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Eliminating toxic woke ideology: what could that mean in practice?

Michael Wernick
Jarislowksy Chair in Public Sector Management
University of Ottawa

DRAFT: MARCH 28

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre may be a Prime Minister in waiting. It seems reasonable to give greater scrutiny in the days ahead to statements that may soon have to be transformed into government policy through laws, regulations, administrative practices and institutional change.

One place to start is the now widely viewed interview Poilievre gave to Jordan Peterson on December 21, 2024. In particular, the part where he talks about race and identity. Watch the whole thing and make your own assessment.

Poilievre falls in an old tradition that puts individual before group and Canadian identity before identity politics.

“We’re going to get back to the basic principle that people are judged based on their individual character and humanity, rather than their group identity”.

“Leave the hyphens, we don’t need to be a hyphenated society”

“Put aside race, this obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted”

What is new is how he melds the old intellectual tradition with the contemporary populism that attacks “elites” and “horrendous, utopian wokeism”.

Neither are clearly defined. But let’s play it out and ask what it might mean for an incoming Canadian government in 2025.

There are a few indicators in the Peterson interview and other statements.

“I will defund wokeism and fight anti-semitism”

He would “fire government officials throughout (his) administration who are imposing a toxic woke ideology”

So, what will he really have to decide as PM?

The issues that will come up for him in government can be grouped under:

  • Laws
  • Institutions
  • Funding programs
  • Appointments
  • Courts
  • Administrative Practices
  • Litigation
  • The Algorithm for Policy Development

Laws

The most relevant would be the Employment Equity Act, the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Public Service Employment Act. Perhaps the Broadcasting Act.

The Employment Equity Act is a creature of the 1980s. The Trudeau government will fail to complete a review of the act that it launched in 2021. The Task Force report tabled by then Minister O’Regan in December 2023 sits without a legislative response.

Poilievre will have to decide whether to pursue a renovation of the Act, scrap it entirely, or let it carry on untouched into the late 2020s without addressing such thorny issues as whether to keep women as a category in a public service that is now 56 percent female, and whether to break up the “visible minority” category and replace it with more specific identifiers, such as “Black” and “South Asian”.

The Canadian Human Rights Act may be reopened. Poilievre has spoken about protecting free expression but also about clamping down on hate speech. This will have to turned into legislative language that will be subject to Charter challenges.

It is notable that in 2016 there was broad support from all parties for C-16 which added gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. The bill was a response to transphobia and in current US politics would be considered “woke”.

Institutions

Legislation would have to be reopened if the government wants to strip or constrain the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal of its power to make large monetary awards and intrude into the internal operations of government.

In his leadership campaign Poilievre promised to create a “Free Speech Guardian” to ensure the compliance of universities with the principles of academic freedom and free speech and investigate claims of academic censorship. This means creating, funding and staffing either a new institution or embedding it within some other agency.

The future of the Centre on Diversity and Inclusion embedded at the Treasury Board Secretariat seems uncertain now. Perhaps too the department called Women and Gender Equality Canada? These are decisions Poilievre will face.

Some Senators are likely to press the government for a response to their December 2023 report Anti-Black Racism, Sexism and Systemic Discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which among other things calls for appointing a “Black Equity Commissioner”.

The government could rescind or amend the policy directive on “sustainable and equitable broadcasting” issued in late 2023 by the Minister of Canadian Heritage to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Funding Programs

Poilievre has said basic transfers to the provinces will not be affected by his intention to expunge wokeism.

One important funding tool is the federal granting councils: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC); Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); and especially the oft criticized Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). To change their outcomes the government can alter their underlying legislation that sets out mandate and goals. How far it can go to direct their internal policies and strip out DEI is debatable, but they can replace their senior leaders or choke off Ministerial signoff of plans and appropriations until compliance is achieved.

The other relevant tool is direct funding through dozens of contribution programs. Most of them work by taking applications, screening them according to pre-published selection criteria and making funding recommendations. Often the funding decision for small amounts is delegated from the Minister to public servants, through something called a chart of delegations, but the Minister can choose the setpoints for delegation. If Ministers keep more of the final decision to themselves what it means in practice is that their political office is going through each file and making their own recommendation in a “grey note”, away from the transparency obligations of the Access to Information Act.

Trying to intervene on individual files in contribution programs very late in the process or after a recommendation has been made to the Minister, got Harper era Minister Bev Oda into hot water in the 2011 case of Kairos.

So the smarter play for a new government will be to task each Minister to slog through the terms and conditions of all of their funding programs and make changes to expunge DEI in the selection criteria. They will want to get this done prior to opening new application windows.

