Toronto Metropolitan University remains committed to medical school admissions through “equity pathways” (admissions streams for Black, Indigenous and other equity deserving groups) though it has developed a vocabulary that obscures their discriminatory impact: “excellence, inclusion and innovation;” students “from the community, for the community.” But according to TMU vice-president and dean of medicine, Teresa Chan, the university remains “committed to admitting a majority of students through equity pathways.”
It would at least be informative to hear an explicit acknowledgment that the policy discriminates against white applicants, but no, there is no mention of discrimination and its prohibition in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Ontario Human Rights Code; it is as if these provisions do not exist or matter, or do not apply to TMU.
How did we get here? This is an important question in the Canada of 2025 and in no area is it more troubling than in the practice and acceptance of discrimination we would have thought unimaginable in the not-too-distant past: race-based admissions processes; race-based hiring of professors and others; race or gender requirements for researchers who receive grants from federal agencies; requirements that job applicants disclose how they would support DEI initiatives that focus on identity; university spaces set aside as lounges only for students of colour. In part the answer lies in Orwellian newspeak that substitutes ambiguous or superficially inoffensive language — as in the TMU vocabulary — for the explicit recognition of discrimination that at one time we would have heard. In part, too, the answer lies in affirmative action that extends well beyond what might have been anticipated when it was protected in Section 15(2) of the Charter.
It is past time that we reaffirm the primacy of the first principle of non-discrimination in Section 15(1) of the Charter and its equivalent in provincial human rights codes, and require a strict interpretation of the scope of affirmative action under Section 15(2). In the United States affirmative action was accepted after a century of post-Civil War discrimination against Blacks, but what were seen as its excesses led the Supreme Court in 2023 to declare it unconstitutional. That will not happen in Canada but we should not tolerate the extent of discrimination undermining Section 15(1) that we have seen in recent years.
But for TMU there is a remedy at hand. The school’s discriminatory admissions led Ontario Premier Doug Ford to demand that it educate qualified individuals regardless of their race or background. He should see its continuing commitment to admissions through equity pathways as unwillingness to accede to his demand, and his government should impose appropriate consequences upon the school, including withdrawal of funding until it abides by the principle of non-discrimination.
National Post
Peter MacKinnon has served as the president of three Canadian universities and is a Senior Fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.