The Conservative Party will end public funding for university research that addresses “woke” topics, according to the Quebec section of the party platform. The platform doesn’t define the term “woke,” and Poilievre hasn’t given a clear answer when asked by reporters.
However, in recent years, the party has increasingly used the term “woke” in speeches, petitions and policy statements to attack the Canadian government’s climate policy.
The right uses the threat of “wokeism” to invoke fear that liberal elites are “remaking the world” and will curtail people’s liberties and status, said Imre Szeman, director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto.
One of the most worrisome parts of the Conservatives’ pledge is that “woke” is a category that it can fill with whatever it wants, he said. “This is why “woke” is an adjective that is able to link up all kinds of unrelated practices, beliefs, opinions, and outlooks. What’s 'woke’ is, in the end, anything and everything that bothers them.”
We have a once in a lifetime chance to get the best and brightest American academics and researchers.
Are we really going to waste this golden opportunity on the same policies chasing them away from the US in the first place?
This is a golden goose. This is a chance for us to bootstrap our pharma, tech, AI, materials engineering, chip design, and more industries.
This kind of thing hasn’t happened since scientists fled nazi Germany.
Yes we are going to waste this opportunity (independent of who we elect)! Provincial governments are in charge of funding universities and have been consistently decreasing funding for decades and simultaneously cutting off any source of revenue. Most universities in Canada are struggling financially and will have a very hard time hiring anyone in the short term. There will be some counter examples like the ones at U of T, but this will not be the norm.
A quick correction. Most of the scientists didn’t really flee from nazi Germany. They were given the option to either work for the USSR or USA, or face trials (or simple executions) for what they did during the war.
Any reference to “fleeing” Germany would be referencing the scientists that left before, or early in the war. While they were a minority, they did include some extremely notable examples like Einstein and the Polish scientists that figured out the Enigma machine. After the war, those left were given choices (orders) by the victors, and followed them as cowardly or enthusiastically as they did during the war.
So you’re saying they… left the place where they were in order to avoid a form of danger.
The difference is the form of danger was from the people they fled to. The nazis weren’t trying to prosecute their scientists at the end of the war. The allies were. They were given the choice of imprisonment/death, or work for us.
Oh, right. They were fleeing from dying there though.