For some time now, Quebec has imported the “politics of identities” from the United States (identity politics), in spite of himself. This policy consists in classifying individuals by identity groups, either in relation to their “race”, their religion, their sex, etc. The debate it generates has become particularly inflamed recently with the multiple attempts to have the ideology of systemic racism adopted as holy truth. Fortunately, Quebec is still resisting this harmful ideology in the fight against racism, as I mentioned in my last text.1.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
For some, it would be a passing issue, for others it would be progress, but for many, and I include myself in this number, the racialization of our society will be a major division in the coming decades if we don’t act now.
I refuse to live in a society where an individual’s “race” is the primary characteristic that defines their interactions with their peers and the state, nor in a society that places the racial identity of its citizens above their collective identity, their citizenship and their socio-economic condition.
We must continue our fight against racism and discrimination, but always bringing everything back to the “race” of individuals and perceiving “systemic racism” everywhere is not desirable, on the contrary. Rather, it leads to sad slippages, as we have seen recently with this competition from the biology department of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Laval University, where applications that do not belong to certain specific identity groups are excluded without even consider their merit; we no longer speak of favoring an identity group with equal competence, but of automatically excluding candidates according to their membership of identity groups. And the scariest thing about all of this is that it is a repeat of other cases at Concordia University, McGill University, the University of Ottawa and several other Quebec universities. and Canadian.
In fact, I am still baffled by the case of that award-winning McGill University professor, Patanjali Kambhampati, who was recently denied two research grants by the Canadian government because he simply wanted to hire the best students. In fact, his project for the characterization of materials using laser spectrometry was refused since “the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) considerations of his application were deemed insufficient”, even if the scientific merits of his project proposal were beyond reproach. In fact, he simply wanted to hire his team of researchers “based on their merit, regardless of their identity affiliation”. For this professor emeritus of Indian origin and having immigrated to Montreal in 2003, his mortal sin was to advocate universalism, that is, a vision of the world that characterizes individuals according to their abilities and their merit, and not according to their belonging to a identity group.
It is important to emphasize that these unacceptable excesses stem from Canadian multiculturalism and the interference of the Canadian government in our Quebec universities.
In fact, since 2018 and at the initiative of the Trudeau government, any researcher applying for funds from one of Canada’s three granting councils (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Institutes of Health Research and Council of research in the humanities) must complete an EDI declaration. This McGill professor who wanted to hire on merit saw his request being excluded by this mechanism. Also, these three Canadian granting councils subject our universities to quotas stemming from the EDI philosophy, based on Canadian statistical averages without reflecting their local reality. According to Université Laval, it cannot submit applications other than those of specific identity subgroups “as long as its representation targets have not been reached, and this, in accordance with the requirements of the Canada Research Chairs Program”. . The same was true for all recent similar excesses within other Quebec and Canadian universities.
It will be recalled here that higher education, and therefore the hiring of professors, is an area of exclusive jurisdiction of the Government of Quebec. These abuses are therefore the direct consequence of the Canadian government’s interference in Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction, made possible by the federal spending power. These excesses are not inevitable, and it is possible for Quebecers to take measures to ensure that they do not happen again.
Which brings us back to this harsh reality, that Quebec must still and always fight to exist and bring its vision of society to life. Our differences are often a strength, because they allow us to combine expertise and complementary experiences, but in Quebec, they must be part of a universalist conception of society, anchored around the Quebec values of French as a common language, secularism of the state and equality between men and women. Faced with these excesses of radical individualism, Quebec must return to the concepts that make it possible to rediscover the sense of commonality, namely citizenship, the defense of the general interest and the nation. Indeed, a nation is united by the sense of the common good, whereas this radical individualism aims rather to replace this common good with the good of each one.