Why is DEI so flawed and illiberal?

One reason we set up the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy is to give Canadians the data, history, and tools to inform themselves and others. Think of us as the “wholesaler.” It’s our goal to provide research you can then “retail” to students, parents, teachers, politicians, the media—anyone you think is open to reason, facts, and informed history.  

To that end, we analyze certain issues in detail in studies, books, and essays. Here’s one critical one to ponder: Why the illiberal, anti-merit, anti-individual policy known as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) is flawed. It is not because a diversity of people from all backgrounds, or acceptance, is somehow undesirable—quite the opposite. But nice-sounding words are not enough when it comes to treating people as equal in law and policy or getting to a flourishing country with equal opportunity for all.

DEI’s illiberal origins

In Canada, not enough attention has been paid to DEI and why it’s flawed no matter how sincerely intended. It is, in fact, harmful to individual freedom and to prosperity. But why is that?

DEI is the same as “affirmative action” and “employment equity.” (And all of them are American in origin. Read Martin Loney’s 1998 book, The Pursuit of Division, for the history of this.) Despite the nice-sounding phrase, this concept assumes racism explains all (or mostly all) economic outcomes. That includes the incomes and wealth of individuals—the “privilege” claim. DEI policies thus discriminate against students in admissions at universities and in hiring across multiple employers on this basis.

A useful fact about privilege: If one was a slave on a southern U.S. plantation in 1850, slaveholders indeed gained their wealth based on black slavery. But that’s not Canada in 2025. It wasn’t even Canada in 1850 given that slavery began to be fought by British colonialists in the late 1700s and was abolished in law in the British empire effective 1834, with rare exceptions in Canada being slaveholding First Nations in British Columbia in the 19^th century.

Facts about economic outcomes and multivariate causes

So, what does explain economic outcomes in modern, mostly open economies? A plethora of factors beyond the possibility of some causal impacts from some racism:

• Geography. Those in rural areas have lower incomes than those in urban areas. This partly explains lower indigenous incomes on average vis-à-vis other Canadians.

According to 2016 census data, nearly 60% of indigenous Canadians (First Nations, Metis, Inuit) lived in towns, villages, or cities with less than 30,000 in population compared with just 32% of non-indigenous Canadians. Given that most educational and economic opportunities are in or near major cities, that helps explain part of the difference in average incomes between indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians.

• Education. Educational attainment, be it a trade or a university education, is directly correlated with higher incomes. As Aristotle Foundation senior fellow Matthew Lau pointed out in our first study, on average, Canadians of East Asian ancestry show higher weekly earnings than white Canadians.

For example, Canadian-born men of Japanese ancestry recorded average weekly earnings of $1,750 in 2016 compared with white males who earned $1,530 weekly. Canadian-born women of Korean ancestry earned $1,450 weekly compared with white women who earned $1,120 weekly. All that and more correlates with educational attainment: East Asian Canadians have higher educational levels compared with white, and other, Canadians.

• Average age levels. The average age of a cohort also matters to economic outcomes because 50-year-olds are at the peak of their career and earn more than 20-year-olds just starting out. This also skews the averages when cohorts are compared. It is also why it’s a mistake to assert “racism” as causal when this other factor is also in play. For example, the median age for First Nations is just over 27 years, for Métis it’s 33, and for the non-aboriginal population it’s 41.

• Family breakdown. There are many necessary reasons why spouses cannot and should not always stay together, but insofar as some blame racism for economic outcomes, here’s another factor: the impact of family fracturing on social outcomes such as crime.

Back in the 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a sociologist and later a Democratic Senator from New York, famously wrote of how the breakdown of the black family was leading to higher crime rates, among other negative consequences: young males without a father were statistically more likely to be involved in crime. Decades later, in 2012, political scientist Charles Murray observed the same dynamic for white American families. He catalogued the same patterns and decline for economic and social outcomes in his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010.

Here’s the good news about the erroneous claim that racism explains all or mostly all economic outcomes: When apple-to-apple comparisons are made, incomes are often more similar than simple average comparisons would show. Here’s how Matthew Lau put it in our Aristotle Foundation research paper on race and incomes:

“After controlling for level of education and work status, indigenous Canadians earn close to the same incomes as non-Indigenous Canadians. The median income for indigenous Canadians who worked full-time for the full 2020 year was only slightly below the national average among people with a bachelor degree or lower ($58,400 indigenous vs. $60,800 non-indigenous), and slightly above the national average for those with a higher level of education ($85,000 vs. $83,000).”

Some caveats and the big picture: Given the foregoing, why do some people think racism explains all or mostly all in terms of incomes and wealth?

Some conflate personal bigotry with “institutional” or “systemic” racism.

Fact: Canada began to dismantle actual institutional racism in law and policies in the 1940s and 1950s, far ahead of the American civil rights era. For example, in 1953, the federal government passed The Fair Employment Practices Act, which banned discrimination based on race, national original colour, or religion. Many provinces including Ontario banned such discrimination around the same time.

In other words, while personal prejudice can and does exist today (bigots can be found online and in person) it’s not the same in effect as literal discrimination by an institution—a government, corporation, school, or university—outlawed over seven decades ago. (DEI discrimination is the modern-day exception.)

Despite that reality, American authors such as Ibrahim X Kendi, Ta Nehisi Coates, Peggy Mcintosh, and others are widely read, but in error. The theory they offer up is monocausal: racism explains all or most economic outcomes, including disparities between cohorts. As an antidote, more people should read economist Thomas Sowell’s landmark work over 60 years on race and culture and its nuances on multivariate inputs for outcomes. Sowell has always been data-based, empirical, and historically informed in a manner Kendi, Coates, and McIntosh are not. Here’s a summary conclusion from Sowell:

“During the long years that I spent researching and writing this trilogy I was struck again and again with how common huge disparities in income and wealth have been for centuries, in countries around the world—and yet how each country regards its own particular disparities as unusual, if not unique. Some of these disparities have been among racial or ethnic groups, some among nations, and some among regions, continents, or whole civilizations.

