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At Toronto Metropolitan University medical school, some students are more equal than others

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8 months ago

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READ THE REALITY CHECK

By Bruce Pardy

 

 

A new Aristotle Foundation Reality Check from Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy details how Canada’s courts reinterpreted even the clear equality clause in the constitution to read in anti-individual “equity.” That hollowed out a founding Canadian principle of equality before the law.

Canada’s newest medical school will select students not for their ability, but their identity.

Great, as if Canada’s healthcare system wasn’t bad enough already.

The school, which opens next fall at Toronto Metropolitan University, will reserve 75 per cent of its seats for Indigenous, Black, and other “equity-deserving” groups including 2SLGBTQ+. These students will need an undergraduate GPA of only 3.3 on a 4-point scale, and maybe not even that; for comparison, the University of Toronto medical school’s average accepted GPA is 3.95.

Able-bodied straight white students can’t apply for these seats. It’s TMU’s affirmative action school for doctors who can’t get in on their merits. Canada now has full-blown racial and gender discrimination. How did we get here? The Supreme Court of Canada is largely to blame.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court brought race-based admissions at American universities to an end. Harvard University, among others, preferred Black and brown students to Asian and white ones in the name of “diversity.” That practice, the court declared, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Equal protection “cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.” In the United States, equal treatment under the law is a constitutional requirement.

But not in Canada. “Every individual is equal before and under the law,” says the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination …” But the Supreme Court of Canada has long insisted that the clause does not mean equal treatment but equity.

Equity, also known as “substantive equality” or “equality of outcome,” means treating different groups differently. It means applying standards and granting rights to compensate for perceived advantages, disadvantages, strengths, and weaknesses. Equity is a right granted not to individuals as individuals, but to members of groups.

Equal treatment and equity are opposites. The law cannot apply the same laws and standards to everyone and also adjust them depending upon the group. As Friedrich Hayek put it, “From the fact that people are very different, it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time.”

So what happened? The Supreme Court of Canada did not decide its first case under the equality provision, section 15(1), until 1989. In the interim, the federal government established a Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, also known as the Abella Commission after its commissioner Rosalie Abella. Abella, now retired, would later become the most activist judge on the court. The commission’s report, released in 1984, recommended employment equity policies in the federal government and in federally regulated companies, and led to the passage of the federal Employment Equity Act in 1986, which required affirmative action programs that gave preference to candidates from some groups over others.

The Act did not bind the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Charter, but it was newly in place when the Supreme Court heard the case of David Mark Andrews, a British citizen and permanent resident of Canada, and a qualified lawyer, who challenged a British Columbia requirement that lawyers be Canadian citizens. In its 1989 decision, the court struck down the requirement. Justice William McIntyre wrote, “… a law which treats all identically and which provides equality of treatment between “A” and “B” might well cause inequality for “C,” depending on differences in personal characteristics and situations. To approach the ideal of full equality before and under the law… the main consideration must be the impact of the law on the individual or the group concerned…”

The court has been doubling down on equity ever since. Unlike the American Constitution, the Charter contains an exception to its equality guarantee. Section 15(2) allows for programs of affirmative action that discriminate against members of some groups to promote the fortunes of others. It was meant to be an exception, but the Supreme Court has made it the general rule.

In Canada, the Charter may not even apply to university admission policies (because universities are not governments), but human rights codes do. Like section 15(1) of the Charter, human rights codes promise a right to equal treatment. But in accordance with the Supreme Court’s equality jurisprudence, human rights have come to mean equity too. In 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal said that white people cannot claim discrimination. “An allegation of racial discrimination or discrimination on the grounds of colour,” it wrote, “is not one that can be or has been successfully claimed by persons who are white and non-racialized.”

Thanks to the Supreme Court, equality rights have become weapons wielded by preferred groups to demand more lenient standards and advantageous outcomes. In Canada, some people are more equal than others. Remember that next time you’re waiting to see your newly minted doctor.

Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe, professor of law at Queen’s University, senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and author of the new report “A Right to Unequal Treatment”.

Know about the Dorchester Review?

You should.

Our friends at the Dorchester Review have printed excerpts of The 1867 Project—Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled. In addition to such fine selections, their quarterly has other terrific historical work.

Check them out here.  
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Aristotle Foundation

How Vimy Ridge Shaped Canada

Published on July 2, 2025

By

The Battle of Vimy Ridge was a unifying moment for Canada, then a young country. The Aristotle Foundation’s Danny Randell explains what happened at Vimy in 1917, and why it still matters to Canada today.

