Cancel culture is the opposite of multi-culture. And as the world’s most multi-cultural country, this should worry Canadians more than most.
As Michelle Goldberg noted last week, there’s “an aggressive new censoriousness.” True, she was referring to America where some school boards aren’t satisfied to ban certain books. They insist these books be burned. It seems last week, Virginia’s Spotsylvania County School Board voted unanimously to have books with “sexually explicit” material removed. Two of the board members wanted the books burned as well, “just so we can identify, within our community, that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”
The American censors tend to love Jesus; gays, lesbians and Nigerians, not so much. But those of us who tend to be left-wing should not be feeling that smug. It seems that Woke culture is booming in Toronto.
If your relationship to “Wokeness” is a vaguely unformed idea that it’s about being politically correct, let me give you the dictionary definition before I tell you how quickly it’s lost its way and become a rallying point for ‘cancel culture’, which officially means “withdrawing support for public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive.”