unlike the united states, where there are large areas with majority populations of black people that are descended from slavery, under 2% of canadians are of african ancestry, and essentially all of them are migrants to canada after the pearsonian system was set up. while some of these people may have had slave ancestors in the caribbean or other places, there is essentially no cultural legacy of slavery in canada. there are small communities of loyalists in nova scotia and alberta; that's about it.

canada of course helped a lot of blacks escape slavery, but almost all of them chose to move back to the united states.

the fact is that the number of black canadians coming out of a history of slavery is statistically insignificant. you couldn't even micro-target it. there's more hermaphrodites.

so, why would anybody think trudeau would be responding in the context of a culture he doesn't live in, and about a minority that does not exist in the country he's running for prime minister in?

i'm a leftist. but, i'm also a logician. and, i get into a lot of arguments with activists over this stuff. it's a theory that makes sense in the context of a society built on imported slaves that neither went through reparations nor even really dismantled the economic system of slavery (they just created a prison labour system and made up crimes for black people to break, and that continues today with the war on drugs). that's what it's meant to explain: social relations between the remnants of a small white slave-holding class and a large enslaved black population.

there's nothing of the sort in the history of canada. not with blacks. not with the indigenous groups, who we've treated very poorly but not in a comparable way; you'd have to start from the very first principles of the theory to build a parallel critical race theory on aboriginal peoples in canada, and it would look almost nothing like the critical race theory as it applies to blacks in the southern united states. the historical goal of the canadian state has been to assimilate the natives. the dominant policy has been to try and convert them into free farmers, on an equal footing with the white settlers. laws were passed to destroy their culture to get them to that end point; there was much resistance. but, it's been a process of "domesticating" them into what american society considers being free (and which they have historically certainly not considered free to mean), not anything remotely resembling chattel slavery. there's consequently not an entrenched hierarchical system of control and dominance that is a remnant of a legacy in slavery, because there was never any such system in the first. there was and remains forces that wish to assimilate the natives into western culture, and treat them with equality under the law - including equal levels of taxation.

some advocates of the thinking understand this, and try and be careful when they say things. but, it seems to be taught at the undergraduate level of university nowadays and picked up by people with very poor understandings of history, that want to think of it as a global universal that you can just plug into any system, anywhere with comparable levels of resulting insight. these are the frustrating ones.

but, the argument in this circumstance is too weak to even be a simple error in generalizing the specific. leftist activists also know that crt is widely used entirely disingenuously as a trump card to attack political opponents. so, you might have an organization that wants to save the trees, and various dominant personalities vying for control over that organization. it is routine occurrence nowadays for arguments to erupt accusing one another of abusing privilege, in order to create fracture points that will lead one personality to conquer the other. any ridiculous straw man will do.

that's really what you're seeing here: even the most naive and ignorant application of critical race theory could not be so specious, if coming from an adult. an undergraduate student, maybe, but that's not where the attack is coming from.

it's simply meant to proactively smear. and, while i may agree that trudeau's answer was a little simplistic, these dishonest and shifty tactics have coalesced into a clear pattern that needs to be rejected. we can argue about what trudeau said, sure. but, we need to drop the bullshit, first.

http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/22/trudeau-defends-comments-made-during-womens-debate/