With an eye on the party's future, go-getter Tory MP Jivani says he doesn't have time for party infighting
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OTTAWA — Conservative MP Jamil Jivani doesn’t yet have a critic assignment, but he’s still finding plenty of ways to keep himself busy.
One glance at the link-heavy website for the Yale Law graduate’s new “Restore the North” initiative conjures up the image of an overachieving high school senior anxiously padding his college application portfolio with extracurriculars.
The homepage is littered with nearly a dozen boxes leading to different sign-up sheets, including petitions to reverse Liberal immigration policies , crack down on open-air drug use and make oral nicotine products like Zyn more widely available. Shouts of “Free the Zyn!” even broke out in the House of Commons last week after Jivani raised the issue of nicotine pouches in question period.
“(These things) are tied together in so far as I’m involved in all of them, and they all sort of reflect the sentiments that I’m hearing from Canadians, and young Canadians in particular,” said the 38-year-old Jivani, when asked whether there was common thread to the causes listed on his website.
Jivani has lately been spending a lot of time meeting young Canadians where they’re at, kicking off a campus tour with fellow Conservative MP Ned Kuruc last month.
He’s staying put in Ottawa next week to host a conference on another cause he says is close to his heart: eradicating what he sees as a leftist form of racism that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — a fellow Yale Law alum — has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Jivani sat down with the National Post for a wide-ranging interview about the upcoming National Forum to End Liberal Racism , how his much-publicized friendship with Yale classmate JD Vance helped shape his views on affirmative action and how he keeps himself busy to avoid the “drama” on Parliament Hill.
He explained that, even with the House set for a hectic week, it was important for him to carve out time to convene a conversation about the prevalence of so-called positive discrimination like diversity quotas in government policies and procedures, especially those related to hiring and promotion.
“The idea behind ending Liberal racism is to acknowledge that a lot of what the federal government does right now is out of line with core values that I think a lot of Canadians have, which is that people should be treated fairly and equally. There are a series of policies the federal government has when it comes to hiring for jobs or in government programs that distribute grants and other resources to the public that are exclusively … based on belonging to certain identity groups,” said Jivani.
Jivani says these discriminatory policies do a disservice to everyone involved.
“On one end, it excludes a lot of people (from opportunities), and that is, in and of itself, a classic case of discrimination. On the other side, for people from the identity groups who may be included in these … policies, it is a gesture towards us that indicates a stamp of inferiority,” he said.
Jivani notably takes issue with voluntary self-identification boxes on government job application forms, which he says convey a clear message that minorities are less capable than other candidates.
“But for claiming to be part of an identity group, the government might not hire you,” said Jivani.
Conservative MPs Shuvaloy Majumdar, Sandra Cobena and Vincent Ho will also make presentations at the forum, set for Tuesday evening in downtown Ottawa. Jivani has invited all Liberal MPs to attend, but says none have RSVPed yet.
Jivani’s personal crusade against what he calls Liberal racism is, at first glance, a U-turn from his 2018 book Why Young Men , where he writes at length about how bonds with Black peers and mentors like professor Andrea Davis, now head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Wilfrid Laurier University , helped him excel at university despite an unstable childhood. Yet, he says his core beliefs remain fundamentally the same, if tempered somewhat by life experience.
“What I learned, I think, from the time I wrote my book till now is just being a lot more sensitive to how race can be used to mask some of the very serious issues in our communities and in our country,” said Jivani.
He added that, even at the time, he was uncomfortable with the excessive focus on race in the media coverage of the book, noting that the absence of a racial qualifier in its title wasn’t an oversight.
“There were people in the media who wanted to make my book about race, when, if you read the book, it talks about boys and young men of all different racial and cultural backgrounds, with the effort of showing actually we have a lot of the same challenges,” said Jivani.
Jivani’s friendships with working-class white classmates like Vance, who wrote about his own hardscrabble upbringing in the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy (later a movie), helped reshape the way he views fairness.
“My view is that a lot of the issues can be best understood based on class, based on, you know, broader social dynamics. Like, for example, being the first person in your family to attend a post-secondary or to graduate from university,” said Jivani.
Jivani said he’s all for helping disadvantaged youth pursue higher education and break into professions but adds that race is a poor proxy for need.
Kwesi Opoku, a longtime friend of Jivani’s, says that the push against diversity quotas “sounds a lot like Jamil.”
“Jamil’s a lot of things. He’s a really brilliant guy, he’s very thoughtful but he’s really, at his core, just a regular-shmegular Black guy,” said Opoku.
Opoku said he thinks Jamil’s views are shared by much of the Black community, even if this fact isn’t widely discussed.
“The vast majority of Black people, although it doesn’t get spoken about, are not in support of affirmative action (and) DEI policies. Most Black folks see themselves as not inferior, being able to compete with anybody.”
Another friend and former Conservative staffer, said that Jivani was doing a “massive service” to Canadians by heading off a far uglier discourse about race, one increasingly being driven by young men.
“(Jivani) will get dismissed by mainstream pundits as pandering to radicals and reactionaries … but if you go and look at how he engages with them, he doesn’t just agree with them, he pushes back,” said the friend.
He pointed to a recent event at a Toronto-area campus where Jivani rebutted arguments put forward by attendees associated with the anti-immigration Dominion Society.
Jivani said that his busy calendar hasn’t given him too much time to dwell on the recent intrigue inside the Conservative caucus, such as the recent double-whammy of a floor crossing and resignation. Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont crossed from the Tories to the governing Liberals and Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux announced that he would be resigning his seat.
“I don’t mean to say it dismissively, because I understand there’s a lot of attention on the drama, but like I just don’t care, dude. I’m just focused on getting my job done,” said Jivani.
Jivani did care enough to call d’Entremont an “idiot” after learning of his defection to the Liberals on budget day.
He also said he’s “not worried at all” that his growing public profile will create the impression that he’s after Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s job.
“We’re a team. Every event I go to, there are multiple MPs there, including the National Forum to End Liberal Racism … I’m proud to be part of the team,” said Jivani.
He added that the team already has a captain and he doesn’t see that changing.
“We’ve had our leader (Poilievre) since the election and, from my standpoint, we got, you know, over eight million votes. We got lots of people who sent us here and want us to work hard on their behalf.”
Cole Hogan, a conservative strategist who specializes in digital campaigns, says that Jivani’s expanding digital footprint — spanning three websites, dozens of videos and a recently launched YouTube series — echoes Poilievre’s own cultivation of a personal sub-brand under the Conservative umbrella.
“In 2021, and even before that, Pierre was sort of doing his own thing. And he would do the longer form YouTube videos at first,” said Hogan.
A flurry of digital content targeting Canada’s then exploding inflation crisis positioned Poilievre as the clear favourite to succeed Erin O’Toole as Conservative leader after the party’s loss in the fall 2021 election.
Hogan added that the multiple online petitions that Jivani has launched could help him gauge potential support for a future leadership run.
Alex Marland, a political science professor at Acadia University who recently co-authored a book on party loyalty in Canadian politics , said that Jivani’s freelancing is indicative of the fact that the Conservatives recently lost an election and are looking for a message that will put them over the top.
“So in my view, the main thing is its proximity to an election. So the closer you get to an election, the more urgency of unity of message there is. And when you just had an election, there’s often a party that doesn’t win is itself trying to reposition and recalibrate and figure out what its messaging is,” said Marland.
Marland added that the attention Jivani is getting for his personal initiatives is likely a good thing for Canadian democracy, given our political system’s tendency toward the centralization of power.
“It’s really important to make sure that individual MPs get attention, not always the leader,” said Marland.
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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