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Though it contains only six words, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s statement “End DEI. Restore the merit principle,” has proven so rich for analysis that it has garnered two articles. Last semester, we analyzed the first half of this statement: unpacking what DEI policies and bureaucracies look like in the Canadian context, we were then able to demonstrate the justificatory basis for their implementation. Now, it is time to unpack the latter half. That is, even if the normative framework for DEI policies is sound, why would Canada need them to begin with if the ‘DEI era’ succeeded meritocracy? In order to answer this question, however, we must first interrogate the concept of meritocracy as a normative ideal and investigate its integration into dominant political discourse. Further, we must assess the validity of Poilievre’s assertion that Canada has a meritocratic history, which DEI has undermined.
Meritocracy as a Term
While the concept of meritocracy has been the subject of political/philosophical debate for millennia, the term itself was only conceived in 1958 by Michael Young in his sociological satire The Rise of the Meritocracy.In this book, Young defines merit as the product of intelligence quotient plus effort; as such, meritocracy may be defined as a system where meritocrats (those with the most merit) reign. Young speculatively traces the so-called rise of meritocracy from 1870 to 2033—the latter is now less than a decade away. As Anyue Zhang notes, and contrary to mainstream conceptions, this rise is a distinctly dystopic process. For Young, meritocracy breeds unique forms of inequality and societal corruption through the consolidation of meritocrats as an oppressive elite class. While “competitive entry [was] made the rule,” (in place of hereditary entry), merit “became the arbiter, attainment the standard, for entry and advancement,”1 distinctly marking the end of the era of institutionalized nepotism, but heralding a new form of exclusion.
Young paints a picture of intellectually gifted children being whisked away into a separate educational system wherein specialized training is provided for them. From here, a shift in societal structure takes place, away from economic-class-based stratification and towards merit-based stratification. With the most astute children separated from their peers (deemed cognitively-limited), an exclusive and powerful cohort begins to take shape. For Young, this new hierarchy is unique to others of days past precisely because it justifies itself on the grounds of fairness. While power structures based on kinship and inheritance, for example, were premised on structural injustice, the merit-based hierarchy claims righteousness in its constitution. The specific inequality that emerges from the meritocratic shift, thus, is validated because those who benefit from the meritocracy ‘deserve it’.
Young theorized that meritocracy could not remain severed from heredity for long. With time, the meritocratic class would calcify and beget patterns of endogamy. With meritorious individuals marrying and creating families amongst each other, their children naturally become exposed to the best resources, receive strategic upbringings designed to foster merit, and navigate the process of diagnosis with ease. Simultaneously, non-meritorious individuals internalize their status as an inherent failure; the meritocratic system effectively erodes upward mobility. With wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the meritocratic few who ensure a consistent and controlled transition of power through generations, merit itself is distorted into a tool for repression and systemic maintenance. Young goes as far as to theorize a black-market trading industry where elite families exchange large sums for meritorious children, demonstrating an utter bastardization of the apparatus which originally proclaimed to produce the most just outcome.
We are here confronted with a vision of meritocracy that is vastly different from the dominant narratives presented about it. Even still, while Young coined the term meritocracy, he did not invent the concept of the ‘merit principle,’ nor is his analysis of it universal. Let us now, then, imagine meritocracy as an ideal type, not an impending dystopic reality.
Meritocracy as a Platonic Ideal Type
The earlier comment that the concept of meritocracy has been debated for millennia was not facetious. Merit stems from the Latin word meritum, which means ‘a thing earned,’ qua the noun merere, which means ‘to deserve,’ and the suffix -cracy comes from the ancient Greek word kratos, which means ‘power’ or ‘rule.’ In short, meritocracy describes the rule of those who deserve to rule. Thus, while the term meritocracy was not iterated until the mid-twentieth century, its conceptual foundations may be traced far back through history.
One of the most salient examples of classic meritocratic theorization stems from Plato’s concept of the philosopher king. In his Republic,2 Plato goes about theorizing the ideal city-state, arriving at the conclusion that aristocracy is the best form of political leadership. It must be acknowledged that Plato’s vision of aristocracy was quite different from contemporary mainstream conceptions of it. While the word evokes images of noble families living on landed property, for Plato, aristocracy was much closer to modern-day notions of meritocracy. In essence, Plato’s theorization of aristocracy describes the ‘rule of the best.’ The qualifying factors for this ambiguous ‘best’ include wisdom, virtue, a taste for justice, and a vocation for philosophy.
