Anyone who believes in free speech should be appalled at what happened in Oak Bay recently.
A fierce opponent of the province’s new sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity curriculum was scheduled to speak at the Windsor Pavilion. The SOGI curriculum was developed after the Education Ministry demanded changes in the way schools promote gender diversity.
Instead of a talk, however, what we had was a howling mob who shouted down the speaker, banged drums, set off a fire alarm and generally created mayhem. Their justification? Anyone who disagrees with them is guilty of hate speech.
This was not hate speech. Oak Bay council sought legal advice before scheduling the event, and as Mayor Kevin Murdoch put it: “The lawyers’ pretty strong opinion was that it did not constitute hate speech.”
But that didn’t stop the protesters, one of whom, Rose Henry, had this to say: “This is what the wall of resistance looks like. There is no room for hate. This is what the sisterhood looks like. We are standing here to say: No.”
Leaving aside the unintentional irony of proclaiming “there is no room for hate” while exuding it, this is not what resistance looks like. This is what happens when thugs and bullies rule.
And where were the authorities? Oak Bay knew well in advance what was going to happen. Yet that municipality’s police force arrived only after the speaker had been hounded off the stage.
In fairness, I give councillors credit for taking what they understood would be a controversial decision. But having made that choice, there was an obligation to see it through.
I recall, growing up in the 1950s, when freedom of speech meant just that. You had a right to think and say what you pleased, regardless of whether others disagreed. Perhaps the memory of what happened under tyrants such as Stalin and Hitler bolstered this belief.
Of course, there were limits. You couldn’t yell “fire” in a crowded theatre, and slander and libel were disallowed.
Yet back then, freedom of speech was understood to be the apex of enlightenment, the culmination of a centuries-long struggle to escape oppression.
Belief in this ideal defined liberalism, and fostered efforts in the mid-20th century to reverse discrimination. Passage of the American Civil Rights Act in 1964 comes to mind. Martin Luther King Jr. led that movement, not by getting in people’s faces and screaming at them, but by the power of speech.
In those days, being a liberal meant you could tolerate opposing views, indeed fight for the right of others to hold them, as any open-minded person should. But that has changed. Contemporary liberalism has become a bastion of rigid adherence to whatever orthodoxy holds the day.
If what happened in Oak Bay were an isolated event, we might perhaps let it pass. However, intolerance is also sweeping through Canadian universities. The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (and it’s a shame such an institution need exist), publishes an annual Campus Freedom Index.
In 2018, 16 Canadian universities earned an “F” for failing to uphold free speech. The University of Victoria was one of them. Among student unions, 22 were graded “F,” the student union at UVic included.
If we cannot count on centres of higher learning to defend, indeed even comprehend, basic freedoms, where are we to turn?
I have a proposal. With the exception of a handful of private colleges, Canada’s universities are publicly funded.
Very well. Then let our provincial government make clear it will not suffer the erosion of basic freedoms. If the Education Ministry is willing to intervene when schools go off the rails, perhaps the Ministry of Advanced Education can do the same with universities.
As for the SOGI protesters at the Windsor Pavilion? Our forebears had a cure for that. Eight hours in the stocks.
