The Cultural Revolution Up North

Woke activists in Canada are trying to rewrite history and shut down intellectual freedom.

Mark Milke, National Review, January 31, 2022

Earlier this month, Jordan Peterson, the most famous cultural export from Canada since Marshall McLuhan, announced that he was resigning as a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He’d achieved Canadian fame a few years ago for pushing back against forced speech at the university. After an appearance on British television in 2018, he shot to worldwide stardom for defending empiricism — specifically, the once uncontroversial notion that men and women are biologically different — against a host who kept reinterpreting his remarks to be the opposite of what he was clearly saying.

Peterson explained in his announcement that he could no longer supervise white male graduate students in good conscience because they face “a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers.” The “diversity, inclusivity, and equity” programs of racial and ethnic quotas — “DIE” mandates, as Peterson aptly calls them — are stacked against white men. As for his university colleagues, all of them “must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant.” They play along even though few believe in placing race and gender ahead of merit and competence. This, wrote Peterson, “is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture.”

So the good professor quit. His departure from an increasingly corrupt academic world is only the latest example of how woke culture is ripping up Canadian higher education. Peterson is often characterized by his opponents as right-wing, but that would be a nonsensical label; he’s simply an empiricist in a country where empiricism is under attack by woke revolutionaries.

In fact, those same revolutionaries found a target in someone who might be viewed as Peterson’s ideological opposite: a Marxist professor.

It was revealed this month that Frances Widdowson, a tenured political-science professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, was fired just before Christmas. Among her academic sins was to criticize Black Lives Matter, but, even more dangerous for a Canadian academic, to dissent from the radical assertion that Canada is a genocidal nation-state based on its treatment of indigenous peoples.

Widdowson, who has spent significant time in Canada’s Arctic working with native Canadians, has opposed such a radical reinterpretation of Canadian history. Indigenous Canadians — once called “Indian,” “native,” or “aboriginal” — now hold a place in Canadian elite discussions comparable to that of black Americans in many public debates in the United States: On the Canadian left, and especially among the woke, there is an assumption that any disparities in outcomes observed between whites and other statistical cohorts — education levels, incomes, the proportion working in selected professions, and so forth — must be due to modern-day or historical discrimination or both.

Widdowson dared to defend empiricism as central to the university’s project, mission, and mandate. For example, she has long criticized the claim that “indigenous knowledge” is akin to established science. As she remarked in one interview, “Aboriginal traditions can be brought in [to education] if they are not inconsistent with scientific educational methods.” The problem is when “unscientific ideas . . . are being promoted, . . . things like creationism and animistic beliefs about animals talking to people.”

Distorted Ideas about Past and Present

In the United States, thinkers such as the economists Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Glenn Loury have long shredded overly simplistic cause-and-effect links between past racism and present social and economic problems; so, too, have linguist John McWhorter and social scientist Shelby Steele. All have pointed out that education, family structure, faith, cultural beliefs, and other influences today play a much larger role in economic and other outcomes than any legacy of slavery or so-called systemic racism.

In Canada, the woke Left makes similar charges of racist oppression but adds the acidic accusation of genocide perpetrated by whites against native Canadians. The impetus for the genocide charge was two reports commissioned by the federal government, released in 2015 and 2019, on the history of Indian residential schools, i.e., boarding schools for rural native children.

The schools were established in parts of rural Canada in the late 19th century, with a few operating until the 1990s. Even though the reports’ authors, members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, were appointed by the government of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, it was clear from the start that they were out to blame such schools for the modern misery that does exist among some native Canadians.

In addition to that Commission bias, in May 2021, an ostensibly explosive discovery came to light. It was reported that over 200 unmarked graves had been discovered at an Indian residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia. Canadian media wrongly reported that these were “mass graves,” and worldwide media ran with it.

In fact, these were likely individual graves once marked by wooden crosses or other markers that have long since turned to dust. This month — many months after the supposed mass graves were discovered — Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus of history at the Université de Montréal, wrote in a Canadian journal that “in Kamloops, not one body has been found.” In addition to this rather extraordinary fact, he noted that the graves (where they exist) may well be not only those of children — tragic as any such early deaths are — but of adults from the same community.

