"Woke" Liberal government is destroying Canada's economy

Identity politics is making it worse

I have heard so many speeches by Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh and other left wing Canadian leaders claiming they will “fight systemic racism” in Canada I gag whenever I hear another one. Reality is that Canada is among the least “racist” countries on Earth and the only “systemic racism” I see in Canada is our abhorrent treatment of First Nations and other indigenous people. Here is how the world sees Canada.

I suspect Canada would rank first if our government repealed the Indian Act and transfered direct ownership of the lands occupied by indigenous people to those people in “fee simple” with the right to alienate the land if they chose. It is about time Canada started treating indigenous people like every other Canadian with all the rights and privileges Canadians enjoy.

United States is another story. When your racial equity score ranks lower than Mexico and Brazil, you have a problem. Admittedly there are over 100 nations worse than the United States but they don’t live next door to Canada. When you mention “systemic racism” in United States, everyone thinks of Blacks and the history of slavery. But “racism” in the United States goes well beyond Blacks whose acceptance into society and opportunities have become comparable to all Americans - Fifty-five of the mayors of America’s 100 largest cities are Black, a former President is Black, CEO’s of major corporations and private equity firms are Black, and Blacks populate the ranks of academia, mainstream media anchors, legal and medical professions and much of silicon valley in proportion to their share of the population or often greater.

The “systemic racism” in America today is anti-Asian and anti-Semitic. Highly qualifed Asian students are denied acceptance into Ivey League universities in favour of Blacks. Harvard University is a case in point. For years, Jewish students were discriminated against and in more recent years, the same discrimination was applied to highly qualified Asian Students. Harvard justifies the current discrimination as an attempt to provide greater access to Harvard for Blacks and Hispanics. For some reason, “woke” America thinks one form of discrimination is better than another. Nothing could be less aligned with the American tradition of equal opportunity or farther from Martin Luther King’s famous phrase - judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

America (like Canada) remains riddled with systemic racism against people of indigenous ancestry. Both United States and Canada have hundreds of years of oppression of First Nations and there is no hint that will change any time soon - just a lot of hot air about “reconciliation” in Canada and even less air on the subject in United States. Systemic biases go well beyond race. Under Joe Biden, Americans are divided into “identity groups” like White, Black, LGBTQ, Hispanic, and a plethora of “genders”. Every one of these groups is pitted against all the other groups by Democrats who support divisive entities like Black Lives Matter (a scam run by communists), Antifa (a left wing terrorist organization pretending to be right wing).

Canada is no better under Trudeau. He pretends to embrace “diversity and inclusiveness” but calls Canadians who disagree with his policies extremists, racists, and misogynists” who “take up space”. Trudeau’s idea of an inclusive society is one that defines inclusiveness by dividing Canadians into groups based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religious belief and like Biden, pitting these groups against one another in his own divisive speeches and with divisive policies including legislation compelling the use of certain pronouns.

Corporate governance NGO’s who embrace the silly ESG fad are worse. They want boards of directors to be chosen based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious faith, and gender (there seem to be more genders than Carter has liver pills) and pretend this will create better boards, but ignore knowledge and competence as a pre-requisite for making sound decisions on business issues. The Coalition for a Better Future is one such organization putting “social justice” ahead of common sense in setting ESG goals for Canada that can only damage the economic value created by our business sector, signing on to the nonsense that CO2 emissions will cause “climate change” and threaten humanity. They don’t and the threat to Canadians is “woke” culture, not climate change.

The Coalition’s goals and “scorecard” evidence a desire for Canada to not only return to “systemic racism” but also to base economic decisions on identity politics.

Some of the scorecard measurements include:

Share of women in senior management positions (Gender bias)
Share of indigenous people in senior management positions (Racial bias)

GHG emissons per unti of GDP (Pretense that CO2 causes climate change)
Percentage of primary energy from zero-carbon sources (Same pretense)
Clean tech contribution to GDP (Same pretense)

We need Canadian leaders to recognize reality. Decades of “woke” policies have hollowed out Canada to where manufacturing employs only 9% of Canadians and primary industries (oil & gas, mining and forestry) only 12%). Seventy nine percent of Canadians employees work in the Services sector.

All of the “wealth creation” done in Canada is done by the good producing sectors since wealth is created only by altering the shape of matter at or near the Earth’s surface and all other activity is either irrelevant to wealth or involved in its destruction, consumption or distribution. Canada barely has an agricultural sector today, comprising less than 2% of GDP.

Investors (domestic and foreign) see the trend and there has been a flight of capital from Canada. Canadians have been investing overseas and foreign investment is finding better jurisdictions for its capital.

Source: Fraser Institute

Imposing “woke” ESG and climate change policies on the shrinking goods producing sector of Canada’s economy will drive even more capital out of the country.

If our “woke” leaders want to redistribute wealth to improve “equity” they must first enact policies that enhance the creation of wealth. You can redistribute what you don’t have. Instead, the Trudeau government constantly attacks oil & gas and mining with its Impact Assessment Act and “woke” cabinet. It is too consistent to be accidental - the Liberal government wants to destroy Canada’s economic foundation, make Canadians dependent on government, and shift society to authoritarian socialism. I can’t think of a better recipe for that end.

Margaret Thatcher saw it coming. She also quipped: “The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”.

When election time rolls around, remember what the climate scam is all about and think twice before you vote for a party led by Justin Trudeau or Jagmeet Singh.