AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AKA POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION............................. (AKA DISCRIMINATION)

Affirmative action is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer or have suffered from discrimination within a culture.

Or if you prefer, you do the exact same thing you used to hate other people for doing. Instead of creating an actual level playing field where literally EVERYONE can compete fairly, you arbitrarily decide that one group has "has its time" and now needs to take a back seat. Positive (ugh) discrimination leaves meritocracy and effort on the back-burner for the profit of identity politics.

The inevitable end result is that you end up with a less competent corps of personel than you would have with REAL equality. For example, if only 10% of candidates for police jobs are women, and you force a quota of 50% female police workers, the women chosen for the job won't be as good as a simple result of being selected from a much smaller pool of applicants. And again, since nobody bats an eye when it's men being shafted, here's a reverse example : if a health-care system decided to impose 50% male nurses, you would get a dropoff in nurse quality because you would have to turn away many excellent female candidates and let in mediocre men.

It also creates as many problems as it solves. Watch the sh*t hit the fan when you combine the current implementation of this idea (forcing equality of outcome and equal representation everywhere) with that other deliriant ideology, the spectrum of gender identities. There's not gonna be enough jobs in existence to accomodate everyone I tell ya. What's Justin "2015" Trudeau gonna do about his silly cabinet parity when there's more accepted genders than positions in the cabinet? Enlarge it? Make ministers take turns?

Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking "Offering the same opportunities that white men have to women and minorities is progress" and started thinking "Women and minorities are a progress compared to white men".

Preventing someone from getting a job or an award because of their identity, even though they are the most qualified for it, is discrimination pure and simple. You're just adding the word "positive" at the end to feel better about yourself when you're the one doing it.