Regardless of what is eventually determined to be the truth at Kamloops, the rediscovery of graves was Canada’s George Floyd moment, but for indigenous Canadians: The Kamloops residential-school graves became symbolic of any and all wrongs done to Canada’s native populations from the first arrival of Europeans. It didn’t matter that, as Rouillard wrote, “imaginary stories and emotion have outweighed the pursuit of truth.”

To grasp how the anti-empirical bent among woke academics and students has distorted the understanding of past wrongs suffered by Canada’s native populations, one must consider some statistics. In apples-to-apples comparisons based on education level, type of employment, and age, the earnings of indigenous Canadians and other Canadians are roughly the same.

For example, 2016 census data show that a young native Canadian between the ages of 25 and 34 with a bachelor’s degree or above who worked full-time earned a median income of $43,445, about $100 more than a similarly situated non-native Canadian.

Also relevant is the fact that, for decades, “treaty Indians” (as native Canadians with ties to reserves were called in official language) have benefited from affirmative-action programs, federal health-care spending, including benefits unavailable to other Canadians, and tax-free status for any income earned on reserves. Government spending directed at Canada’s native populations has been increasing markedly since at least 1950, and far beyond what population growth combined with inflation would require.

One can debate the merits and efficacy of these preferential policies and spending programs, but at a minimum they attest to an effort at “making up” for past wrongs. Such long-standing benefits for indigenous Canadians are hardly in keeping with charges that Canada is a genocidal nation-state.       

The modern-day economic and social problems among some indigenous Canadians have little do with schools shut down long ago. Only a minority of native Canadians ever attended them, and not all students suffered from maltreatment (as the late indigenous author Richard Wagamese once pointed out in a Calgary Herald column about his mother’s experience).

The more salient fact is that many present-day native reserves are in remote locations, far from educational and economic opportunities. Today’s poor outcomes, on average, also have much more to do with a lack of private property on indigenous reserves and a collectivist, top-down governance that more resembles Cuba’s model than that of modern Canadian towns and cities.

No reasonable person disputes the reality of intermittent attempts to suppress indigenous culture in Canada, or of the evils of sexual and physical abuse that took place at some Indian residential schools. But abuse and cultural intolerance — as bad as they undeniably were — and attempts in the 19th and 20th centuries to integrate indigenous Canadians are not akin to genocide.

How Far Will Woke Mania Go?

When Widdowson rejected the claims of genocide, the wrath of students and some staff at her university was enough to get her fired. It’s significant that this incident took place at a small university in the city of Calgary, which for decades has been the heartbeat of ideological and political conservatism in Canada (and is Harper’s hometown). That’s how far the woke revolution has penetrated.

As in the United States and the United Kingdom, Canada’s woke revolution has toppled or defaced statues ­of historical figures, including a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald, ripped down in Montreal; another of Queen Elizabeth II, the head being lopped off; and one of Winston Churchill, splashed with red paint. The radicals want to rewrite Canadian history to portray the British and Europeans as settlers and oppressors with genocidal intent toward indigenous peoples, who are portrayed as inherently peaceful.

Remember that the charge of genocide is being leveled not just by campus radicals or activists but by the government’s own commission. The 2019 federal report on Canada’s indigenous peoples compared past harms and alleged present maltreatment of aboriginal Canadians to the deliberate massacres in Hitler’s Germany: “The truth is that we live in a country whose laws and institutions perpetuate violations of basic human and Indigenous rights. These violations amount to nothing less than the deliberate, often covert campaign of genocide.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau routinely apologizes for decisions by colonial or early Canada that affected indigenous peoples. He has done this so often that even the BBC once headlined a news report with the question, “Does Justin Trudeau apologise too much?”

Last June, when Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada’s far-left New Democratic Party, said that “Canada is a place of racism,” Rupa Subramanya, a National Post columnist, answered Singh by asserting, based on her experiences as an immigrant, that “Canada is . . . one of the most tolerant places on earth.” In fact, it’s really the woke radicals who are intolerant. Widdowson and Peterson are only the most high-profile academic casualties of the woke mania in Canada. It is unlikely that they will be the last. 

Mark Milke wears many hats and one is that of an author. His most recent book is The Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations. You can follow him on Twitter @MilkeMark . Image credit: Pixabay.