The federal government has potential leverage on universities by withholding funding for research and infrastructure until the university changes its DEI policies and practices. However, this would be seen by many as interference in provincial jurisdiction. Poilievre has not shown any consistency on federalism, being highly interventionist on housing and safe injection sites, but also criticizing federal overreach. How far to intervene with universities’ DEI practices could turn out to be a difficult course to chart.

Appointments

One sure way for the Prime Minister to affect the culture of the federal state over time is by making choices about appointments to senior leadership positions, boards of directors, advisory boards, adjudicative bodies and review bodies.

Many of these are the purview of full Cabinet through Governor in Council appointments (what the Americans call executive appointments) or appointments by specific Ministers under the authorities given to them by laws.

Most of these appointments are “at pleasure” which means they have minimal job security. They can be revoked quickly if the government is willing to meet a test of procedural fairness and pay an amount of severance the courts would find reasonable. Other appointments are deliberately “on good behavior” which raises the bar for dismissal very high. There is jurisprudence on this, some of it created by clumsy firings by previous governments.

The government will be able to fire and replace GIC and Ministerial appointees that it considers important to expunging wokeism. Changing the boards and advisory councils may draw less attention than changing CEOs but it would have a long-term impact.

Middle managers and permanent employees are shielded to an extent because they covered by the Public Service Employment Act. They can be fired with a combination of notice and payment in lieu of notice if the employer can demonstrate just cause. They can also be laid off if their work is terminated by the shutting down of a program or institution.

However, under current law employees have recourse to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Accessibility Commission if they believe the firing is discriminatory, and to the Public Service Integrity Commission if they believe there is an abuse of power or reprisal.

Courts

The composition of the courts can affect future rulings and jurisprudence. Firing any of the 1200 federally appointed judges has until now been close to impossible. The government can, however, influence the courts by making new appointments when vacancies occur. The government can influence how judges are selected and promoted by making appointments to the 17 Judicial Advisory Councils that screen applications and make recommendations to the Minister of Justice. These people currently serve for three-year terms. Since 2016 the government has collected information from applicants on diversity and language proficiency and publishes the outcome for appointments. The government could stop collecting or publishing this data.

Administrative Practices

The federal government has adopted administrative policies and practices related to DEI and Indigenous reconciliation.

Some policies, directives and guidelines emanate from the Treasury Board and cover all organizations unless explicitly exempted. Others were developed by individual departments, agencies and Crown Corporations. Some organizations have posted Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Plans.

One example of a broad policy is the Guidelines on Making Communications Products and Activities Diverse and Inclusive issued in 2023. Another is the Policy on People Management updated in 2021 and the more specific Directive on Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion from 2020.

Government procurement practices have been affected by explicit policies such as the Supplier Diversity Action Plan, the Black Business Procurement Pilot, a Policy on Social Procurement and a Minimum Target for Indigenous Procurement (the one that drew attention during the ArriveCan hearings). The obverse of using procurement to promote DEI would be to change the criteria to bar suppliers who have DEI policies that the government finds offensive.

Human resource practices of relevance include staffing, training, recourse and a collection of practices under the label “restorative engagement”.

The Canada School of the Public Service, the in-house academy, provides a range of relevant training. Examples are Supporting Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Through Staffing , its Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Learning Path For Executives. It is not clear at this point whether Poilievre sees Indigenous reconciliation and the initiatives launched in response to the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as “woke”. The Canada School of the Public Service has a catalogue of Indigenous Learning Products. Some departments have pursued their own training initiatives related to Indigenous reconciliation.

Many of the collective agreements that ended the public service strike in 2023 include language regarding a review of anti-racism and discrimination training. These agreements will expire and come up for renegotiation in early 2026.

With respect to hiring and promotion, there has been a decades long internal debate as to whether the public service should pursue targets and reporting against them, putting a lot of weight on development programs to increase the pools of promotable candidates, or use closed staffing processes to increase representation of “equity seeking groups”. Here we are back to discussing the categories in the 1980s Employment Equity Act.

There may be clues to what is coming in the 2010 episode when then Conservative Treasury Board President Stockwell Day ordered a review of a staffing competition limited to Aboriginal and visible minority candidates. Employment Minister Jason Kenney argued at the time “we can continue to achieve greater diversity in the public sector without prohibiting people from applying for jobs on the basis of their race or ethnicity”.

The Poilievre government will have to decide whether to permit staffing processes limited to equity seeking groups and what to do with targeted development programs such as the Mosaic Leadership Development Program. This task will probably be part of the mandate letter of the Treasury Board Minister.

