Twenty of the top 25 TSX-listed Canadian firms explicitly advocate for DEI in their job postings, but there are signs that sanity is starting to return

When love dies, the ties that bind simply melt away. That’s the fate of the modern-day affair between western institutions and the virtue-imbued succubus of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

How bad is DEI? At the extremes, the recent case of Henry Nowak, a murder victim who was handcuffed in his dying moments by British police rather than resuscitated — pandering to the assailant’s false claims of racism — can be traced to pervasive DEI training in the United Kingdom’s College of Policing and to such clumsily worded guidance as “our commitment to racial equity … does not mean treating everyone ‘the same.’ ”

Across Canada, similarly myopic training and skewed hiring behaviours have become the norm in recent years, busily cultivating a nightmare future where box-checking supersedes talent and mastery. But there is still a glimmer of light at the end of the long DEI tunnel.

A new report by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy focuses on Canada’s private sector, highlighting how even our leading companies are almost uniformly frozen in lockstep with the DEI zealotry advocated by academics. But the report also reveals belated signs of a long-awaited thaw.

Following an extensive analysis of job postings and careful scrutiny of firms’ publications — including policy statements, shareholder reports and declarations of social responsibility — the report finds Canada’s top corporations mostly mired in outlandish performative antics and worshipping at the altar of DEI.

What emerges is an alarming trend that is tantamount to discrimination and bias when it comes to Canadians’ career advancement. The report shows that a majority of leading companies in Canada are beholden to DEI-influenced behaviour, and ranks them based on an algorithm incorporating 10 metrics. Of these 10, one — scanning public-facing documents for ideological language — was aided and cross-checked by two separate AI platforms, and then verified manually. The rest were derived from answers to survey questions.

The data make for grim reading. Twenty of the top 25 TSX-listed Canadian firms (80 per cent) explicitly advocate for DEI in their job postings, and that figure increases to nearly 90 per cent when tech and telecom companies are excluded.

Ironically, only 70 per cent of companies declare themselves equal opportunity or affirmative action employers, suggesting that DEI presently enjoys higher priority than these pre-existing, legally embedded (but less fashionable) policies.

Thankfully, unlike the universities spotlighted in Aristotle’s previous research, none of the firms said candidates’ contributions to DEI were an asset for clinching a job.

Meanwhile, 60 per cent of firms went on to probe job-seekers for demographic information that had no bearing on their employability, a practice that inevitably fans suspicions about employers triaging applicants along race, gender and sexuality lines.

More worryingly, 88 per cent of companies announced demographic targets and quotas when hiring or promoting staff. And anyone lucky enough to score that hard-won job or promotion can expect to be ushered into one or more DEI educational bootcamps enthusiastically offered by every single one of Canada’s top 25 firms, except Shopify.

Hardly any of the job postings examined overtly preferred or restricted candidates to defined groups, though there were some, suggesting that what boffins term “diversity managerialism” is almost entirely performative.

The report distills its findings to produce a discrimination score, allowing companies to be ranked in terms of their “corporate wokeness,” and aims to guide today’s job candidates when assessing their prospects.

Top of the league table was Intact Financial, the insurer, but big banks like BMO and RBC were close behind. Collectively, firms in banking, finance and insurance pinned their DEI colours to the mast by scoring more than double those in tech and communications. Conversely, firms like Shopify and Constellation Software were at the bottom of the pack, making meritocratic hiring more likely.

The big picture has corporations virtue-signalling their DEI credentials on the one hand, but avoiding overtly discriminatory statements that might attract litigation on the other. Yet amid the monotony of woke excesses, there are breadcrumbs of hope.

BMO dropped diversity as a core value; a cautious Dollarama has de-emphasized mandatory DEI training for staff; and others like Waste Connections are avoiding DEI language as public discontent over identity politics grows.

The report perfectly captures the unsustainable DEI gobbledygook when one manager at Telus describes her firm’s efforts “incorporating Indigenous perspectives into our data ethics strategy,” and how employees are taught “why that’s important.”

Everyone with a pair of eyes knows our universities are ideological basket cases. But it’s not too late for Canadian companies to atone for past foolishness and abandon DEI indulgences that are increasingly tied to poor performance.

The new Aristotle Foundation report is retrospective, documenting the unvarnished reality of the recent past. But in 2026, there is a desire for change, and a growing number of firms are looking to make a clean break, leaving DEI — the spurned lover, once so adored — standing angrily on the doorstep in the rain.

Leigh Revers is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation, emeritus professor with the Institute for Management of Innovation and the department of chemical and physical sciences at the University of Toronto, and author of “From Equal Opportunity to Quotas: An index of DEI in hiring and ideological capture in Canadian corporations.” Photo credit: iStock.