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

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.

Juno News - November 11, 2023

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

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