Those who embody these qualities to the greatest extent are subsequently granted a specialized education that lasts thirty-five years in total. In their amalgam, these special few will become philosopher kings: guards of the city, in conjunction with on-the-ground soldiers. The philosopher kings shall guard the city with their wisdom, virtue, and sense of justice—while the soldiers (auxiliaries in Plato’s vocabulary) materially protect the city. The guardian class (philosopher kings and auxiliaries), says Plato, ought to breed amongst each other and raise their children communally. From this emerging community of elite children, only a select group will prove worthy of ascension to the title of philosopher king; the remainder shall be producers or auxiliaries. And so, in ideal terms, a new batch of philosopher kings will arise with each generation to protect the city in perpetuity.
While the moral implications of Plato’s configuration are quite different from Young’s, they are consistent in their theorizations of a well-educated and specialized meritorious elite taking up the positions of ultimate rulership. While Plato sees this as the key to a city’s success, Young sees it as a pathway to inevitable societal erosion. It must be acknowledged that even Plato’s conception itself is far from utopic, however, due to his theory of cyclic regime collapse.
Plato believed that aristocracies (in the ancient Platonic mobilization of the word, which we now recognize as meritocracies) would naturally crumble into timocracies over time. A timocracy, in this vision, describes a state where honour and glory are held above all and function as the primary motivators for action among leaders. Gradually, says Plato, the philosopher kings (meritocrats) will decline in overall excellence,3 philosophy will subsequently lose value, and precedence will be given to battle-strength and wealth.4
With education degenerating through generations, the guardians’ disposition evolves to be warlike, and society as a whole becomes fragmented, individualistic, and privatized.5 The change from aristocracy to timocracy is not the final juncture in regime change, only a critical one. Plato theorizes that timocracies will regress into oligarchies, where money becomes the ultimate object of societal value and the wealthy few reign. Here, we must digress from our analysis of Plato, as a complete analysis of his theory of regime change would occupy an article in itself. That said, we may now put Young and Plato’s respective analyses of meritocracy in dialogue with one another and as a springboard to analyze the use of the words merit and meritocracy in contemporary mainstream political contexts.
Plato vs Young
While Young and Plato’s conceptions of meritocracy are distinct, they collectively convey a narrative of incremental societal corrosion through the bastardization of the merit principle. In both writings, the rule of the best is undermined by greed. For Young, meritocracy is susceptible to inevitable corruption from its inception, while for Plato, the aristocracy cannot remain stable forever and will eventually deteriorate into timocracy. It must be recognized, though, that Plato’s formulation of meritocracy is the most ideal form of regime—regime change is simply fundamental to his theory, so the ‘true meritocracy’ is ultimately fleeting. Counterintuitively, then, Young’s cautionary tale is complemented by Plato’s optimal model. Both solidify meritocracy as a system that necessitates intellectual-elite capture through strategic schooling and merit-based stratification.
Regardless of its perceived endpoint, though, meritocracy can be simply summarized by returning to Young’s initial definition: the rule of the most meritorious, where merit is the sum of intelligence and effort. It is from this most simplistic definition that we may analyze ‘merit’ and ‘meritocracy’ as principles which have become embedded within the contemporary political lexicon. The above theoretical evaluation does not prove useless; quite the contrary. As we move into this contemporary analysis, we ought to keep in mind how the modern discourse regarding meritocracy seldom acknowledges the dystopian origins of the term or theorizations of its timeline.
Merit/ocracy as a Political Buzzword
In 2001, Young would release an article entitled “Down with meritocracy:” a response to the increased mobilization of merit/ocracy in mainstream political dialogue, and a reiteration of the 1958 book’s initial intentions. An excerpt reads:
I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair [then the Prime Minister of the UK]… It is highly unlikely the prime minister has read the book, but he has caught on to the word without realising the dangers of what he is advocating.
It becomes salient that mainstream conceptions of merit/ocracy derive from distorted extrapolations of the term in its original context. How, then, is merit/ocracy understood in the dominant imagination, and how has it been mobilized in the Canadian context specifically? In the mainstream, analyses of merit/ocracy seem to accept Young’s premises that merit equals intellect plus effort and that meritocracy stands in opposition to nepotistic structures. But, they appear to reject or ignore the normative aspects of Young’s theorization that warn people of the rise of meritocracy. Take, for example, a statement from Jason Kenney (Premier of Alberta, 2019-2022):
We [Alberta] are a natural home for business and have a culture of innovation. We are a meritocracy, we judge people not by where they come from or how they pray or who their father was, but based on their work ethic and how they treat others.
