Russell Stockley

HAPPENING NOW: Union activist and NDP leadership candidate Rob Ashton suggests we "eat the damn rich" to thunderous applause at the party's convention.

CEO French. Most people think “woke” in Canada is just about being nice. Polite. Inclusive. Harmless. Like putting a land acknowledgement on your website and calling it a day. That’s the sales pitch. Now watch the behaviour, not the branding. What we actually have isn’t kindness. It’s compliance with a moral script that keeps changing mid-sentence. One year’s acceptable language becomes next year’s offence. Words get redefined. Intent doesn’t matter. Only alignment does. Miss a step and you’re not corrected, you’re marked. And here’s the trick. It didn’t spread through loud revolution. It spread through HR policies, university codes, and government frameworks. Quietly. Form by form. Training module by training module. You don’t vote on it. You absorb it. Like background radiation. Then you get moments that expose how brittle this system is. Take Air Canada. The CEO offers condolences… but not in French. And suddenly, that’s the story. Not the loss. Not the people affected. The language choice. The compliance failure. Think about that. We’ve trained ourselves to scan for symbolic mistakes instead of focusing on substance. The priority shifts from “Was this humane?” to “Was this perfectly aligned with every linguistic expectation?” Miss one box, and the reaction machine spins up. That’s not compassion. That’s ritual. People say, “If it’s so bad, why doesn’t anyone push back?” They do. Just not publicly. Because the real currency here isn’t truth. It’s risk. Risk to your job. Your reputation. Your access. So people do the math. Stay quiet. Nod along. Keep your head down. The classic Canadian move. Keep the peace. Don’t make it awkward. But silence has a side effect. It looks like agreement. And that’s how you end up with a system that feels unanimous on the surface and hollow underneath. A lot of people going through the motions. Saying the lines. Not buying the script. Here’s the part that gets ignored. The original impulse wasn’t crazy. Fair treatment. Equal opportunity. Basic dignity. Most Canadians already agreed with that decades ago. That wasn’t the fight. The shift happened when it stopped being about fairness and started being about control of language and outcomes. When disagreement became “harm.” When questions became “violence.” That’s not progress. That’s a shutdown of thinking. And once a system punishes questions, it stops correcting itself. It drifts. Fast. My take. Don’t overreact and don’t submit. Call things what they are, calmly and clearly. Refuse the language games. Ask simple questions and keep asking them. No yelling. No panic. Just steady pressure. Because systems like this don’t collapse from outrage. They collapse when enough people quietly stop pretending to believe them.

Who needs the media when Liberal ministers can simply sit down and interview each other about what an incredibly excellent job they’re all doing.