Smiley’s People

In Canada, unlike Britain, people aren't yet routinely jailed for tweets but free speech among the professional class is all but dead.

Psychologist, professor, doctor, nurse. The skilled who came in from the cold. No, these aren’t tales from the pen of British spymaster John LeCarré, but an up-to-the-minute roll call of every profession in Canada that now faces a full-frontal onslaught on freedom of expression, and whose ranks are being unscrupulously silenced for holding widely shunned views on pain of career-ending penalties.

Gary Oldman plays intelligence officer George Smiley in Tomas Alfredson’s screen adaptation of John LeCarré classic spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). Image courtesy of Mere Orthodoxy.

When it comes to success and human flourishing, you either believe in the primacy of merit, or you don’t. There is no middle ground. The principle that the individual best suited for a position in society—from parking attendant to prime minister—should be chosen by virtue of their excellence is a straightforward and uncomplicated one.

What’s become undeniable in Canada—and is arguably no less prevalent in Britain—is the way our institutions have ditched merit as their guiding star. Such behaviour in a career-minded individual would be quickly diagnosed as a suicidal pathology. Both of us have written in the Canadian press about how immutable factors such as skin melanin levels and the possession of a particular set of genitals have now superseded merit, whether it’s in medical training and practice, or a part of the insufferable social justice religion that has swept across higher education in the English-speaking world.

The recent sacking of Amy Hamm, a nurse and National Post columnist, by her governing professional body, the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives for the apparently impermissible transgression of expressing incorrect opinions outside of her workplace clinches the debate that, here at least, the merit of her case was subservient to a moralising political stance that is—to the adults in the room—intellectually backward.

For Hamm, who co-funded a billboard in Vancouver declaring her admiration for the gender critical author J. K. Rowling, a mild but high visibility exercise in her advocacy for women’s rights, the recent decision to terminate her employment marked the culmination of a four-year long battle.

The offending eight-foot-tall sign, comprising eleven characters, nine of them the famed author’s name and initials, remained intact for 24 hours and was described by one pearl-clutching local resident as “insidious.” Hamm’s perfidy includes such ‘objectionable’ views as calling for biological males to be banned from women’s toilets and changing rooms.

Canadians have been here before. The psychologist Jordan Peterson was openly persecuted with the same deranged vigour by the Ontario College of Psychologists and Behaviour Analysts for ‘unprofessionalism’ tied to complaints about his expressing opinions on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and criticizing Canada’s former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, among other alleged misdemeanours cited by complainants he had never met or who falsely claimed were his patients. Making complaints is so simple, you see; it is just a click away for every last miserable malcontent.

The result? Despite strenuous appeals to the highest court in the land, seeking to overturn the College’s coercive demands for corrective media training, judges found against him. And so, one of Canada’s leading intellectuals was banished under the shadow of further persecution augured by Canada’s controversial Online Harms Bill, Bill C-63, and now voluntarily resides—without a hint of irony—in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

The burning question, then: who’s next up to the chopping block? Certainly, in the Great White North, no one among the one in five Canadians currently working in the professions is safe from the tender mercies of moralising and vainglorious governing bodies eager to run these obnoxious Postmodernist ideas up the flagpole; and many such agencies will correctly (but misguidedly) point to the universities as their North Star.

In Canada’s publicly funded healthcare system, doctors and nurses alike are expected to self-censor or parrot only what their regulatory bodies deem acceptable across a suite of increasingly political topics. During the pandemic, those same regulators egregiously sought to position themselves as arbiters of truth, according to the final report of the Covid-19 task force commissioned by the government of Alberta.

Which medical debates will be the next to be stifled? As technology rapidly advances, instead of regulatory bureaucrats issuing unilateral diktats, the autocorrective process of free speech is best poised to safeguard patients. In our minds, we’d rather have questions we can’t answer than answers we can’t question.

