Canadian universities and national research funding agencies
insist on mandatory training that offers highly-politicized claims about discrimination and equity. Failure to accept the training means you might not get hired, or be allowed to sit on hiring committees — or, for universities themselves, that they won’t receive highly coveted Canada Research Chair positions. This training isn’t meant simply to avoid discrimination in the workplace — for that would be commonsensical and not at all controversial. Rather, the so-called training redefines the meaning of what counts as discrimination in ways that are very debatable — and yet no debate is allowed.
Professional associations and institutions are being taken over by activists who demand that only certain political views are the new normal
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What the College of Psychologists is doing is the equivalent of an old school teacher who wants to discipline a whole classroom and so selects the biggest kid to come to the front of the class to face the strap.
The big kid might be able to handle the pain, but the dark message is really for all the others watching. “This is what happens when you act out,” the college is saying. “This is what we do to those who break our rules.”
The college claims it’s upholding professional public standards. Yet any reasonably intelligent person can see the subjective bias they are using to make that claim.
The issue here isn’t the political opinion. It is instead the way professional associations and institutions are being taken over by activists who demand that
only certain political views are the new normal.
It’s easy to see this as a power grab, and it is. But it’s also likely that the psychologists and other professionals genuinely believe what they’re doing.
Over the last few years as our media landscape has polarized in correlation with the rise of social media, we have not spent nearly enough time noting how this transformed informational world has affected our highly educated professionals. Many of our educated classes listen to CBC radio and read the Globe and Mail and the New York Times, and many seem not to have noticed how the viewpoints they find in those outlets have narrowed. It can seem as if the radicalization and polarization in our media ecosystem has all taken place somewhere else and to somebody else. Polarization is about Fox News and right-wing media personalities like Ben Shapiro. Surely it can’t be about me!
It’s too easy for such figures to believe that they occupy the centre — even as the news outlets veer leftward, and increasingly exclude opinions now deemed “problematic” but which were, five minutes ago, simply an alternative perspective.
Certainly, radicalization happened on the right. Polarization has been a two-way street. But the difference is that it was more obvious what was happening to those on the right. They actively sought out different points of view. Many of our professionals and intelligentsia continued to sit in the same space, ingesting the same media, and failing to realize that their new normal was radically different from what it had once been. Polarization came for them and they didn’t need to get out of their chair.
As the Trump presidency deranged America, and as woke ideology jumped into the mainstream, many of our highly educated professionals simply switched what they saw as normal. The Overton window shifted. Canada became a genocidal state; questions like “where are you from?” became racist, and a white kid sporting dreadlocks went from being a bad hair-fashion choice to evidence of white supremacy.
