'Canada is worse'

My introductory remarks from the 'Will DEI ever DIE?' panel at the Battle of Ideas Festival

I was thrilled to have been invited to speak on two panels at this year’s Battle of Ideas Festival in London. The first took place on Saturday morning. I shared my introductory remarks for that panel, entitled,“Sex Realism and the New Book Burnings,” here on Substack, earlier this week.

The second panel, “Will DEI ever DIE,” took place on Sunday afternoon and featured myself, Andrew Doyle, Tim Crowley, James Esses, Akua Reindorf, and (the very impressive!) moderator Ella Whelan.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I decided to take on the task, as this festival, of reporting on how much worse things are in Canada than they are in the UK.

As such, here are my (intended) comments (I ran out of time, naturally, so wasn’t able to get through all of this during the panel:

I am particularly biased against DEI policies, as I come to you from Canada—land of the slow middle child, desperately angry at its irrelevancy but too polite to do anything about it.

Instead of dealing with practical matters of people not being able to afford homes or food, the country has instead dedicated itself to the endless acknowledging of, rallying around, implementing of policies, and reporting on Canada’s need to feel endlessly terrible about a racism and bigotry that doesn’t exist, and talking ad nauseam about the need for “inclusion” and “acknowledgement,” despite the fact that all this inclusion and acknowledgement seems to have accomplished nothing in terms of making Canada a less (supposedly) racist, transphobic, and discriminatory place.

Canada has institutionalized DEI so successfully it’s difficult to see how it could ever truly be rid of it. Having astutely reelected the exact same Liberal Party that destroyed the country and propagandized and demoralized its citizens so deeply over the past decade, Canadians have handed their fates over to the very state which funds and therefore controls the media, healthcare, education, the arts (which in Canada only exist on account of government grants), and just about every other institution in existence.