Action4Canada - June 04, 2026


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

Hosted by
Tanya Gaw
Mentioned
Miles McDougall Kamloops
Next Guest： Frances Widdowson Your Community Your Future. Step Forward in the 2026 Municipal Elections

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).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 have the universities hold these events with diverse perspectives on whatever claim it may
00:00:07 be, whether it's trans activism or the residential schools or the Kamloops case.
00:00:13 And we must, and University of Lethbridge is the place to start.
00:00:17 And I'm really hoping, because I did speak to Miles McDougall, who is the advanced education
00:00:22 minister on April 30th.
00:00:23 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 But the University of Lethbridge is never going to agree to that on its own.
00:00:40 It is completely at odds with the academic character of the university.
00:00:44 And the only way it'll happen is if the government demands that it do it.
00:00:50 And the government has the authority to do this.
00:00:52 It has the power.
00:00:53 So I don't understand why the government of Alberta is not forcing the University of
00:00:59 Lethbridge to hold this event when it sees what happened on February 4th, which was an
00:01:05 absolutely shocking display of deranged students who have been encouraged by the faculty to
00:01:12 act the way that they are.
00:01:14 And this has the backing of the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association.
00:01:18 They are completely behind these students.
00:01:21 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.