This essay was originally read at The First Annual Laurier Conference on Business and Professional Ethics, at Wilfrid Laurier University, in October 1996.

Initially accepted by the editor for publication in the proceedings of that conference, the essay was then censored and excluded, on purely political grounds, by the publisher’s politically correct editorial board.

The essay was subsequently published as Lou Marinoff, “Employment Equity versus Equal Opportunity,” Sexuality and Culture, 4 (Fall 2000): 23–44.

It is republished here by permission of Springer Nature.

Introduction

“Employment equity” is the Canadian version of affirmative action. However, given palpable differences between Canadian and American history, notably Canada’s lack of involvement in the slavery of the Triangular Trade, Canada’s preferential social and economic policies primarily favor females over males, instead of non-whites over whites. In Canada, a pervasive and systematically inculcated mythology of socially constructed “gender imbalance,” biting into the body politic with the totalitarian teeth of Orwellian laws, is utilized to discriminate viciously but often covertly against males. The Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA), which during the 1990s was colonized by proponents of “group rights” and radical equity feminists, commissioned and adopted a set of overtly anti-male hiring recommendations, replete with suggested quotas, which drove this author (among many other well-qualified males) out of that country. This paper argues that employment equity, along with all its bureaucratic appurtenances, should be abolished. The CPA’s scandalous hiring recommendations are discussed as a case study, to illustrate the untenability of the equitist position. I claim that social justice demands equal opportunity, which in the free play of enlightened market forces leads to unequal but fair outcomes; and that social justice does not need employment equity, which engineers unfair outcomes to suit arbitrary or egregious assumptions, and thus engenders copious unfairness as well as economic costliness. Meanwhile, the politicization of sexuality in Canada has exacerbated social conflict between the sexes and has had deleterious effects on the culture.

Prelude to the Critique

As a prelude to my critique of employment equity, I must explain something of my vision of social justice. I do this at the outset in order to preempt the sort of charges directed at those who dare speak out against the political programs that equitists regard as sacrosanct icons of fairness.