How Trudeau Liberals’ DEI obsession helped kill Canadian culture

At the same time, the Canada Council’s zealous pursuit of “decolonization,” and its prioritization of works “of personal reflection where the point of view of the author is evident,” gave further momentum to personal narratives at the expense of history, biography, science, or politics. There was an explosion of memoirs. Many were trauma memoirs, recounting the horrors of growing up gay, Black, female, Indigenous, or some combination of all of them. Others were memoirs by famous people, as we have seen, sports stars, politicians, and media personalities. Charlotte Gray, the distinguished Canadian historian, noted: “The top 2018 Governor General’s award shortlist for nonfiction contained five memoirs; the 2019 shortlist was dominated by personal stories; all five of the 2020 nominations were memoirs. In 2021, there was only one book on the shortlist that was not a memoir.” In 2023, four out of five nonfiction nominees for the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction were memoirs: Gendered Islamophobia; Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls; Unearthing; and Invisible Boy. The 2024 shortlist is somewhat more balanced with only two memoirs.