Lessons For Next Time: Actually Make Use Of Diversity
On Diversity For More Than Diversity’s Sake
One of the things people point to as evidence of Justin Trudeau’s wokeness was the decision to appoint a gender equal cabinet, a decision I’ve litigated before and I think was a good thing fucked up. (For new readers: he never should have said anything about it, he just needed to do it.) But, the real problem with it was not listening to the diversity of voices the government put around the Cabinet table. The virtue of diversity - whether gender, race, sexual orientation, religious, or otherwise - is to avoid groupthink and provide different perspectives, which flow through to sharper decision making.
The problem with the Trudeau government was that we reduced cabinet governance to government of and by the PMO, with select departments having some leeway but the big decisions being made by an isolated group. We never empowered our Ministers to take advantage of the special insights their diverse perspectives should have enabled them to have. We made a lot of our Ministers - both the pale, stale males and the younger, often non-white, often female ones - essentially spokespeople for the PMO. It was a waste of everybody’s time.
But, the decision to say “Because it’s 2015” and to appoint Randy Fucking Boissonault as a “Special Advisor to the Prime Minister on LGBTQ2 Issues” and to done the amount of cultural clothing in India and any number of decisions that on their own aren’t crises led to a sense that Trudeau and co viewed representation as a costume to wear and a crutch to virtue signal. Trudeau wasn’t the first to do so and he isn’t the last - Wab Kinew wore a fucking Winnipeg Jets jersey on P&P last night over his collared shirt to show he’s a regular, relatable guy, to take the most recent example. But it’s not a solution in and of itself.
If Mark Carney is committed to diversity and representation - as his stated commitment to a gender equal cabinet suggests - he needs to ensure that the diverse slate of Ministers actually deliver on the potential that their backgrounds give them. If we are going to fight the scourge that is anti-semitism, empower members of Cabinet - both Rachel Bendayan, who I assume will keep her cabinet job, but all members - to step up the fight.
We need to encourage Ministers and Members to make the case for compassion and empathy and love for the Jewish community in Canada in ways they are best suited to do in their communities. I know firsthand that many members are doing hard work keeping communities harmonious, but I’d love to see more public examples of Muslim MPs speaking out against anti-semitic attacks and I’d love to see Housefather and Bendayan speak up about the need to fight back against Islamophobia significantly. There are messages that will play differently depending who makes them, and there are some messages we can use that diversity to amplify most effectively.
But if we are going to have a diverse Cabinet table, we need interesting ideas. If we repeat the Trudeau era experience of feminist rhetoric selling bland, bog standard Liberal policies, we’ll look like morons. The problem with uniformity - either all-white decision making teams, all male teams, or whatever else - is there are collective blindspots. The reason to embrace diversity on non-moral grounds - you know, other than thinking that having a penis doesn’t make you inherently smarter - is that there is a price to pay when those blindspots lead to bad decisions and policy fuckups. But if we don’t let them make use of the viewpoints that only their lives could lead them to, then it’s all a waste.
Take criminal justice reform, a policy area often talked about in terms of helping non-white people. There are, undeniably, problems of police interactions with non-white people, but the solution set often doesn’t match the people it claims to represent. It should not go unnoticed that some of the places in Canada that saw the biggest swings to the Conservatives because in part rising crime are some of the least white parts of Canada. Liberal bail reforms haven’t seen the problems of Indigenous overrepresentation fixed either, in part because the ideas were half baked at best. We have strong non-white MPs and Ministers, and yet they couldn’t or weren’t empowered to explain that just because non-white communities don’t always have the highest opinion of police forces, they also don’t view bail reform and catch and release as good. (The fact violent crime is up a third in a decade also helps kill any positive arguments for the Liberal legacy here.)
Put more bluntly, if Carney wants to claim the mantle of the radical centre, it will require ideas that are more than merely the warmed over piss of the conventional wisdom and of the narrow Ottawa consensus. It will take a real commitment to intellectual diversity, which should be strengthened and informed by diversity of lives lived. Now, that doesn’t mean an embrace of differing concepts of truth and that doesn’t mean embracing a fuzzy sense of reality where feelings trump facts, but just because some of the world’s biggest advocates for diversity have been some of the dumbest kinds of progressives doesn’t mean the basic principle that diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes isn’t true anymore.
If we want radical solutions, and properly innovative solutions that aren’t just various renditions of “spend more money” or “cut taxes”, we need to embrace a variety of ideas and try and find them. We need diversity of thought and experience to come up with the new ideas that can help solve the difficult crises we face, from stagnant productivity to rising crime. At a time when we need to roll back significant aspects of the criminal justice reforms of the last decade, how do we do so in a way that doesn’t give police carte blanche to go back to treating every Black and Brown Canadian like shit? As a white guy who has never once feared a cop in my life, I don’t fucking know - and I’d like to think there are others who know better than me.
If we’re going to save this country from the many problems we face, we will need new ideas and solutions that a diverse Cabinet can provide better. But diversity for the sake of diversity won’t achieve any outcomes, and we can’t let the focus slip to imagery and not outcomes.
I recently read "The Essential Trudeau", a collection of quotes and passages of Pierre Trudeau's writings, essays, interviews, and speeches, arranged by topic. Quite a fascinating little read and I strongly recommend it for any Canadian liberal.
In discussing diversity in his cabinet, Pierre Trudeau talked about how he wanted to ensure at least a rough equality between French and English ministers. There were practical reasons for this, and also a national unity imperative: Pierre Trudeau believed he could better maintain the unity of French and English Canada by ensuring French Canadians saw themselves succeeding at the highest levels of the federal government.
In doing this, however, Pierre Trudeau was also sensitive to avoiding inspiring resentment from English Canadians. He saw an English backlash as a threat to national unity in the same way that French alienation would be. So he followed a few rules of thumb on it:
-If given the choice between a less competent French minister and a more competent English one, choose the English minister.
-If given the choice between English and French ministers of equal competence, prefer the French one when and where you can (and you can't do it all the time, as competencies vary between people).
And at the same time, Pierre Trudeau did not go out on the news and state he is appointing French ministers simply for their French-ness, because to do so would undermine the public standing of those very French ministers he was appointing to his cabinet. He simply appointed as many French ministers to his cabinet as he practically could, while also trying to be sensitive to resentment and backlash and run the country as competently as he could.
Some valuable lessons there I think in how liberals today need to make substantive commitments to diversity in leadership, not merely performative ones. Values must be lived in action, not simply declared.
Wab wore that jersey proudly. He always does. He was out on the concourse pregaming and sitting in the stands like a regular fan. Not in the elite boxes. He did it before he was Premier too.