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On October 15, 2025, Pierre Poilievre reposted an official petition of the Conservative Party to his X profile, accompanied by the text “End DEI. Restore the merit principle.” The petition in question, titled “DEI spending and government waste needs to DIE,” certainly expresses its purported objective clearly: that is, the eradication of “waste[ful]” and “bloated” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in Canada. This verbiage, despite its superficial playfulness, is austere in its call for a complete and permanent abolition of national DEI policy—whose existence the petition pins entirely on the Liberal Party. Here, Pollievre alleges that the Liberals have squandered $1.049 billion in favour of propagating a so-called “DEI bureaucracy while Canadians struggle to make ends meet.” The claim presented here is twofold: 1) DEI has its own bureaucratic regime, and 2) DEI policies are actively hurting Canadians, writ large. These arguments are made under the assumption that DEI represents a departure from an old Canadian schema: meritocracy. Let us, then, investigate these claims made by the Conservative Party while engaging with the normative underpinnings of DEI initiatives and the concept of distributive justice more broadly.
DEI in Canada
Mogilski et al.’s definition of DEI is helpful in the comprehensive net it casts:
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) refers to policies, practices, and social norms aimed at promoting fair treatment and representation of people from historically disadvantaged groups, such as sexual, gender, and ethnic minorities.
First, we must acknowledge that we are working with words whose definitions and terms have long been debated. In general, individuals have radically different ideas of what diversity, equity, and inclusion are, the role they ought to play in society, and the degree to which the state should enforce these ideals. Identifying the introduction of DEI in Canadian policy, though, proves to be a more pragmatic task, as it allows one to trace its institutional progression rather than unpack its conceptual foundations. The pillars of diversity, equity, and inclusion have been salient in the Canadian legal context since the 1960 Bill of Rights, enshrining the rights “to life, liberty, security… and enjoyment of property” in conjunction with freedoms of “religion,” “speech,” “assembly and association,” and “press.” The accent here is diversity; inclusion would become more notable in the 19771 Human Rights Act, which specifically targets “discriminatory practice[s] … refusal, exclusion, expulsion, suspension, [and] limitation” in the workplace. Diversity and inclusion would be further codified in the eighties with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988), with the specific dimension of equity reaching a status of explicit recognition in the Employment Equity Act (1986; 1995)2. The Employment Act is of special value for analysis here, as it begins to probe the role of DEI in market, institutional, and labour relations, which Mr. Pollievre appears most concerned about. An excerpt from the Act reads:
Every employer shall implement employment equity by: (a) identifying and eliminating employment barriers against persons in designated groups that result from the employer’s employment systems, policies and practices that are not authorized by law; and (b) instituting such positive policies and practices and making such reasonable accommodations as will ensure that persons in designated groups achieve a degree of representation in each occupational group in the employer’s workforce that reflects their representation.
The Government of Canada names the following groups as applicable to the stated designated groups: “women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and visible minorities [later revised to racialized people].” The idea that DEI initiatives imply a call-to-action emerges, true in both a positive and a negative sense. First, employers are asked to eliminate structures of exclusion from their workplaces. Second, they are instructed to make positive changes in policy-building, accommodation practices, and to institute intentional representation. In sum, marginalized persons are granted the negative right to non-discrimination, while employers are positively obliged to implement practices and policies that strive to realize this right..
The aforementioned processes of identification and elimination suggest at least some form of internal corporate investigation. Further, the implied suggestions of specialized training required to implement “positive practices” certainly do not come without cost. Facilitated and enforced by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), corporations are provided (often subsidized) training to: “initiate [establish and sustain] an employment equity program, conduct a workforce analysis, conduct an employment systems review, create an employment equity plan, and submit [a corresponding] annual report.” Such processes are inherently costly. The Act applies to the federal public service, official Crown organizations, and all corporations regulated by the federal government.
Bureaucracy and DEI
It is undeniable that DEI policies are regulated, at least largely, by the Canadian bureaucracy. The mere fact that DEI is intertwined with bureaucracy, however, is not surprising.
Bureaucracy may be defined as a formal organizational arrangement characterized by division of labour, specialization of functions, a hierarchy of authority and a system of rules, regulations and record keeping. In common usage, it refers to the administrative branch of government.
