Action4Canada - June 04, 2026


They're Not Going to Self-Correct＂ — Frances Widdowson on Free Speech at Universities


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

159.05

Word count

246

Sentence count

14


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The government of Alberta has the authority to force the University of Lethbridge to hold an open inquiry on the Kamloops case, but they refuse. Why is this happening? And why is it happening in the first place?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 have the universities hold these events with diverse perspectives on whatever claim it may
00:00:07.040 be, whether it's trans activism or the residential schools or the Kamloops case.
00:00:13.320 And we must, and University of Lethbridge is the place to start.
00:00:17.260 And I'm really hoping, because I did speak to Miles McDougall, who is the advanced education
00:00:22.020 minister on April 30th.
00:00:23.860 He said he would go speak with the University of Lethbridge to try to work out some kind of agreement between the university and myself to hold this event.
00:00:35.740 But the University of Lethbridge is never going to agree to that on its own.
00:00:40.020 It is completely at odds with the academic character of the university.
00:00:44.720 And the only way it'll happen is if the government demands that it do it.
00:00:50.140 And the government has the authority to do this.
00:00:52.520 It has the power.
00:00:53.860 So I don't understand why the government of Alberta is not forcing the University of
00:00:59.340 Lethbridge to hold this event when it sees what happened on February 4th, which was an
00:01:05.440 absolutely shocking display of deranged students who have been encouraged by the faculty to
00:01:12.940 act the way that they are.
00:01:14.720 And this has the backing of the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association.
00:01:18.700 They are completely behind these students.
00:01:21.600 And unless you have unions that are acting in an appropriate way to protect academic freedom, there's going to be no protection of open inquiry at university. So they're not going to self-correct.