If Poilievre’s government follows Donald Trump’s lead in declaring there are only two genders, his government will have to decide whether to retain or repeal a number of administrative practices. Examples are Statistics Canada’s standards on “gender of person” issued in 2021, and Passport Canada’s and IRCC’s adoption of an X identifier option.

Litigation

Poilievre’s government will have to decide how best to deal with any follow-up to a class action suit by the Black Class Action Secretariat alleging systemic racism since 1970 and seeking damages of $2.5 billion on behalf of Black public servants and retirees. It is likely litigation will re-emerge in a new form.

The Algorithm for Policy Development

Since the 1970s the federal government has tried to shift policy development in the direction of inclusion. For the first decades the focus was on gender equality. Since the 1995 Federal Plan for Gender Equality, units within the public service have been tasked with conducting Gender Based Analysis (GBA) of policy proposals as part of the wider due diligence process. Part of the purpose of having a department once known as Status of Women and later as Women and Gender Equality was internal advocacy and training to conduct GBA.

In 2011, in part responding to a 2005 Parliamentary Committee report and an Auditor General review, a Plus was added to GBA, and GBA+ has steadily widened its scope to issues of “intersectionality” of gender with an non-exhaustive list of other factor that includes race, age, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and spirituality.

GBAPlus analysis is now a mandatory part of the algorithm for development and due diligence of Memoranda to Cabinet, Treasury Board Submissions, Budget submissions and Departmental Plans and Results Reports. Several departments maintain teams devoted to GBAPlus work. Others retain consultants to train their people in the methodology. GBAPlus was part of all Ministers’ mandate letters in 2019 and 2021.

In June 2022 Trudeau released a Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan and assigned its follow up to a secretariat at the department of Women and Gender Equality.

The Poilievre government will have to decide whether to retain the directives and public service teams that go with GBAPlus and the Action Plan, seek to modify them, or scrap them altogether as vestiges of wokeism.

Public Service Autonomy

Since January 2021, in the aftermath of the turbulence of 2020’s Black Lives Matter and the discovery of Indigenous graves, three successive Clerks of the Privy Council (Shugart, Charette and Hannaford) have used their positions as nominal “head of the public service” to issue versions of a Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion in the Federal Public Service.

Poilievre will have to decide how much leeway to give the Clerk and the Secretary of the Treasury Board to continue these initiatives or to ask for them to be modified or cancelled.

Michael Wernick
Jarislowksy Chair in Public Sector Management
University of Ottawa

DRAFT: MARCH 28

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre may be a Prime Minister in waiting. It seems reasonable to give greater scrutiny in the days ahead to statements that may soon have to be transformed into government policy through laws, regulations, administrative practices and institutional change.

One place to start is the now widely viewed interview Poilievre gave to Jordan Peterson on December 21, 2024. In particular, the part where he talks about race and identity. Watch the whole thing and make your own assessment.

Poilievre falls in an old tradition that puts individual before group and Canadian identity before identity politics.

“We’re going to get back to the basic principle that people are judged based on their individual character and humanity, rather than their group identity”.

“Leave the hyphens, we don’t need to be a hyphenated society”

“Put aside race, this obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted”

What is new is how he melds the old intellectual tradition with the contemporary populism that attacks “elites” and “horrendous, utopian wokeism”.

Neither are clearly defined. But let’s play it out and ask what it might mean for an incoming Canadian government in 2025.

There are a few indicators in the Peterson interview and other statements.

“I will defund wokeism and fight anti-semitism”

He would “fire government officials throughout (his) administration who are imposing a toxic woke ideology”

So, what will he really have to decide as PM?

The issues that will come up for him in government can be grouped under:

  • Laws
  • Institutions
  • Funding programs
  • Appointments
  • Courts
  • Administrative Practices
  • Litigation
  • The Algorithm for Policy Development

Laws

The most relevant would be the Employment Equity Act, the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Public Service Employment Act. Perhaps the Broadcasting Act.

The Employment Equity Act is a creature of the 1980s. The Trudeau government will fail to complete a review of the act that it launched in 2021. The Task Force report tabled by then Minister O’Regan in December 2023 sits without a legislative response.

Poilievre will have to decide whether to pursue a renovation of the Act, scrap it entirely, or let it carry on untouched into the late 2020s without addressing such thorny issues as whether to keep women as a category in a public service that is now 56 percent female, and whether to break up the “visible minority” category and replace it with more specific identifiers, such as “Black” and “South Asian”.

The Canadian Human Rights Act may be reopened. Poilievre has spoken about protecting free expression but also about clamping down on hate speech. This will have to turned into legislative language that will be subject to Charter challenges.