The Conservative petition unmistakably takes issue with DEI writ large; even still, it makes a point of isolating the bureaucracy while evoking an image of Canadians struggling to make ends meet. The rhetoric propagated here is zero-sum in that it implies the money directed toward DEI initiatives is coming at the expense of other sectors in need of the funds. This fiscal theorization is symbolic of a scarcity mindset, where a perceived scarcity of resources fosters sentiments of fear, emphasizing limitation and depletion over opportunity. A framework of abundance, in contrast, accepts a starting point of plenty, where growth, newness, and extension are possible. Both are useful here: yes, the Canadian budget is certainly limited, and the deficit ought to garner attention. Even still, if the petition’s allegation of a $1 billion DEI bureaucracy were true, this would represent only 0.36 per cent of Canada’s five-year investment plan ($280 billion invested), which excludes annual day-to-day spending. The petition’s mobilization of scarcity rhetoric leads conservative partisans to believe that the ‘DEI bureaucracy’ is costing Canadians something, without providing a causal mechanism for this claim. Let us, all the same, flesh out this implied correlation. The concept of bureaucracy necessarily begets hyper-specialization, where administrators with targeted expertise focus on a specific dimension of governmental administration. That said, there is no consolidated, unilateral DEI division of the Canadian bureaucracy. Instead, DEI policies and practices are propagated across various departments through directives and action plans, where bureaucrats occupying high-ranking administrative positions work within small coordinating bodies. One such example is the federal Anti-Racist Secretariat, which works under the Department of Employment and Social Development Canada. This secretariat officially “helps federal departments and agencies combat the effects of systemic racism, discrimination, and hate on Indigenous Peoples, Black communities, racialized communities, and religious minorities.” Bodies such as the LGBTQI+ Secretariat function similarly with corresponding dimensions of focus. There is admittedly some opacity in delineating who exactly these secretariats employ and what their day-to-day functionalities consist of. Frustrations regarding the direction of taxpayer funds are therefore not unfounded. However, if the fragmented economics of the DEI conversation are driving the Conservative critique of it, then a broader critique of bureaucratic structures is being made with DEI as a scapegoat.
The petition’s formulation of a billion-dollar DEI bureaucracy is reductive. Further, the petition’s linkage of the so-called DEI bureaucracy with struggling Canadians provides no causal claim that suggests DEI ought to be held responsible for hurting the economic status of Canadians. Further, one might understandably question who exactly the disadvantaged Canadians the petition is referring to are, considering DEI policies are fundamentally designed to support and uplift Canadians from historically marginalized groups.
Normative Underpinnings of DEI
Now that we have established what DEI is and how it is practically administered in the Canadian context, it is pertinent to take a step back and evaluate the normative argument in favour of it. A political-theoretic pillar of modern governance, distributive justice, is extremely useful in establishing a justificatory framework for DEI on the basis that such policies are a principled good:
In plain terms, distributive justice states that all persons ought to be allotted goods in a just manner; goods, or “receipts,” may include “social and material goods, conditions, [and] opportunities.”3 The judgment of who ought to be a recipient and what quantity they ought to be owed is, in this context, an ethical one,4 resting upon the framework that, historically, the distribution of receipts has been unjust5. Theories of distributive justice are deeply intertwined, and some might argue synonymous, with the principle of equity. Equity is here interpreted as the mechanism of distributive justice, where persons are allotted disproportionate goods or services based on need and historical precedent, with corresponding policies and practices designed to equalize material and social relations in society. This principle suggests that people have radically different points of origin in all aspects of life. A basic example where equity is relevant compares a person born into generational wealth with a person who is born into poverty. Empirically, the person born into wealth will be far more likely to reach a given net worth than the person born into poverty. If distributive justice is employed here, it would be suggested that the person experiencing poverty be allotted receipts that, in some way, mitigate the predetermining force that is the economic status one is born into.
With the basis that people are born into deeply unequal material and social circumstances, DEI policies mobilize theorizations of distributive justice as its peers, extrapolating them into tangible practices. DEI policies are designed to strategically reduce and, as a normative goal, eliminate structural disparities within a given society. In its theoretical constitution, that is, DEI is a project of upliftment through institutional rearticulation.
Consolidations
With this brief delineation set aside, we must now recentre Poilievre’s initial statement and the petition itself. If the above statements regarding DEI’s upliftment and justice are true, after all, why would the Conservative Party be interested in ending it, especially if their concerns pertain to struggling Canadians? The first part of the answer to this question is that Pollievre and the Conservatives are framing DEI through a zero-sum lens that renders their analysis of it critical. The second part is that they see DEI as symbolic of the displacement of an old Canadian way: meritocracy. This will be explored in depth in Part II of this article, but for now, let us consolidate our discussion thus far. 1) Pierre Pollievre, and the Conservatives as a whole, want to end DEI policies in Canada, with the claim that DEI is hurting struggling Canadians. 2) DEI initiatives have legal precedence in Canada dating back to the 1960s, with the particularly notable Employment Equity Act of 1986. 3) DEI policies are administered by the Canadian bureaucracy, like any other public-service initiative. 4) Evidence that there is a consolidated $1 billion DEI bureaucracy is unfounded. 5) DEI is designed to uplift marginalized people through directed allotments of goods and services, utilizing the principle of distributive justice. With this, we can weigh the Conservative claim against the facts—there is still work to be done, though. Next month, we will delve into the second component of Pollievre’s statement: that DEI has undermined and overtaken the Canadian meritocracy.
Edited by Margaux Zani and John Bollinger
The argument defended in this article is solely that of the author and does not reflect the position of the McGill Journal of Political Science, the Political Science Students’ Association, or the McGill Department of Political Science.
Featured image by The Washington Post/Getty Images.
