Howard Levitt: Woke is broke and Donald Trump’s return confirms it

Companies were already reining in DEI departments, but the U.S. election results show that a sea change is upon us

Published Nov 15, 2024  •  4 minute read

U.S. president-elect Donald Trump during a meeting in Washington, D.C. Photo by Alex Brandon/AP files

“Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.” — Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Nov. 10.

The queen of woke making such a declaration signifies a sea change in contemporary culture. A change which resonated in the workplace even before last week’s U.S. presidential election.

When I went to legal conferences over the past three years, the buzzwords were DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and ESG (environmental, social and governance). ESG market funds were all the rage and compliance officers ensured that they ticked all the equity boxes, partly to get government orders.

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Now, all of that is in tatters. U.S. president-elect Donald Trump won the vote by running against those very things and, to the point, received majority support. Quoting Dowd again: “The (Democratic) party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like ‘Latinx’ and ‘BIPOC.’ This alienated the country.”

Well before this election, while our COVID mandates made it a serious offence to be in any Canadian workplace unmasked, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida made it an offence for any Florida employer to require employees to even wear a mask.

That was ahead of the curve, but only somewhat. President-elect Trump whipped up voter support by campaigning explicitly against DEI mandates and, with respect to ESG, campaigned against climate alarmism and over-regulation. As Bernie Sanders noted (and this is the only time I will ever quote him): ”It should come as no surprise that the Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class abandoned them.”

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The precursor to the undoing of the Democrats, as I have noted before, was the massive de-emphasis on DEI in North American workplaces. Over the past year, DEI departments experienced the largest cutbacks of any corporate group.

CNBC reported that companies laid off DEI staff, DEI leaders and cut budgets for external DEI groups by as much as 90 per cent in 2023.

By mid-2023, DEI-related job postings had declined 44 per cent from a year earlier, according to Indeed. By contrast, from 2020 to 2021 those postings increased by close to 30 per cent.

In Canada, we have seen the results of DEI gone mad, most tragically through the suicide of Richard Bilkszto, a former principal who killed himself after being repeatedly criticized at a DEI seminar for disputing the instructor’s assertion that Canada was more racist than the U.S. And Jewish groups have made clear they believe that DEI was the tinder which fanned the flames of anti-semitism following the Oct. 7 attacks by pitting groups against each other as part of its very mandate. After all, the DEI narrative has been that Western civilization and Israel are inherent oppressors who can do nothing right while the Palestinians and Muslims are victims who can do nothing wrong.

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Canadian employees, like those in the U.S., have finally had it with DEI in its current form and the culture that goes with it, replete with mission statements that are forgotten as quickly as they are published. Hypocrisy hits hard.

Then there is DEI’s Canadian twin cousin, the workplace investigation, which has become the new employment law firing squad, whereby accused managers are suspended and ordered to speak to no one while outside investigators gather evidence against them and everyone who knows where their bread is buttered piles on. Meanwhile, rumours fly about what calumnies they must have committed to be ordered off of work and their reputations end in tatters, however innocent.

Such suspended employees seldom return to work and, if they do, it is to an environment of resentment and humiliation. Workplace investigation by externals, as it is practised in Canada, is cancel culture writ large. Precisely the sort of U.S. “ready, shoot, aim” approach that resulted in the resentment toward the elite, which inserted Trump back into power. Or, as Rahm Emanuel put it: ”When the woke police come at you, you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

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So where does this take Canadian employers?

In order to avoid the resentment of their employees, they should go back to basic human rights, focusing on equality of opportunity and not on DEI’s forced equality of outcome. They have to avoid hiring radical DEI trainers and leftist workplace investigators — and virtually all of them are leftist. They have to go back to focusing on merit, something desperately needed given Canada’s abysmal productivity statistics, and stop diverting resources into causes that antagonize and alienate rather than unify. Indeed, with our major trading partner more protectionist than ever, productivity has to become a singular focus and employees have to be united to that end.

And if an employee engages in misconduct, fire them. Cease diverting resources into months–long investigations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars with the suspect furloughed and deprived of all legal rights, which has become de rigueur in the external investigation industry. What should be done is simple. Have someone in HR speak to the accuser, the accused, any witnesses, come to a decision within three days and then have everybody come back to work not (much) worse off for the trouble.

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Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers with offices in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. He practices employment law in eight provinces and is the author of six books, including the Law of Dismissal in Canada.  

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