“Identity Politics”

For many years, Pride flags have been among the banners flown on lampposts in downtown Woodstock.

But going forward, a change in the town’s rules means they will no longer be allowed.

“We’re disappointed that that’s the position the town has taken,” said Amanda Lightbody, founder and president of The Rainbow Crosswalk, a non-profit Pride organization supporting the Woodstock region.

When Attorney General and Justice Minister Arif Virani introduced the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, on Feb. 26, I expected this legislation to be the focus of the first query during question period in the House of Commons the next day.

I was disappointed.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said very little about the legislation. He issued a very vaguely worded statement the next day, without even referring to the bill by name, that there should be no redundant bureaucracy and people shouldn’t be punished for their opinions, while saying that people exploiting children or women should be punished by the justice system.

Canadians cannot allow politicians to curtail our freedoms by playing at identity politics.

Conservatives have always ridiculed the rise of the woke movement and identity politics. Traditional liberals have recently joined in, most notably the philosopher Susan Neiman in her 2023 book Left is Not Woke. In part, these liberals are attempting to reverse declining public support for left-wing political parties, which the public now associates with woke’s inherent extremism. But more traditional left-liberals fail to acknowledge their role in encouraging woke ideology, which conservatives warned for decades was the inevitable outcome of modern liberal thought.

Gender studies comes to policing.

Among anti-cop legislators, “defund the police” may have lost some currency, but “demoralize the police” is doing just fine.

On January 30, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act, over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams. The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian. If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystander’s race, sex, and age. Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse? Too bad. Identity-based paperwork comes first. (If an officer waits to the end of his shift to finish filling out the forms, he will still likely need to have made some contemporaneous record of his encounters.)

The department’s personnel will spend hundreds of hours a day cumulatively on this bureaucratic task—time diverted from bringing criminals to justice.