“In the nineteenth century, real per capita income in the Balkans was about one-third that in Britain. That dwarfs intergroup disparities that many in the United States today regard as not merely strange but sinister. Singapore has a median per capita income that is literally hundreds of times greater than that in Burma.

“Why are there such disparities? In some cases, we can trace the reasons, but in other cases we cannot. A more fundamental question, however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first place?

“During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as the Malay majority…. In the Austrian Empire in 1900, the illiteracy rate among Polish adults was 40 percent and among Serbo-Croatians 75 percent–but only 6 percent among the Germans.

“Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other countries–disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as well as in fields of specialization–why should anyone expect equal outcomes in incomes or occupations? [Moreover], educational differences are just one source of economic disparities.”

What about useful diversity, equity, and inclusiveness?

There’s much right about diversity and acceptance. To ponder an example of how a monoculture can harm itself, consider the example of Japan. The country shut itself off from the world between 1603 and 1867 due to a self-enforced “sakoku” policy of isolationism. That did not help Japan develop. By the time Japan was forced to open up at the point of a gunship in 1853 and 1854, and when the existing Japanese regime collapsed in 1867, Japan had much “catching up” to do vis-à-vis the rest of the world on technology and much else.

In other words, whether individuals, countries, or companies that beg, borrow, and “steal” from each other, openness to others and what they bring is generally a positive development. (Imagine if Europeans kept Roman numerals instead of Arabic numbering; they would still be stuck in the Middle Ages technology-wise given the difficulty of calculating complex formulas that are necessary for actuarial tables and engineering, among other fields.)

Diversity and inclusion properly understood then is, in fact, the history of Western liberalism (the classic kind, not the modern “progressive” liberalism). That is where the focus from John Stuart Mill (On Liberty) and others was so helpful to those individuals in marginalized groups: The point was to protect the individual in law and policy instead of finding reasons not to do so based on irrelevant characteristics such as one’s collective identity (religion) or unchangeable identity (skin colour, ethnicity).

That is why, in response to 19^th-century ideas of the moral equality of the individual that flowered in the 20^th century, by the 1950s, pressure built to outlaw actual institutional discrimination. Ironically, the only “but” is that identity politics today means Canadians are again divided based on what they look like. That is not liberal but regressive, and, at its core, anti-individual and anti-merit. Lurking at the back of it all is what I just noted: The mistaken belief economic outcomes are wholly or mostly due to assumed past or present racism or “privilege”.

The other part that drives DEI policy is the notion that discrimination based on identities today can somehow make up for past discrimination against people based on their identities. I unpack all this in The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization. (See the latest version here and 100 reviews from the original edition here.) In short, it is one thing to compensate ex-slaves for the egregious evil done to them, as Quakers did in the late 18^th century. In that instance, a direct cause-and-effect link existed between an action (slavery) and an economic outcome (ex-slaves of course had little opportunity to earn wealth). That is unlike the DEI assumption among a wide variety of cohorts today, that today’s disparities are mostly race-based, even in the face of contrary evidence and competing causal factors. 

Those twin beliefs—racism explains much and we must make up for past varieties of discrimination today—is what drives the modern DEI movement. It is also why DEI is so anti-merit, illiberal, and anti-individual: The “diversity” and “inclusion” movement today is in fact dismissive of intercultural borrowing. It also excludes people in hiring and university admissions if they are the “wrong” skin colour, ethnicity, and so forth. DEI is thus anti-diversity and exclusive.

As for the other buzzword, “equity,” equal outcomes are a chimera and undesirable. Actual diversity (!) should presume we all have differing priorities, unique goals, have diverse skill sets and the like. That is why any reasonable person should focus on equal opportunity for all instead of on equalizing outcomes.

A reading list on DEI

In our short two years in existence as an educational charity, the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy has published a substantial body of work on DEI and related issues. Here’s the list of just our published studies and related books:

• Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts about Race, Discrimination, and the Poor, Matthew Lau and David Hunt

• A Right to Unequal Treatment: In Canada, some people are more equal than others, Prof. Bruce Pardy

• What DEI research concludes about diversity training: it is divisive, counter-productive, and unnecessary, Prof. David Millard Haskell

• Systemic racism claims in Canada: A fact-based analysis, Matthew Lau

• When did Canada end systemic discrimination? An historical and legal review, Timothy Platnich, Danny Randell, and David Hunt 

• DEI and academic hiring in public universities: An index of university discrimination in Canada, David Hunt, Collin May, Ven Venkatachalam, and Alex Emes

• Exploring Our Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century, Dr. Peter MacKinnon

• Confronting Illiberalism: A Canadian Perspective, Dr. Peter MacKinnon

• The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization, Dr. Mark Milke

Lastly, let me leave you with another thought from Thomas Sowell:

“It should be axiomatic that there is not unlimited time, unlimited resources, or unlimited good will among peoples–anywhere in the world. If we are serious about wanting to enlarge opportunities and advance those who are less fortunate, then we cannot fritter away the limited means at our disposal in quixotic quests. We must decide whether our top priority is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are looking for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good for the moment or whether we are seeking methods with a proven track record of success in advancing whole peoples from poverty to prosperity.”

Mark Milke, Ph.D., is the president and founder of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and author of six books, and over 70 studies. His newest book is The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization. Photo: iStock.