It is notable that in 2016 there was broad support from all parties for C-16 which added gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. The bill was a response to transphobia and in current US politics would be considered “woke”.

Institutions

Legislation would have to be reopened if the government wants to strip or constrain the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal of its power to make large monetary awards and intrude into the internal operations of government.

In his leadership campaign Poilievre promised to create a “Free Speech Guardian” to ensure the compliance of universities with the principles of academic freedom and free speech and investigate claims of academic censorship. This means creating, funding and staffing either a new institution or embedding it within some other agency.

The future of the Centre on Diversity and Inclusion embedded at the Treasury Board Secretariat seems uncertain now. Perhaps too the department called Women and Gender Equality Canada? These are decisions Poilievre will face.

Some Senators are likely to press the government for a response to their December 2023 report Anti-Black Racism, Sexism and Systemic Discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which among other things calls for appointing a “Black Equity Commissioner”.

The government could rescind or amend the policy directive on “sustainable and equitable broadcasting” issued in late 2023 by the Minister of Canadian Heritage to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Funding Programs

Poilievre has said basic transfers to the provinces will not be affected by his intention to expunge wokeism.

One important funding tool is the federal granting councils: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC); Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); and especially the oft criticized Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). To change their outcomes the government can alter their underlying legislation that sets out mandate and goals. How far it can go to direct their internal policies and strip out DEI is debatable, but they can replace their senior leaders or choke off Ministerial signoff of plans and appropriations until compliance is achieved.

The other relevant tool is direct funding through dozens of contribution programs. Most of them work by taking applications, screening them according to pre-published selection criteria and making funding recommendations. Often the funding decision for small amounts is delegated from the Minister to public servants, through something called a chart of delegations, but the Minister can choose the setpoints for delegation. If Ministers keep more of the final decision to themselves what it means in practice is that their political office is going through each file and making their own recommendation in a “grey note”, away from the transparency obligations of the Access to Information Act.

Trying to intervene on individual files in contribution programs very late in the process or after a recommendation has been made to the Minister, got Harper era Minister Bev Oda into hot water in the 2011 case of Kairos.

So the smarter play for a new government will be to task each Minister to slog through the terms and conditions of all of their funding programs and make changes to expunge DEI in the selection criteria. They will want to get this done prior to opening new application windows.

The federal government has potential leverage on universities by withholding funding for research and infrastructure until the university changes its DEI policies and practices. However, this would be seen by many as interference in provincial jurisdiction. Poilievre has not shown any consistency on federalism, being highly interventionist on housing and safe injection sites, but also criticizing federal overreach. How far to intervene with universities’ DEI practices could turn out to be a difficult course to chart.

Appointments

One sure way for the Prime Minister to affect the culture of the federal state over time is by making choices about appointments to senior leadership positions, boards of directors, advisory boards, adjudicative bodies and review bodies.

Many of these are the purview of full Cabinet through Governor in Council appointments (what the Americans call executive appointments) or appointments by specific Ministers under the authorities given to them by laws.

Most of these appointments are “at pleasure” which means they have minimal job security. They can be revoked quickly if the government is willing to meet a test of procedural fairness and pay an amount of severance the courts would find reasonable. Other appointments are deliberately “on good behavior” which raises the bar for dismissal very high. There is jurisprudence on this, some of it created by clumsy firings by previous governments.

The government will be able to fire and replace GIC and Ministerial appointees that it considers important to expunging wokeism. Changing the boards and advisory councils may draw less attention than changing CEOs but it would have a long-term impact.

Middle managers and permanent employees are shielded to an extent because they covered by the Public Service Employment Act. They can be fired with a combination of notice and payment in lieu of notice if the employer can demonstrate just cause. They can also be laid off if their work is terminated by the shutting down of a program or institution.

However, under current law employees have recourse to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Accessibility Commission if they believe the firing is discriminatory, and to the Public Service Integrity Commission if they believe there is an abuse of power or reprisal.

Courts

The composition of the courts can affect future rulings and jurisprudence. Firing any of the 1200 federally appointed judges has until now been close to impossible. The government can, however, influence the courts by making new appointments when vacancies occur. The government can influence how judges are selected and promoted by making appointments to the 17 Judicial Advisory Councils that screen applications and make recommendations to the Minister of Justice. These people currently serve for three-year terms. Since 2016 the government has collected information from applicants on diversity and language proficiency and publishes the outcome for appointments. The government could stop collecting or publishing this data.

Administrative Practices

The federal government has adopted administrative policies and practices related to DEI and Indigenous reconciliation.

