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Canada has its own Jason Ardays — our versions of the Black British academic who recently committed suicide after it was revealed that he plagiarized much of his academic work and invented a fabulist version of his personal history.

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The Canadian versions might not be as outlandish — but they almost certainly exist. The system incentivizes their creation.

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Having concocted a caricature of Canadian society as ghoulishly racist, where skin colour and background are said to continuously limit life chances, those who peddle this story of never-ending systemic racism are determined to find those who persevere despite the odds. Present yourself as a social victim who overcame adversity, and there is a market for your story.

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Just think of the list of pretendians over recent years — academics, writers, and celebrities who won jobs and accolades based on supposed Indigenous ancestry. Buffy Sainte-Marie claimed a fake Indian identity for decades, her music said to reflect Indigenous roots, before she was outed as an American of English and Italian ancestry whose family had changed its name to combat anti-Italian sentiment after the Second World War. At least one wesbite still describes her as born on a Northern Saskatchewan reserve.

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Then there is Thomas King, the so-called American Cherokee writer who moved to Canada and presented himself as a font of Indigenous wisdom and humour. That, too, turned out to be an invention.

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Universities are no different. The drive to “decolonize” has created a demand for Indigenous voices, and fabulists have flocked to claim the rewards — stable pay, comfortable lives and recognition for identities they don’t own. Carrie Bourassa formerly a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a former judge and UBC law professor and Vianne Timmins, former president of Memorial University in Newfoundland, are among recent examples.

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Canadian universities now routinely hire by identity. The Canada Research Chairs program, one of the most prestigious sources of academic jobs, mandates that chairs match national population targets for women, the disabled, Aboriginal peoples and “racialized” groups — based not on the applicant pool, but on national population share. More broadly, many universities require candidates to submit DEI statements defending a particular reading of diversity, an explicit criterion on which they’re evaluated. Fail to support the institution’s version of DEI, and you rank lower.

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The psychological pull to invent an ever more elaborate story of merit and uniqueness must be strong. But for those hired through searches targeted, explicitly or implicitly, by identity, it’s hard not to imagine these candidates having a version of imposter syndrome where they ask themselves, “Was I hired for my work, or because I checked a box?”

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The Arday case ought to be a wake-up call. Instead, many DEI proponents and their media defenders are drawing the opposite lesson — that his death shows him, yet again, as a victim of racism, hounded by those who vilify him and more proof of how irretrievably racist Britain and Canada remain. Their solution: more identity-based hiring, more DEI re-education. The patient is dying from the medicine? Increase the dose.