10/ If Alberta wants stability, legitimacy, and a future grounded in law rather than chaos, the path forward is simple:
Respect Treaty. Honour constitutional obligations. Lead with accountability.
Anything less is governance failure.
9/ Treaty rights are not negotiable political tools. They are enduring commitments. They pre-date this government, and they will outlast it.
Any government that ignores that reality does so at its own peril.
8/ A unanimous vote of non-confidence from Treaty 6, 7, and 8 leadership is not performative. It signals a breakdown in trust at the highest level of Treaty relations in Alberta.
Trust, once eroded, is not easily rebuilt.
7/ Indigenous governance is about relational accountability. Leadership is not about power, it is about responsibility to agreements, to partners, and to future generations.
That is a standard that is not being met.
6/ The Chiefs have been clear: the current direction of this government is creating instability, division, and conditions that undermine Treaty obligations. That assessment carries constitutional weight.
5/ You cannot claim to respect the rule of law while simultaneously destabilizing the very agreements that give your government authority to operate on this land.
4/ Separation rhetoric, constitutional brinkmanship, and the erosion of democratic oversight are not abstract political strategies. They have direct implications for Treaty relationships, which are Crown-based and constitutionally protected.
3/ Much of my work centers on how institutions fail when they treat Indigenous rights as political obstacles instead of constitutional realities. What we are seeing right now at the provincial level reflects exactly that failure.
2/ Treaties are not historical artifacts. They are constitutional agreements.
You do not sign treaties with people you conquered.
Treaties are agreements between sovereign nations.
If you undermine Treaty, you undermine the legal foundation of Alberta itself.
1/ The Assembly of Treaty Chiefs of Treaty 6, 7, and 8 has passed a unanimous vote of non-confidence in the UCP government.
I stand firmly with them.
This is not symbolic. It is constitutional.
16/ Removing EDI from hiring policy is not a bold or brave move. It is an institutional retreat from responsibility at the exact moment when accountability is being asked for.
15/ If the University of Alberta genuinely believes in excellence, then it should be willing to defend hiring practices that recognize how uneven the academic playing field actually is, not pretend it is flat.
14/ Calling that “merit-based hiring” does not make it principled. It makes it unexamined.
13/ When universities weaken equity commitments, they are not becoming more neutral. They are choosing to protect existing hierarchies from scrutiny.
12/ But beyond governance and legal risk, here is what matters most to me:
Hiring policy determines who controls research culture.
Who supervises students.
Who decides what kinds of questions are deemed legitimate.
Who gets to define rigor.
11/ There are also public legal questions now being raised about whether removing explicit equity commitments is compatible with federal equity obligations tied to major research programs, including Canada Research Chair appointments.
This alone should make leadership pause.
10/ The General Faculties Council passed a motion opposing the elimination of EDI language from the draft recruitment policy.
That should be read as an institutional red flag, not activist noise.
9/ The claim that EDI introduces politics into hiring is ironic. Hiring has always been political. It reflects what an institution values, protects, and reproduces.
The only difference is whether those values are named and accountable, or hidden behind vague appeals to “tradition” and “excellence.”
8/ I also want to be very clear about something that often gets lost in these debates.
Equity policies do not tell committees who to hire. They tell institutions to take responsibility for how opportunity is distributed before hiring ever begins.
7/ The uncomfortable truth is this:
EDI threatens nothing about excellence.
It threatens comfort.
It forces institutions to confront how narrow their definitions of success, productivity, leadership, and scholarly legitimacy have become.
6/ If merit were truly neutral, we would not see the same demographic patterns reproduce themselves generation after generation across Canadian universities.
You do not get structural outcomes without structural causes.
5/ Removing equity criteria does not suddenly make competition fair.
It simply allows committees to rely even more heavily on informal reputation, institutional prestige, and unexamined assumptions about “fit.”
Those are some of the least transparent and most exclusionary parts of academic hiring.
4/ When people argue that EDI “lowers standards,” what they are really defending is a hiring pipeline that already privileges certain trajectories, institutions, supervisors, and networks.
That is not excellence.
That is inherited advantage.
3/ The idea that merit is neutral is one of the most persistent myths in the modern university.
Who gets mentored?
Who gets invited into projects?
Who is encouraged to publish?
Who is shielded from reputational harm?
Those advantages accumulate long before a hiring committee ever meets.
2/ EDI does not replace merit. It corrects for how merit is measured inside systems that were built long before Indigenous people, racialized scholars, disabled scholars, and many others were allowed meaningful access.
1/ The University of Alberta is moving to remove explicit Equity, Diversity and Inclusion commitments from its hiring policy.
This is being sold as a return to “merit.”
That framing is misleading, and frankly intellectually dishonest.
For too long the University of Alberta has been unduly influenced by right wing ideological bias. I am calling for institutional neutrality! We cannot let them indoctrinate our youth. Universities are places to LEARN.
I strongly urge faculty, staff, and students at the University of Alberta to bring a human rights challenge at the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
Win or lose (probably win) the University and UCP would hate to have their dirty laundry aired in public. So do it.
Here is the CBC News story by Emily Williams warning of this appalling decision on the University of Alberta's part. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
I've been saddened today to learn that the University of Alberta is going down MAGA road and wants to abolish Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
So I've written to University President Bill Flanagan, warning him of the legal risks. Because the University may need suing.