Some policies, directives and guidelines emanate from the Treasury Board and cover all organizations unless explicitly exempted. Others were developed by individual departments, agencies and Crown Corporations. Some organizations have posted Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Plans.

One example of a broad policy is the Guidelines on Making Communications Products and Activities Diverse and Inclusive issued in 2023. Another is the Policy on People Management updated in 2021 and the more specific Directive on Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion from 2020.

Government procurement practices have been affected by explicit policies such as the Supplier Diversity Action Plan, the Black Business Procurement Pilot, a Policy on Social Procurement and a Minimum Target for Indigenous Procurement (the one that drew attention during the ArriveCan hearings). The obverse of using procurement to promote DEI would be to change the criteria to bar suppliers who have DEI policies that the government finds offensive.

Human resource practices of relevance include staffing, training, recourse and a collection of practices under the label “restorative engagement”.

The Canada School of the Public Service, the in-house academy, provides a range of relevant training. Examples are Supporting Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Through Staffing , its Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Learning Path For Executives. It is not clear at this point whether Poilievre sees Indigenous reconciliation and the initiatives launched in response to the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as “woke”. The Canada School of the Public Service has a catalogue of Indigenous Learning Products. Some departments have pursued their own training initiatives related to Indigenous reconciliation.

Many of the collective agreements that ended the public service strike in 2023 include language regarding a review of anti-racism and discrimination training. These agreements will expire and come up for renegotiation in early 2026.

With respect to hiring and promotion, there has been a decades long internal debate as to whether the public service should pursue targets and reporting against them, putting a lot of weight on development programs to increase the pools of promotable candidates, or use closed staffing processes to increase representation of “equity seeking groups”. Here we are back to discussing the categories in the 1980s Employment Equity Act.

There may be clues to what is coming in the 2010 episode when then Conservative Treasury Board President Stockwell Day ordered a review of a staffing competition limited to Aboriginal and visible minority candidates. Employment Minister Jason Kenney argued at the time “we can continue to achieve greater diversity in the public sector without prohibiting people from applying for jobs on the basis of their race or ethnicity”.

The Poilievre government will have to decide whether to permit staffing processes limited to equity seeking groups and what to do with targeted development programs such as the Mosaic Leadership Development Program. This task will probably be part of the mandate letter of the Treasury Board Minister.

If Poilievre’s government follows Donald Trump’s lead in declaring there are only two genders, his government will have to decide whether to retain or repeal a number of administrative practices. Examples are Statistics Canada’s standards on “gender of person” issued in 2021, and Passport Canada’s and IRCC’s adoption of an X identifier option.

Litigation

Poilievre’s government will have to decide how best to deal with any follow-up to a class action suit by the Black Class Action Secretariat alleging systemic racism since 1970 and seeking damages of $2.5 billion on behalf of Black public servants and retirees. It is likely litigation will re-emerge in a new form.

The Algorithm for Policy Development

Since the 1970s the federal government has tried to shift policy development in the direction of inclusion. For the first decades the focus was on gender equality. Since the 1995 Federal Plan for Gender Equality, units within the public service have been tasked with conducting Gender Based Analysis (GBA) of policy proposals as part of the wider due diligence process. Part of the purpose of having a department once known as Status of Women and later as Women and Gender Equality was internal advocacy and training to conduct GBA.

In 2011, in part responding to a 2005 Parliamentary Committee report and an Auditor General review, a Plus was added to GBA, and GBA+ has steadily widened its scope to issues of “intersectionality” of gender with an non-exhaustive list of other factor that includes race, age, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and spirituality.

GBAPlus analysis is now a mandatory part of the algorithm for development and due diligence of Memoranda to Cabinet, Treasury Board Submissions, Budget submissions and Departmental Plans and Results Reports. Several departments maintain teams devoted to GBAPlus work. Others retain consultants to train their people in the methodology. GBAPlus was part of all Ministers’ mandate letters in 2019 and 2021.

In June 2022 Trudeau released a Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan and assigned its follow up to a secretariat at the department of Women and Gender Equality.

The Poilievre government will have to decide whether to retain the directives and public service teams that go with GBAPlus and the Action Plan, seek to modify them, or scrap them altogether as vestiges of wokeism.

Public Service Autonomy

Since January 2021, in the aftermath of the turbulence of 2020’s Black Lives Matter and the discovery of Indigenous graves, three successive Clerks of the Privy Council (Shugart, Charette and Hannaford) have used their positions as nominal “head of the public service” to issue versions of a Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion in the Federal Public Service.

Poilievre will have to decide how much leeway to give the Clerk and the Secretary of the Treasury Board to continue these initiatives or to ask for them to be modified or cancelled.