On a recent television panel, Globe and Mail parliamentary bureau chief Bob Fife was asked about the pitfalls ahead for the Trudeau Liberals.

In his answer, he suggested that the upcoming consultations on systemic racism would be a wedge issue, saying, “Is there really systematic racism in Canada? Go to high schools and universities. Kids of all ethnic backgrounds are hanging around together. It’s not the Chinese kids with the Chinese kids or the South Asian kids with the South Asian kids. I’m not sure if that’s the case but this government has a tendency to tell us how we should be thinking and there’s a potential danger in this, ‘We know what’s best for you’ type of attitude.”

First of all, the social behaviour of teenagers is not a basis for any definition of systemic racism. Indeed, if one were to go to those high schools and look at their suspension records and into the classrooms of college-stream classes, one might begin to have a sense of what systemic racism is.

Secondly, this public consultation is only the beginning of a $23 million anti-racism strategy outlined in Budget 2018. In Canada, the rise of the 3 Percent, the impact of Rebel Media and the racist anger that led to the Quebec Mosque shooting, point to a clear need to discuss race and racism.

Questions about systemic racism are less about our personal interactions but rather about how the institutions that govern our lives have internalized and implemented racism. A multi-ethnic group of university students may quite like one another but their experience of the school is likely to differ on racial lines.

Fife’s answer is telling. He is not the only senior political journalist to speak dismissively on the subject. Political columnist John Ibbitson has written that, “a committee crisscrossing the country in search of intolerance is bound to find it, and to publicize that finding. This is of a piece with this government’s fondness for making people feel bad about themselves.”

Conservative MP Maxime Bernier has recently decided that any attempt by the government to grapple with race and racism is a Very Bad Thing.

On this consultation, he tweeted, “More Liberal identity politics to divide us into tribes, buy votes and justify big gov programs. Get ready to hear self-appointed reps of intersectionally oppressed victims tell you every day how systematically racist and intolerant Canadians are.” The usual places in the right-wing Internet have already begun to spin out.

The broad coalition of white fragility on display is, as ever, disappointing but not surprising.

(Coined by academic Robin DiAngelo, white fragility states that white people live in “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”)

The Liberal government has held, or is holding consultations on, justice reform, NAFTA, marijuana, housing, and an independent elections commission, to name but a few. If anything, they are less interested in telling Canadians how to feel but in hearing how Canadians feel about everything. If you feel strongly about nutrition labelling, then this is the government for you.

Yet few of these consultations have ever pre-emptively provoked warning and ire quite like the consultations on systemic racism.

As the CBC notes, the federal government has been cautioned to approach this consultation carefully. A similar consultation in Quebec led to public rancor and was ultimately reframed to focus on the nebulous goal of “valuing diversity and fighting against discrimination.”

It has become commonplace to overinflate and overstate what conversations will do. A non-binding motion to study Islamophobia can become an all-out assault on free speech only if you’re committed to or tacitly approving of Islamophobic speech.

Halting, underfunded, awkwardly celebratory and yet necessary efforts at reconciling Canada’s past with Indigenous peoples are met with cynicism and impatience. Members of the same Parliamentary press gallery that could not find a single question to ask about Black people at the event for Black people comfortably frame the conversation on racism.

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Consultations on systemic racism are a sign of a high-handed and didactic government that tells us how to think and feel only if that “us” doesn’t include some of us.

Vicky Mochama is a co-host of the podcast, Safe Space. Her column appears every second Thursday. She also writes a tri-weekly column for Metro News that mixes politics, news and humour.