1 week Ago By [email protected] (Raisa Patel)
OTTAWA—Wasteful. Weird. Wacko.
Woke. It may seem strange how four letters strung together, nestled among a series of alliterative buzzwords, bearing a modern definition so amorphous so as to be nearly meaningless, can evoke such clear feelings of something bad , of something reaching into places it shouldn’t. But the word, lifted from the oeuvres of Black political activists, singers and writers, has became one of the terms Pierre Poilievre has relied on most to discredit his political rivals in his relentless bid to end almost a decade of Liberal rule.
In “woke,” the Conservative leader has found the perfect word, a term right-wing movements and politicians around the world have successfully captured to brand progressives as performative activists bent on government overreach. The word is so pervasive that U.S.
President Donald Trump didn’t even need to say it when he promised during his inaugural address this week to scrap any policy “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” something he said would restore America “and the revolution of common sense.” Maybe that sounds a bit familiar. Newly-published research has shown that Poilievre’s Conservatives have excelled at using “woke” to try and delegitimize progressive parties, people and policies and frame them as a threat to Canada’s democratic values.
To chart how Poilievre arrived at this moment, however, you have to start in the early and mid-20th century, when the term was first used to call for awareness and vigilance about systemic injustices in a profoundly prejudiced America. One of its earliest recorded uses is tied to a 1938 song by American folk and blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, who went by the stage name Lead Belly. The song is called Scottsboro Boys , and tells the story of a landmark set of race cases that saw nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931.
In a spoken recording after the song concludes, Lead Belly warns those listening to be “a little careful” when they pass through the area, and to “stay woke, keep their eyes open.” Decades later, the phrase “stay woke” would re-enter the musical mainstream as a refrain in Erykah Badu’s 2008 track Master Teacher, and surface again during the protests and racial reckonings that followed the police killings of Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014 and George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020. The use of the word “woke,” with that original meaning intact, has only shown up once in Canada’s parliamentary record.
Several years before he became the first Black Speaker of the House of Commons, Liberal MP Greg Fergus used it to mark the start of Black History Month in 2019. “Whereas we once divided ourselves into narrow interests based on where we or our ancestors came from, more and more we are a woke community that is working together to achieve a common interest: to be equal and to be treated as equal, equal in business, studies, law, culture, innovation, politics, government and citizenship,” Fergus told his fellow MPs. “That was really the only instance,” said Patrick McCurdy, a communications professor at the University of Ottawa who traced, with two other researchers, how Conservative MPs have wielded the word in parliamentary debates.
“Then we really see the entrance of this culture war.” McCurdy and his colleagues analyzed the use of the word “woke” in all House of Commons and committee records from 2001 until June 2023. They found 122 instances of the word and its variations being used in a “non ‘wake up’ context” from 2019 onwards, with most of those uses delivered by Conservative MPs — and mostly only after Poilievre took the party’s helm in 2022.
The data shows that Poilievre first used the word once in 2021 and again in 2022 — the year when the term’s use climbed to 20 instances, 19 of which were uttered by Conservative MPs. In the first six months of 2023, the word was used 88 times: 63 of those stemming from Conservatives, 33 of which were attributed to Poilievre. A Star search of the parliamentary record showed that after McCurdy’s data collection period, Poilievre only said “woke” on seven occasions, though other Conservative MPs used it more than 70 times.
It’s also a word the Conservative leader has used frequently on social media and in media interviews over the past year, most recently in a lengthy conversation with media personality Jordan Peterson, in which he said Canada had been stricken with “horrendous utopian wokeism.” Conservatives have used “woke” to malign a peculiar jumble of issues: race and gender inclusivity in school curriculums and workplace hiring practices, attempts to modernize Canada’s military, animal rights activism, the country’s telecommunications regulator, the bail system, drug supply policies, reusable grocery bags, pro-Palestinian protests, and the federal carbon pricing scheme. The party did not respond to the Star’s requests for comment on this story.
