experience, at least for a country that has lots of
00:09:42.560 immigrants, as Italy did for 100 years, outpouring of immigrants. So that explains again, or helps explain
00:09:49.360 that you're not going to have equal outcomes. Or the other example, as Sowell points out,
00:09:53.360 which you know, Matthew notes as well than I have in my work. Look, families, you know, I have three
00:09:59.200 siblings, we don't have equal outcomes. We had the exact same environment growing up. But people vary
00:10:05.280 widely in outcomes despite exactly similar similar upbringings. So to blame everything on racism as
00:10:11.120 people do are mostly on racism is simplistic to the extreme. The paper you can read at aristotlefoundation.org.
00:10:19.520 And there's also lots of other good stuff there you should check out. The founder
00:10:22.800 of that, Mark Mielke joins us. Mark, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:10:27.120 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.