About the Aristotle Foundation

The Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy is a new think tank that aims to renew civil, common-sense discourse in Canada. As an educational charity, we publish books, videos, fact sheets, studies, columns, interviews, and infographics.

Visit our website at www.aristotlefoundation.org for more of our content.

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Aristotle Foundation

The Canadian Medical Association’s inexplicable stance on pediatric gender medicine

Published on June 21, 2025

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By Dr. J. Edward Les

The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide from its shelves — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs

Physicians have a duty to put forward the best possible evidence, not ideology, based treatments

Late last month, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) announced that it, along with three Alberta doctors, had filed a constitutional challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26 “to protect the relationship between patients, their families and doctors when it comes to making treatment decisions.”

Bill 26, which became law last December, prohibits doctors in the province from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapies for those under 16; it also bans doctors from performing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors (those under 18).

The unprecedented CMA action follows its strongly worded response in February 2024 to Alberta’s (at the time) proposed legislation:

“The CMA is deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care, including the Alberta government’s proposed restrictions on gender-affirming treatments for pediatric transgender patients.”

But here’s the problem with that statement, and with the CMA’s position: the evidence supporting the “gender affirmation” model of care — which propels minors onto puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and in some cases, surgery — is essentially non-existent. That’s why the United Kingdom’s Conservative government, in the aftermath of the exhaustive four-year-long Cass Review, which laid bare the lack of evidence for that model, and which shone a light on the deeply troubling potential for the model’s irreversible harm to youth, initiated a temporary ban on puberty blockers — a ban made permanent last December by the subsequent Labour government. And that’s why other European jurisdictions like Finland and Sweden, after reviews of gender affirming care practices in their countries, have similarly slammed the brakes on the administration of puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to minors.

It’s not only the Europeans who have raised concerns. The alarm bells are ringing loudly within our own borders: earlier this year, a group at McMaster University, headed by none other than Dr. Gordon Guyatt, one of the founding gurus of the “evidence-based care” construct that rightfully underpins modern medical practice, issued a pair of exhaustive systematic reviews and meta analyses that cast grave doubts on the wisdom of prescribing these drugs to youth.

And yet, the CMA purports to be “deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care,” which begs the obvious question: Where, exactly, is the evidence for the benefits of the “gender affirming” model of care? The answer is that it’s scant at best. Worse, the evidence that does exist, points, on balance, to infliction of harm, rather than provision of benefit.

CMA President Joss Reimer, in the group’s announcement of the organization’s legal action, said:

“Medicine is a calling. Doctors pursue it because they are compelled to care for and promote the well-being of patients. When a government bans specific treatments, it interferes with a doctor’s ability to empower patients to choose the best care possible.”

Indeed, we physicians have a sacred duty to pursue the well-being of our patients. But that means that we should be putting forward the best possible treatments based on actual evidence.

When Dr. Reimer states that a government that bans specific treatments is interfering with medical care, she displays a woeful ignorance of medical history. Because doctors don’t always get things right: look to the sad narratives of frontal lobotomies, the oxycontin crisis, thalidomide, to name a few.

The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: it illustrates what happens when a government drags its heels on necessary action. Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide, given to pregnant women for morning sickness, from its shelves, three months after it had been banned everywhere else — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs, along with other severe anomalies. It’s a shameful chapter in our medical past, but it pales in comparison to the astonishing intransigence our medical leaders have displayed — and continue to display — on the youth gender care file.

A final note (prompted by thalidomide’s history), to speak to a significant quibble I have with Alberta’s Bill 26 legislation: as much as I admire Premier Danielle Smith’s courage in bringing it forward, the law contains a loophole allowing minors already on puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to continue to take them. Imagine if, after it was removed from the shelves in 1962, government had allowed pregnant women already on the drug to continue to take thalidomide. Would that have made any sense? Of course not. And the same applies to puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones: they should be banned outright for all youth.

That argument is the kind our medical associations should be making — and would be making, if they weren’t so firmly in the grasp, seemingly, of ideologues who have abandoned evidence-based medical care for our youth.

J. Edward Les is a Calgary pediatrician, a senior fellow with the  Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy,  and co-author of “Teenagers, Children, and Gender Transition Policy: A Comparison of Transgender Medical Policy for Minors in Canada, the United States, and Europe.” 

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