Here, meritocracy is framed as the system of ultimate fairness, challenging inherited power and enforcing neutrality. Kenney proudly proclaims Alberta as a meritocracy, evidently ignorant of the term’s origins. Brian Pallister (Premier of Manitoba, 2016-2021) evoked a similar sentiment when questioned about the lack of women on the Treasury Board in 2016. When Wab Kinew (Manitoba’s current Premier) questioned whether the all-male board members were simply those with the most merit, Pallister doubled down. He told the room what he had told his own daughters: everyone has a right to equal opportunity, but success shall be determined by merit. This statement implicitly addresses the DEI conversation by suggesting that there is nothing wrong or suspicious with the entirely male board. Here, like in the statement from Poilievre that catalyzed these articles, merit/ocracy is framed in opposition to DEI. Within this camp of thought, however, there is nuance that ought to be addressed, made salient in this quote from British PM Blair himself—to whom Young’s critique was directed—from a speech at the opening of Highlands School, 1997:
By the next academic year, 50 per cent of students’ parents will not pay tuition fees. There will be bursaries of £2,000 offered to 25,000 students from poorer backgrounds… There will be no quotas; no lowering of entry standards. It is a strictly meritocratic programme. But its purpose is to say to pupils even in the toughest inner-city schools: your background shouldn’t hold you back; if you have the ability, you can get the university place.
Here, Blair affirms the institution of distributive justice practices for poor students while simultaneously upholding meritocratic rhetoric. All the same, he firmly asserts the absence of quotas, a feature commonly associated with affirmative action and DEI. The claim here is not that Blair is somehow ‘pro-DEI’ qua the popular imagination; what is made clear is that he believes an unequal distribution of capital to poor families is justified in aiding the elimination of class barriers to educational access. In other words, household incomes are vastly diverse across the nation, and poor people ought not to be excluded from a given school based on income. Thus, to include poor people, a policy of equity ought to be implemented.
The claim made here is that it is illogical to apply this line of reasoning as narrowly as Blair does. The £2000 sum distributed to poor families is designed to level the proverbial playing field such that no student has to decline an opportunity to study on economic grounds. Are we to assume, then, that the only playing field which needs levelling is the economic one?
How Could DEI Displace Meritocracy When We Never Had One?
Let us resituate ourselves in the Canadian context to answer this question, as it is most relevant to Poilievre’s statement. In short and crude terms, the mere fact that Residential Schools were federally instituted in Canada until the late 1990s is proof enough that there exists no precedent of the merit principle. How, that is, could merit alone decide one’s future when Indigenous children—with the same intelligence and effort as their white counterparts—were forced into genocidal, abusive, intentionally underfunded, and labour-based educational institutions? The absence of the merit principle for Indigenous peoples specifically is already salient, but more evidence may be provided.
Before the 1951 revisions to the Indian Act, Indigenous people who wished to enter the professional sphere would be confronted with the reality of having to renounce their ‘Indian status’. Any Indigenous person admitted to a legal or medical university program, for example, would become involuntarily enfranchised into Canadian society. Enfranchised Indigenous persons were no longer considered legitimate ‘Indians,’ and the government would subsequently revoke their land and treaty rights. In essence, Indigenous people were forced to choose between career opportunities and their own identity. In plain terms, “economic and social sacrifices [were] incidental to enfranchisement,” until this was deemed6 unjust and professional pathways were disentangled from this process.
Presented here is a clear example of where the so-called merit principle is wholly inapplicable. The aforementioned example is among the multiplicity of other mechanisms and barriers instituted against Indigenous peoples to prevent their success in society. But how is this history of systemic denial to be reckoned with, to be repaired? PM Blair’s allotment of an economic sum to poor families directly mitigates the class barrier to entry, but what ought to be done when the barriers are racial?