“When you have a sort of vague and shifty term like this, it means that when you get criticized, you can always say, ‘No, no, that’s not what I meant by this,’ and shift to another meaning. I think it can give rise to a kind of slipperiness that can be very useful in the cut and thrust of public debate,” said Jennifer Saul, a chair in social and political philosophy of language at the University of Waterloo. That kind of ambiguity is the hallmark of political dog whistles, said Tari Ajadi, a political science professor at McGill University.
“If you replace the word ‘woke’ with a skin colour, if you replace the term ‘woke’ with a sexual orientation, if you replace the term ‘woke’ with a gender ...
you get a very different response. It wouldn’t be allowed to be said,” Ajadi said. The myriad uses of the word prompted McCurdy and his colleagues to sort the examples they collected into seven different definitions of “woke.
” The “authoritarian” definition meant the word was used to characterize something as controlling or intolerant, for example, and the “ineffective” definition was applied when it was used to paint a policy as actively harmful. The researchers concluded that MPs, largely Conservative ones, had succeeded in shifting the term from its social justice roots and into an understanding associated with control, positioning Poilievre “as the only political defender of freedom against this looming totalitarian threat.” The Conservative leader has previously said as much.
“It has plenty of pretexts but only one purpose: control. It is designed to divide people by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, vaccine status and any other way one can divide people into groups. Why? It is because then one can justify having a government to control all those groups,” Poilievre told the Commons in 2023 when asked to define the word.
“No more woke. We need freedom.” How Poilievre arrived at that definition begins not with the right, but with the left.
Ajadi said the word “woke” was first recast from “a very in-group thing that’s talking about being socially conscious and politically conscious ...
to talking generically about social justice, which it was never intended to be.” He said the term was seized by the upper-middle class, corporations, universities, and politicians who claimed it as a trendy term that came to represent a “poorly-defined set of values.” “This is how this kind of appropriation of language emerges and unfolds, and then very quickly gets appropriated once more by the right to mock what some might call performative activism,” Ajadi said.
Indeed, the word eventually became synonymous with inauthentic virtue signalling from progressives (think Justin Trudeau, who had publicly condemned racism before admitting he had previously worn blackface), and left-leaning policies that earnestly sought to correct historic inequities, but were spun by the right as infringements on their freedoms. The result? Laws like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called Stop WOKE Act — or Stop Wrongs to our Kids and Employees.
(The 2022 state law, which banned education and workplace initiatives that suggest people are oppressed or privileged based on their race, gender or nation of origin, has faced legal challenges.) Such heavily politicized uses of “woke” left progressive politicians in Canada floundering to respond, McCurdy said. His research showed that Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois MPs tried to “challenge” Conservative uses of “woke” on 22 occasions, and found that they largely wound up legitimizing the word’s use as a pejorative in the process.
In one case, then-Liberal Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen repeatedly characterized the term as something offensive after Poilievre referred to mayors whose housing policies he opposed as “woke.” “He stood up in this House and insulted and denigrated three of the leading mayors of Canada’s largest cities, calling them ‘woke,’” Hussen said during a 2023 debate in the Commons. “The idea (behind the word) has become sullied, and no one’s prepared to try and defend it,” McCurdy said.
The word has also been effective for Poilievre because regular people also use it to convey dissatisfaction, said Mitch Heimpel, director of policy at Enterprise Canada and a former Conservative staffer. Heimpel said he’s heard people in his neighbourhood of young families use “woke” to refer to topics like what children are learning in schools and news stories about someone released on bail committing another crime. “It’s a reflection of a change to a system that in the mind of the person listening, is causing it to not work,” Heimpel said.
“So it becomes a good shorthand in that way.” Both Heimpel and Saul said it is not cause for alarm that words evolve, taking on new meanings over time. “If you try to hold language in place, you’re fighting a losing game,” Saul said.
But for Ajadi, the movement of political language is deliberate, something done with a motive in mind. “Language evolves, but I think that removes agency from the equation,” Ajadi said. “People make language evolve.
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