This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Peter MacKinnon, September 25, 2025
Observers who take issue with current orthodoxies (race-based quotas, compulsory support for racial diversity policies) are often denounced or sidetracked in the country’s universities and other public institutions. Widespread discrimination is practiced in the name of these orthodoxies while the liberal democratic principle of non-discrimination — Section 15(1) of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms — recedes from public view and effect in the name of affirmative action.
Onto this scene comes our fellow Canadian and Harvard professor Steven Pinker, an internationally distinguished scholar whose work includes Enlightenment Now, one of the most celebrated books of the early 21st century. On Sept. 15 Pinker appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research with the message that discriminatory quotas on race and gender work “against the interest of science and the nation.”
Pinker’s evidence before the committee is summarized by the National Post’s Tristin Hopper: “(U)niversities have become subject to chilling ‘monocultures’ that shun and punish dissenting opinions.”
Pinker called for universities to disempower DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). It is not reasonable, he said, to expect ethnic makeups that are exactly proportional to the general population. He noted that in recent years it has become standard practice for Canadian universities to ascribe race-based quotas to everything from admissions to hiring to grant funding.
These are problems with major implications: Unending debate about whether there are too many, or not enough, Asians, whites, Indigenous persons or Blacks in the professoriate. Should the calculus include LGBTQ2S and transpersons? Religions too? Should the merits of research proposals be weighed against the ethnicity, gender or religious beliefs of their proponents? How do you tell student applicants that high academic standing comes second place to membership in “equity-deserving” groups?
Moderate voices on these issues are often silenced by advocates for race and gender quotas who resort to the racist label to discredit those who do not agree with them. The words of Steven Pinker may encourage them to speak up, and to join what we should hope to be a growing chorus favouring non-discrimination, cosmopolitanism and viewpoint diversity. Indeed, Canadians should be grateful to Dr. Pinker.
Peter MacKinnon served as the president of three Canadian universities and is a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Aristotle Foundation.
