This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Peter MacKinnon, January 30, 2025
Toronto Metropolitan University remains committed to medical school admissions through “equity pathways” (admissions streams for Black, Indigenous and other equity deserving groups) though it has developed a vocabulary that obscures their discriminatory impact: “excellence, inclusion and innovation;” students “from the community, for the community.” But according to TMU vice-president and dean of medicine, Teresa Chan, the university remains “committed to admitting a majority of students through equity pathways.”
It would at least be informative to hear an explicit acknowledgment that the policy discriminates against white applicants, but no, there is no mention of discrimination and its prohibition in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Code; it is as if these provisions do not exist or matter, or do not apply to TMU.
How did we get here? This is an important question in the Canada of 2025 and in no area is it more troubling than in the practice and acceptance of discrimination we would have thought unimaginable in the not-too-distant past: race-based admissions processes; race-based hiring of professors and others; race or gender requirements for researchers who receive grants from federal agencies; requirements that job applicants disclose how they would support DEI initiatives that focus on identity; university spaces set aside as lounges only for students of colour. In part the answer lies in Orwellian newspeak that substitutes ambiguous or superficially inoffensive language — as in the TMU vocabulary — for the explicit recognition of discrimination that at one time we would have heard. In part, too, the answer lies in affirmative action that extends well beyond what might have been anticipated when it was protected in Section 15(2) of the Charter.
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Peter MacKinnon has served as president of three Canadian universities and is a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
