EDITORIAL: Canadian schools need free speech charters
Article content
The news that Ontario Premier Doug Ford wants universities to incorporate free speech principles into their policies should be celebrated and embraced across Canada.
For too many years now, Canadian students and professors have risked academic punishment, condemnation and even censure for freely discussing ideas that offend progressive ideology.
Recommended Videos
tap here to see other videos from our team.
EDITORIAL: Canadian schools need free speech charters Back to video
tap here to see other videos from our team.
Fringe activists increasingly feel emboldened to shut down events either by intimidating attendees, pulling the fire alarms or using other disruptive tactics to shut down events they don’t like.
School administrators have too often supported activist demands by imposing outrageous security fees on events that generate controversy or disapproval. though they have seem less eager to impose the same financial hardship on groups whose views they support.
Ford’s PC government in Ontario has given the province’s colleges and universities until Jan. 1, 2019 to adopt policies to protect free speech and open debate and ensure hate speech and discrimination are not allowed on campuses.
It’s a long overdue policy.
Canadians across the country watched with outrage in 2017 at the treatment of Lindsay Shepherd by Wilfrid Laurier University.
Shepherd was reduced to tears by her professors and the university’s diversity and equity officer for daring to show a short television clip of U of T professor Jordan Peterson debating gender pronouns. The audio recording of Shepherd’s disciplinary meeting was Kafkaesque.
Parents spend years scraping up enough money to send their kids to college and university. They then learn their children are not being exposed to critical thinking, they’re being force-fed political and activist nonsense by elitist, activist and self-serving professors.
Disturbingly, this is happening across the country.
“While imperfect, the (Ontario government’s) plan is a welcome departure from the deafening silence of all provincial governments, of all stripes, about the sad state of free speech at Canadian universities,” wrote John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, recently in the National Post.
Ford’s plan is based in part on the University of Chicago’s “Statement on Principles of Free Expression,” adopted in 2015 to ensure their school both fearlessly protected free speech, debate and inquiry – including ideas that may be offensive to some – and rejected hatred, racism and violence.
The Chicago principles could serve as a model to return Canadian schools to actual institutions of higher learning.
tap here to see other videos from our team.
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.