There’s a phrase that circulates in Canadian boardrooms, cabinet offices, and deputy minister suites whenever someone in the room is about to not say the thing they should say. You know the phrase. Let’s take this offline. Or: Interesting point. Or the classic, delivered with a solemn nod that means the conversation is over: We’ll need to circle back on that.
Build Canada published a memo this week called “Say It.” The basic argument is that while compromise helped build this country, that instinct has curdled into a cultural reflex for managed silence that has become costly. Whether it is a decade of stalled productivity, a housing crisis incubated in rooms where nobody wanted to name what restrictive zoning was doing to an entire generation, or a change in immigration rules that moved faster than the absorption capacity of housing, healthcare, and public services, the underlying pattern is the same: While the root cause of the problem is clear, no one in authority is willing to call it out until it becomes a crisis or a scandal.
The memo is right, but there is a specific evolution of the problem it doesn’t quite name. Canada’s vocabulary of conciliation has acquired a second dialect over the past decade, which is harder to challenge because it wraps avoidance and evasion in the language of moral progress. The Canadian instinct for politeness used to hide behind procedure and deference, but increasingly it hides behind equity. We increasingly invoke the language of diversity and inclusion not to advance those things, but to insulate decisions and decision-makers from accountability.
The case of Christiane Fox is instructive here. Fox is currently the Deputy Minister of National Defence, the most senior civilian role in Canada’s most consequential department at what may be the most consequential moment in our recent history. Two weeks ago, the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Konrad von Finckenstein, published an investigation finding that Fox improperly influenced her department to hire Björn Charles in March 2023, when she was deputy minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Fox had known Charles since their student athlete days, and she helped him land a project management job at IRCC. Charles was working as a gym manager at the time, but Fox sent his CV to her assistant deputy minister, continued to communicate privately with him throughout a process she was able to influence, sought updates from the person whose decisions would be determinative of his employment, and pushed for a higher job classification. By June 2024, Charles had been let go due to ongoing performance issues.
Fox’s defence is that she was advancing the government’s anti-racism, equity, and inclusion objectives. The ethics commissioner did not find this credible, and his response is one of the cleaner sentences to emerge from official Ottawa in some time: “Clearly, the true intent behind her interventions was to help Mr. Charles find new employment, and this occurred under her watch through the creation of a position in her department to fit Mr. Charles’s needs.”
In a statement responding to the Ethics Commissioner’s report, Fox defended her actions by saying “In particular, my efforts were focused on advancing diversity and inclusion across the public service, an objective explicitly set for Deputy Ministers.” Taken at face value, this means that any manager can explain away their department’s failure to achieve its mandate to serve Canadians on the grounds that, as Fox puts it, they were focused on “removing barriers that limited how talent was recognized both inside and outside government.”
When equity language is allowed to mask bad management, government inaction, and even to silence critics, it serves as a strategic get-out-of-jail-free card. It also calls into question the good faith of everyone who uses it, no matter how well intentioned.
Take for example Canada’s AI minister, Evan Solomon, who spoke this week at a breakfast hosted by QueerTech and the Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce in Ottawa. At the event, Solomon argued that inclusivity can be Canada’s “competitive advantage” in AI and that the government’s forthcoming AI strategy will be “airtight on bias, racism, and hate.”
Ok. But Canada’s refreshed AI strategy, first promised for the end of 2025, has been repeatedly delayed, and the rest of the world is not waiting for Canada to work out its regulatory framework. The point isn’t that the QueerTech community is unimportant; it’s that when your AI strategy is late and the rest of the world is screaming ahead, leading with diversity as your competitive advantage is a tell that reveals the same instinct the Say It memo is asking us to confront.
In using the language of inclusion as an excuse for inaction, the Carney government is showing disturbing signs of the same behaviour that consumed the Liberals under Justin Trudeau. The prime minister has a reputation as a demanding boss who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, yet he has had nothing to say about the Christiane Fox issue. On this matter and others, the new government is looking a lot like the old one.
The Say It memo argues that Canada's problem is structural silence. What it doesn't add is that the silence is now being actively maintained by a vocabulary specifically developed to defang and deflect any demand for accountability. Calling Fox's DEI defence what the commissioner called it — “not credible” — is not an attack on equity. It is the precondition for equity meaning anything at all.
Canadian news startup Be Giant released a massive poll on entrepreneurship this past week. They surveyed 3,000 Canadian entrepreneurs and found some interesting results:
Overall, entrepreneurs in the country are optimistic. They feel good about their businesses, most feel that government policies are moving in the right direction and that Canada offers a lot of opportunity.
The high cost of living is the primary challenge for entrepreneurs, dwarfing some other considerations such as the regulatory environment. Cost of living is the primary reason that an entrepreneur might think of relocating outside of Canada.
The generational differences are very interesting, indicating that job growth and company growth will come from Gen Z and Millennial entrepreneurs.
The full story and poll results can be found here.
Calgary is showing up – we hit 70% capacity with 3 weeks to spare. We’re matching that energy. We have opened up an overflow room. 🇨🇦
On May 11, join Hon. Jason Kenney, MP Corey Hogan, and an audience of 500 others at the University of Calgary for an honest discussion moderated by Jen Gerson on what it will require to build a stronger nation.
Grab tickets while you still can here.
April 25: In 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened its first navigable channel, with the icebreaker D'Iberville completing the inaugural through-transit from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes.
April 26: In 1956, the Trans Mountain Pipeline carried its one-millionth barrel of oil from Alberta to Burnaby, B.C., Canada's first oil pipeline to cross the Rocky Mountains.
April 27: Expo 67 opened in Montreal, in celebration of Canada’s Centennial. Also, on this day in 1981, Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope fund reached $24.17 million. This exceeded his goal of $1 per Canadian and permanently transforming how the country funds cancer research.
April 28: In 1880, the Bell Telephone Company of Canada was incorporated by Parliament.
April 29: In 1967, CANDU nuclear reactor technology was licensed to India, in the the first international export of Canadian nuclear power engineering.
April 30: This is the last day to file your taxes!
Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Colonel Joshua Kutryk has been assigned to NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station (ISS), launching no earlier than mid-September. And Canadian AI company Cohere will merge with Germany’s Aleph Alpha.
Enbridge has received federal approval for a $4-billion expansion of its pipeline system for transporting natural gas in British Columbia. Meanwhile, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said on Friday that up to 10 new major natural resource projects will be under way by this time next year.
The Quebec Court of Appeal says it is ok for actors to smoke on stage.
Writing in The Line, Jen Gerson hits out at the high cost of Canadian complacency
Ken Whyte, in his books and culture newsletter SHuSH, explains the origins of the crisis of Canadian culture, and how we might start to fix it.
How to live with Death Stars (aka LLMs), from People vs Algorithms, byTroy Young and Brian Morrissey. Tl;dr: “Just make stuff.”
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