Meanwhile, the progressive intellectuals who dominate the academic milieu in universities right across the Anglosphere seem to imagine they can evade detection simply by gaslighting everyone, mouthing oaths of loyalty to the concept of merit and, in the same breath, venerating—amongst a variety of other things beyond anyone’s control—skin colour and gender identity as prestige totems of our individual humanity. For instance, a recent report by the Aristotle Foundation found that 98% of job postings at Canadian universities prioritised candidates based on their race, gender or sexual identity.

In February an article in Canada’s newspaper of record, The Globe & Mail, penned by the wide-awake duchess of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), Debra Thompson—a self-declared mistress of post-colonial finger-wagging whose autobiographical opus is, predictably, entitled The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging—pays obeisance to meritocratic practices and at the same time attempts to airbrush the defunct concepts of DEI back into polite acceptability.

Thompson, who appears to have bounced back and forth across the 49th parallel like a forlorn ping-pong ball in search of belonging and her lost black heritage, declares that she “still feels the echoes and intergenerational trauma of North American slavery. She was often the Only One [sic]—the only Black person in so many white spaces—in a country that perpetuates the national mythology of multiculturalism.”

This is the kind of grubby tat that passes for intellectual engagement in our modern era, embodying as it does the kind of weapons-grade truth denial that has become a commonplace across the academic landscape, a place where rafts of mid-wit professors—adrift like so many unwanted migrants—are immersed in postmodern group-think and routinely display truly exasperating levels of cowardice when underlying principles of higher education are assailed. Those principles are treating everyone equally and advancing people based on hard work, talent and aptitude.

For a start off, nobody cares. It is 2025, and Canada holds up a mirror across the Atlantic, reflecting a cost-of-living crisis where young people can only dream of home ownership in a land where property prices have been driven sky-high by reckless immigration. Making whiny noises about past injustices of slavery that only happened south of the Canadian border, or about the generational oppression served up by a ghost-train of white patriarchs, many of them harking from Britain, is tired, boring and irrelevant. Only rear-view-mirror academics would fetishise such nonsensical fantasies.

Second, right now, Canada faces major upheaval—an economic threat to its existence if not one to its sovereignty. Prime Minister Mark Carney is now captaining an already limping ship, one overburdened by Trudeau-era wokery and climate catastrophism, through uncharted and stormy waters. Staying afloat demands Canadians pull together on the oars, and for the best and brightest to guide the country. If ever there was any doubt, here is a clear and present need for excellence, for merit in the workplace, in the board room, in the offices of government.

Last month, Canadians voters unswervingly and unsurprisingly opted to re-elect the Liberal Party to power for a fourth successive term, despite mounting concerns over Carney’s ties to China and globalist utopians, his longstanding desire for net zero despite facing a trade war, and grifting manoeuvres to divest of private wealth and to shrug off plagiarism accusations underpinning his own doctoral degree from Oxford—a credential one of us shares with him, with growing chagrin.

Indeed, Carney, someone who is more suited to be the president of Harvard University, a modern-day academic zeppelin in the shape of the Hindenburg, has now been coronated as the fourth successive Liberal Prime Minister. As such, the war on merit will inevitably continue. That is a mighty shame for Canada, a country of vast open spaces, virtually endless natural resources and a penchant in its constitutional genes for freedom and the rights of the individual.

To echo LeCarré, there is—and has been for a long decade—a mole in Canada’s Liberal ‘Circus.’ It is a treacherous influence that spills out from the universities and into politics and across the professional regulators, seeking to muzzle truthsayers like Jordan Peterson and Amy Hamm; and, so far, it has succeeded. There must be a change if Canada is to avoid being existentially lobotomised. Only a revisionist leader in the mode of a calm and collected operator—a new George Smiley—can make that happen. And, for our money, that doesn’t look a lot like Mark Carney.

Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney speaks following the announcement of his win at the party’s announcement event in Ottawa, Sunday, March 9, 2025. Image courtesy of The Canadian Press. Credit: Adrian Wyld.

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Leigh Revers is associate professor with the Institute for Management and Innovation at the University of Toronto.

Mark D’Souza is a practising Canadian physician and author of Lost and Found: How Meaningless Living is Destroying Us and Three Keys to Fix It.