Two months ago, there was some thought that Trump’s big anti-DEI agenda might “embolden” a future Poilievre government into doing something similar in Canada. Looking at recent polls, this seems a tad hasty: deprived of Trudeau as a foil and faced with a national emergency that can’t be solved with infantile three-word slogans, Dimestore Pat Buchanan’s odds of leading the CPC to a sweeping victory seem more remote by the day. But there is something deeper at work here, too: namely, that Canadians’ increasing hostility to Trump is making any policies which sound Trump-like into political poison. And I am pretty sure that includes EDI.

I doubt it has escaped anyone’s notice that Trump’s fixation on DEI in universities, like his fixation on anti-Semitism, is not 100% in good faith, and that to a substantial extent, they are being used as pretexts to launch political assaults on universities in order to induce political obedience, in much the same way that Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban did in their respective assaults on civil society. It is also quite obvious that for MAGA, being anti-DEI (the letters are transposed in the US) is actually about undoing the Civil Rights Act and imposing re-segregation. For these reasons, anyone opposed to EDI no longer benefits, as they may (in certain cases) have done as recently as two months ago, from a presumption that their arguments are being made in good faith.

This is not to say that there are no good-faith arguments against EDI, in a limited sense. Reasonable people can disagree about whether EDI policies and discourse are effective or not. Musa al-Gharbi’s recent book We Have Never Been Woke, for instance, makes a sustained if not inarguable case that EDI is mostly a form of signaling in an intra-elite competition for resources and status rather than a genuine attempt to improve race relations or close inter-racial gaps in wealth or opportunity. This recent New York Times article on DEI at the University of Michigan is not without its faults, but the basic points are that a) you can’t workshop your way to racial inclusion and b) not all university employment in positions designed to promote DEI has been particularly cost-effective, are both fair enough. But it is to say that people making anti-EDI arguments are going to have to work a lot harder to persuade anyone either that they have any actual interest in equity at all, or that they are not simply using the issue as a cudgel in a wider culture war battle.

There are, furthermore, two big differences between Canada and the US with respect to EDI that are worth keeping in mind. The first is that EDI in Canada had very little to do with the composition of the student body; unlike the US, students from racialized backgrounds are substantially over-represented (as compared to the general population) in the student body up here. This is not to say that students from all racialized backgrounds are over-represented, but more are than are not (see back here for more on this). As a result, EDI in Canada tends to be much more about representation at the staff level, and specifically—given the politics of the institution—about academic staff. And to the extent that diversity in hiring, pay and promotion is at the heart of Canadian EDI efforts, current practice in academia is not all that far off the standard in the Canadian private sector, where diversity initiatives have been the norm for quite some time. This is why there aren’t that many Boards of Governors, even in Conservative places like Alberta, that have really blinked at EDI hiring initiatives.

The second is that the prominent presence of Indigenous peoples and the legacy of Truth and Reconciliation add a complicating layer to the whole issue. Indigenous peoples are generally not included in most EDI processes because it is recognized that, for historical and Treaty reasons, they absolutely should not be lumped in with other under-represented groups in terms of process, even if both are deserving of and would benefit from greater efforts at inclusion. Having two separate processes is complicated and can at a superficial level look a bit wasteful and politically complicated, but at the end of the day, that complication works in favour of EDI, institutionally speaking. No one—and I mean no one—is going to try and reverse Indigenization initiatives at Canadian universities. And because at least some of the aims of EDI & Indigenization are parallel (ish), going after one but not the other is hard to justify. 

So, given all of that, what is the future of EDI in Canada? Well, it depends a bit on which part of EDI we are talking about. I don’t think we are going to reverse course on equity in hiring. Cluster hires will probably continue for a little while yet for the simple reason that alternatives simply have not been very effective at moving the needle on racial equity (we’ve been doing that with female profs for about 40 years now, and while we are getting closer to parity, it has taken an unconscionable amount of time to get there). Neither do I think many institutions are going to change tack in terms of trying to create more welcoming environments: in an era of tight budgets, universities and colleges are going to do all they can to be seen as good employers on non-financial stuff.

Where I suspect we will see change will be in the tendency to add staff positions for the specific purpose of addressing issues of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. This is a place where a larger set of suspicions both in government and the professoriate about “bureaucratization” and “administrative bloat” will be decisive. This won’t necessarily reduce the amount of work to be done, so it probably will mean that more of it is done off the side of someone’s desk. I also suspect that institutions will look less favourably on equity groups’ requests for separate university events (e.g. Lavender Graduation ceremonies). 

Will this result in a tamping down of the (muted) culture wars in Canadian higher education? No. Some people will remain opposed to things like land acknowledgements, and the aging white guy irritation with Canadian history departments being insufficiently “positive” about Canada (meaning, in practice, centering narratives on any groups other than white settlers) isn’t going to go away either. Culture wars never end. Friction will continue.

And so too, broadly, will EDI. Words and tactics might soften or change, and a variety of other institutional challenges (mainly but not exclusively financial) may mean that the issue will never again be quite as central to university policy as it was in 2020 and 2021. But we’re not headed in the same direction as the US.