Prof. Ricardo Duchesne/ Joshua Blakeney

In this episode of The Real Deal I interviewed Prof. Ricardo Duchesne, author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2012) and member of the Social Science department at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John.The recording of the interview happened to coincide with the latest flurry of criticism of the Puerto Rican born academic. Prof. Duchesne’s observations about the changing ethnic character of Canada—and of the city of Vancouver in particular—led a Vancouver city councillor to mount pressure on the scholar’s employer to reconsider his academic position. Increasingly, Canadian intellectuals who reject the State-ideologies of Multiculturalism and Jewish-exceptionalism and who question ethnicized victimologies are witch-hunted, and in some instances criminalized, for their dissentient viewpoints. As in the Soviet Union, there is an attempt by those in power in Canada to impose a mandatory belief in social-constructionist assumptions about race and ethnicity.