Health authorities say the reason for their plan is that people of colour are disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, with people of colour accounting for 47 percent of the cases, while only making up 19 percent of the region’s population. But if the authorities want to prioritize those who are more vulnerable, they should identify hot spots and create a plan that’s accessible for people of all races living in those high-risk areas. Why should a person living in a high-risk area have priority over another living in the same area, or sometimes in the same household, based on their colour of skin? If the scenario was reversed, and they decided to make the vaccine available to white people only, the uproar would have been endless.
CRT, an invention of radical academics, propounds the world view that Western society is irreparably racist and rooted in a conflict between oppressors (whites) and the oppressed (people of colour).
The documents say it’s a myth that BIPOC—black, indigenous, and other people of colour—could be racist toward white people. Instead, white people can only be subject to “racial prejudice,” which “is not considered racism because of the systemic relationship to power.”
“In Canada, white people hold this cultural power due to Eurocentric modes of thinking, rooted in colonialism, that continue to reproduce and privilege whiteness. It is whiteness that has the power to define the terms of racialized others’ existence,” the documents say.
Some may dismiss these trainings as just government bureaucrats following the trendy theories of the moment, with little impact on their ability to complete the important parts of their job. But throughout the pandemic the practical impact of wokeness on our institutions has become more discernible.
As another case in point, Ottawa only just recently restricted flights from India, which has been struggling with a high risk new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19. This lack of action on the borders was even more concerning at the outset of the pandemic, when many countries closed their borders to flights from China, ground zero for the virus outbreak, but Canada refused to restrict flights.
Besides the fact that Ottawa thinks twice before taking any action that may upset Beijing, what has fuelled this hesitancy is trepidation among our elites about being labelled xenophobic.
The crux of the issue, however, is that the CPHO’s role is supposed to be entirely medical and focused on formulating effective strategies to combat viruses. It’s meant to be divorced from politics and thus, these sorts of polarizing debates. Yet statements such as those made by Tam are political ones, which foist those in these institutions into culture wars at the expense of doing their job correctly and, in this case, protecting Canadians.
The elite preoccupation with wokeness is risible, and as a set of ideas, wokeness itself is easily falsifiable. But as it’s put into practice, the resulting politicization of our most relied-upon institutions can and will have dire consequences.
