Diversity As A Cultural Hammer In Trudeau's Canada
Back in the innocent 1970s, Coca Cola made uplifting commercials in which their sugary carbonated beverage would “Like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”. The commercials ended with the full rainbow of humanity join hands on a hillside in mutual acceptance.
It’s the real thing, said the Coke ad copywriters.
Perfect harmony (Coca-Cola style) would seem to the guiding principle behind the diversity model so beloved by Canada’s prime minister “Happy Ways” Justin Trudeau. Just pretend that Canada is a large Coke commercial funded by transfer payments from Ottawa. And voila! Everybody sing together.
Of course, the practical application of diversity has never been about the harmony that Coca Cola was selling. Trudeau’s dim-witted concept of diversity for Canada is more about empowering grievance groups to punish the mainstream culture for sins real and imagined. They put the D in divisive.
Trudeau culture is about walls, not open hill sides. Like a hotel where the guests stay in their rooms, cook their own foods and sing their own songs (M-m-my Sharia?). But joining hands on a hillside? Not gonna’ happen. Hell, he can’t even get Quebec and English Canada to joins hands after 150 years together.
With few exceptions— say, the knife attack by a disaffected Quebec Muslim at the Flint Airport or the attack at the Cenotaph in Ottawa— the notion that conflicting notions of the nation can live “in perfect harmony” has gone largely untested in a national crisis. So far.
But the indications that diversity is something other than advertised are everywhere. For instance, last week, my alma mater proudly staged a blacks-only convocation at the University of Toronto, the country’s biggest postsecondary institution. (http://www.timescolonist.com/2.2551/2.3207/uoft-to-hold-graduation-ceremony-today-for-black-students-1.20708881)
According to one of the organizers, black students felt they needed a safe space to celebrate what has apparently been a traumatic time at U of T. “We wanted to take a moment because of the different forms of adversity that they’ve had to face while at university and kind of congratulate them for making it to the finish line,” organizer Jessica Kirk told CP.
While Kirk was unable to identify even a single racist incident in her time at U of T, she says she was oppressed by “micro-aggressions”. Micro aggression is snowflake for “rude stuff that bugs me”. “Mansplaining”, “man-spreading” and white privilege are a few of the pithy phrases churned out by Humanities professors with a pipeline to the media to describe micro-agression.
Kirk described the micro-aggressions she’d witnessed. “I’ve experienced, and have seen, that black students are more likely to be talked over and interrupted in the classroom. Although those are smaller experiences, it takes a toll.”
A toll. Let that sink in. A toll like lynching or housing segregation or denied the vote? No. Just some icky encounters with people who don’t treat them like pampered princes. So, a school that fought segregation’s battle’s in the 1960s is now doing Jim Crow in reverse.
Needless to say, the diversity deans at Varsity, eager to pander, were thrilled to have the segregated ceremony. “The goal is to create a strong pipeline of people who want to make U of T a place to study and encouraging those students to come to U of T and look at U of T as an option, a space where they can come and learn and feel very comfortable and contribute to that community,” gushed Kelly Hannah-Moffat, the university’s vice-president of human resources and equity, to CP.
As my friend Tom Nichols, likes to say, in a time of great financial competition for students, universities are businesses that can’t afford to flunk customers anymore. So safe spaces? Segregated ceremonies? Halal pizzas? You got ‘em.
The intrepid CP reporter seems to have failed to ask the obvious follow-up question to the feckless Hannah-Moffat: What if white students wanted a segregated event? No doubt one blast from the Toronto Star’s progressive trumpet would make that impertinence a non-starter.
Diversity 10.6 was also on display at the annual Pride parades this past weekend. The LGBT movement started the bacchanalian episodes to celebrate its new public acceptance, but in Trudeau’s world, the parades have morphed into exercises in power politics. The Toronto parade (one lavishly funded by public dollars) chose to exclude uniformed police from the parade, because the cops once carried out the laws of the day. Ergo, pigs!
Also they ban Jews and others on their shit list. Someone has to step in here, right? Nah. This diversity dodge was tacitly accepted by the prime minister, the lesbian premier of Ontario and the mayor of Toronto, who all subscribed to inclusion-by-exclusion by marching in the parade.
Diversity even extends to summer camps. Camp Hector, a longtime YMCA summer camp outside Calgary, decided to end its practice of using native names for its cabins and teepees and buildings. Apparently cultural appropriation now forbids honouring native cultures by using indigenous names on its property, because… Just because.
As Oprah might say, “You’re getting a culture! And you’re getting a culture. And you’re getting a culture…” Because, hey, it’s "the real thing" in diversity Canada.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on anticanetwork.com. He’s also a regular contributor three-times-a-week to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. His website is Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com)