Shifting to a bike-centric cityscape is a huge shift in infrastructure, if you start mapping out all the components that need to come together for it to happen at this stage. Like I live in Vancouver, where our council has for a few decades put a heavy priority on building segregated bike lanes and connecting paths that are pretty well totally removed from cars. I happily ride my ebike around the seawall during the spring/summer/fall a couple times a week. The weather is mild, albeit rainy, pretty well all year. The terrain is generally pretty darn flat. We've had local e-bike vendors for a long time. We have bike share stations provided by Rogers (formerly Shaw) along most major transit routes. That's still not enough to make vancouver into a bike-primary transportation city. Hell, with reports of ebike batteries exploding periodically, one thing you'd need to add in is mandatory secure ebike parking in condo buildings (we recently had an apt building go up because of it, causing something like 24 people to become homeless) -- which'd mean all the older buildings would need to retrofit things. The list just goes on and on.
And again, in the context of "change all cities in the country to preference ebikes and alternative transport" vs "build EVs in Canada", the former is far more drastic. So if someone wants to put it forward as a realistic/plausible option, beyond just fantasy, they need to really spell out how it'd function, the cost variances / savings they claim would occur, and all that jazz. I'd love to see how it'd be economical for tiny towns in northern BC/Alberta to switch to e-bikes as a primary mode of transport, I just don't think it's realistic. It's the more extreme position to take, so someone should back it up. And, like I said earlier, if they can do that they ought to pitch it to the greens.
An 'ok' video, but it misses a lot of the Canadian context of DEI and CRT stuff, much of which has been institutionalized for decades. It's too focused on recent trends with influencers and US politics.
I'd typed up a big description of that missed context, references/links to the Charter/Employment equity act/supreme court rulings and all that, but it was just so, so long. And based on experience, pointless to explain in online discussions.
I will say though that when I bring these sorts of things up, a big reason I think this is such an issue is that I do think there are inherent bias's and issues in systems. However I'm more concerned with broader economic class disparities then racial ones -- people with dental issues and low income have it rough and deserve a hand; it's not helping to specifically target low income seniors support programs as though being a 'senior' makes you more worthy of help/govt funds. The implementation of DEI has basically been weaponised by the upper class to refocus the anger of the lower classes against one another, rather than against the super wealthy, and that men/white men have specifically been isolated "from the rest". You can put out a corporate policy saying hiring needs to be done through an inclusivity lens, and it allows you to give jobs to just the upper class minorities and discriminate without hesitation against the lower class majority: a third generation millionaire trust fund minority race woman with barely passing skills, is more worthy of employment in the eyes of the govt than a higher skill lower class background white guy quite explicitly with how the govt handles its hiring. Putting a focus on supporting women and minority rights, gives the facade of permission to ignore inequalities that exist between economic classes of men, or people in the broader aggregate. The government/elites don't need to fund / maintain safe third spaces for most of the unwashed masses, if they can sell the idea that only a minority of the population needs those sorts of privileges. They can fund woman specific outreach and support programs, and half ass the opioid crisis for a decade or two while its victims are 75% men. As long as you can get the lower classes focused on racial/gender issues, it's a lot easier to cut the top income tax bracket from 70% down to 38%. It'd be interesting to see a study on the correlation between DEI/CRT programs and broader income inequalities between the top % earners in the country over the past few decades - they've definitely both been on an increasing trend since the 80s, when Canada started doing DEI due to the charter.
The videos note on Bernie -- and Bernie's comments post election about how the democratic party has become too mired in identity politics that it had turned its back on the working class of the country -- are apt. But, by the guidelines that the Government of Canada puts out, expressing this sort of sentiment is racist -- if you're concerned more with broad economic inequality/class without respect to racial lenses, the guides say you're racist. To me, it's the same sort of insanity as the people who say you have to support what Israel's doing in Gaza at the moment, or else you're an anti-Semite/Nazi/terrorist. You can both condemn Hamas, and also condemn Israel's genocidal actions: but the dominant power structure / elites set up the discussion as though there are only two teams/positions, then force people into one of the two camps, and proceed to make them fight one another. It's unproductive in terms of getting a sane / human rights encouraging / life benefiting resolution to the conflict/discussion. It's good in theory, but in practice it's anti-progressive/anti-egalitarian. Sorta like how most people view communism -- ok in theory, but in practice it's pretty well always been a tragedy.