Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be spending $110 million in taxpayer funding on anti-racism and DEI consultants to fight what the Liberals consider the endemic problem of racism at the heart of Canadian society.
The Trudeau government announced the spending as part of its renewed anti-racism and discrimination strategy, with money being doled out to “hundreds” of projects across Canada.
The minister of diversity, inclusion and persons with disabilities, Kamal Khera, revealed details during a press conference on Saturday.
“The strategy incorporates the voices and lived experiences of thousands of Canadians, and enhances our whole government approach to combating racism and discrimination in all its forms,” said Khera.
The program entitled Changing Systems, Transforming Lives: Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy will begin implementation this year and run through to 2028, with $70 million in funds going into local initiatives.
“Our goal with this strategy is to combat all forms of racism and drive positive change in the lives of Canadians,” Khera added.
According to a government release, “Indigenous, Black, racialized and religious minority communities continue to face barriers to inclusion due to racism and discrimination.”
However, critics like the founder of the Aristotle Foundation Mark Milke say that other factors are at play when it comes to barriers between ethnicities.
“The anti-racism promoted by the federal government is not actually anti-racism, it’s reverse discrimination in most cases,” Milke told True North. “It’s nothing like what Martin Luther King envisioned, which was to judge people by their character, by their merit and not by the colour of their skin.”
Milke said that what’s happening presently with anti-racism is just an inversion of what was racism historically, much of which has been popularized by the American author Ibram X Kendi.
Kendi has published several books on the subject of racism, which Milke said he’s redefined as being the root cause of any differences between outcomes. Whether they be differences economically, in education or success in life between groups based on skin colour, they must be due to racism.
“That’s silly, it’s monocausal and it’s simply not accurate,” said Milke. “For example, Indigenous Canadians have lower incomes than Taiwanese Canadians, is that because Canadian society discriminates against Indigenous Canadians but not Taiwanese Canadians?”
Milke argues that the results have to do with far more basic things, like education and geography.
“Taiwanese Canadians are among the most educated in the country and Indigenous Canadians on average are lower than other Canadians,” said Milke. “Or geography, many First Nations people of course live on first nations in the middle of nowhere, with no property rights, no ability to build wealth and far from education and career opportunities.”
The Trudeau government already invested $95 million into an anti-racism strategy between 2019 and 2022.
However, the government argued that the world has since “experienced several tragically impactful events, resulting in devastating consequences, including right here in Canada.”
For example, the government claims that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated “preexisting racial inequalities” due to the financial stress it placed on minorities.
“The federal government’s anti-racism strategy is based on a fraud assumption that everything is due to racism or most things are due to racism,” said Milke. “Not education, not geography, not cultural dynamics, not family dynamics such as two parents or one.”
“All these things factor into outcomes,” he added.
Among the Liberal’s priorities for its new strategy include promoting economic and cultural empowerment, advancing racial equity, driving reforms on law enforcement and public safety.
“The federal government’s strategy is divisive and it’s simply illiberal, and it’s not anti-racist,” said Milke. “It is in fact promoting a form of racism, of reverse-racism.”