In the 1960s, protest movements led Canadian universities to begin introducing Native Studies (now Indigenous Studies) programs and courses into their curricula, in the wake of growing perceptions “that universities represented ‘ivory towers’ for educating the wealthy [dominantly white] elite.”7 Moreover, universities began introducing quotas, intentionally setting out to accept a certain proportion of Indigenous people in the admissions process. One such example is the 1990 quota introduced by the University of Alberta, which aimed to admit Indigenous students so that they made up five per cent of the university population.8 This objective was arrived at based on the fact that Indigenous people made up five per cent of the Alberta population. The goal here was simple: to represent Indigenous students at UofA to the same degree that they were represented in society, not to disproportionately flood the university with ‘undeserving’ Indigenous students. At its core, this quota was designed to begin undoing the historical precedent of Indigenous repudiation from academic and professional pathways. This quota is certainly ‘DEI’ in nature; how then is the argument made that DEI displaces meritocracy?
If meritocratic practice—to accept the popular imagination’s rendering of it—is when the best get what they deserve through effort and intellect, there would certainly be no need, and, in fact, an irrefutable case against the structural limitation of Indigenous people. How, after all, could a meritocratic outcome be produced when certain people are excluded almost entirely from the running? Poilievre’s case for Canada’s history of the merit principle is just as unfounded as his claims about the ‘$1 billion DEI bureaucracy’ hurting Canadians. If anything, the inverse of Poilievre’s claim ought to be reckoned with: that DEI works to undo the systemic sabotage of marginalized people, thereby ‘evening the playing field’ and paving the grounds such that a meritocracy could exist in the first place (ignoring Young’s dystopic reading).
Conclusion
We have thus laid the argumentative framework to confidently state the following: 1) the term meritocracy has dystopic origins, and the concept itself is nuanced far beyond the popular imagination’s perception. 2) Politicians, writ large, are ignorant of the origins of the term meritocracy; this does not stop them from wielding it with conviction. 3) The idea that the ‘DEI era’ displaced the Canadian ‘merit principle’ is unsound because Canada has a history of structurally instituted inequality that prevented certain groups from accessing opportunities on arbitrary grounds. 4) The same claim is deemed unsound again because DEI initiatives are fundamentally designed to combat these inequalities, not shift the focus away from hard work and intelligence.
It is thus reasonable and evidenced to assert that Poilievre’s statement regarding the restoration of the merit principle in Canada is illogical for a multiplicity of reasons. No merit principle can be restored where it never existed; the example of historically intentionally instituted barriers to education and profession for Indigenous peoples is sufficient in destabilizing this component of Poilievre’s comment. A plethora of other examples could be evoked: the tumultuous trajectory of voting rights, racist historical immigration procedures, Francophone exclusion, and workplace discrimination writ large. The irony here is that DEI initiatives have been implemented to undo the structures of discrimination that actively withheld Canada from being a ‘merit-based’ society.
Second, even if Canada did have a merit-based schema, Poilievre and the mainstream political consciousness ought to be wary of how the term meritocracy is mobilized, and how obscured said mobilizations may be from the term’s dystopic origins. Even as a platonic ideal type, meritocracy is theorized as a fleeting system with its own built-in inequalities.9 In sum, meritocracy is not the utopia it is often attributed to being. To borrow from Young himself, “it would help if Mr Blair [and the political elite entirely] would drop the word from his public vocabulary, or at least admit to the downside.”
DEI initiatives did not displace the alleged Canadian merit principle; Canada does not have merit-based shoulders to stand on in the first place,and DEI initiatives, premised upon distributive justice, are necessary to foster the meritocratic systems the political elite evoke. Not only is Poilievre’s comment, then, ahistorical—it is also ignorant of the nuance of merit/ocracy and the essential objectives of DEI altogether. DEI initiatives ought not to end, and if a merit principle really is to be ‘introduced,’ it certainly ought not be a restoration of the Canadian historical precedent.
Edited by Tristan F. Hernandez
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.
Photo by Taylor Campbell / Postmedia. Accessed through the National Post.
- Young, “The Rise of Meritocracy.” 19. ↩︎
- Plato, “Republic,” Book V. 445d–449a. ↩︎
- Fossati, “Injustice and instability in Plato’s Republic,” 58. ↩︎
- 59. ↩︎
- 60. ↩︎
- Parliament of Canada. 1947. “Joint Committees, 20th Parliament, 4th Session : Special Joint Committee on Indian Act, vol. 1,” 199. ↩︎
- Taner, Shona. 1999. “The Evolution of Native Studies in Canada: Descending from the Ivory Tower.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies. 290. ↩︎
- 307 ↩︎
- Let us not forget that enslavement was integral to Plato’s formulation of the ideal city under aristocracy. ↩︎
