00:02:17.900It was actually the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association that after an episode on February 4th, 2026, the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association posted a statement from its Gender Equity and Diversity Committee, which is headed by a professor by the name of Patrick Wilson,
00:02:39.800where it said that I had engaged in misinformation and disinformation, that I was lying, that I had intended to harm students, and that I was motivated by hate.
00:02:56.120So those were the most egregious, defamatory claims that were made.
00:03:01.320And after I had just come on campus to collaborate with a professor emeritus there, Anthony Hall, and we were going to do an academic exercise called Spectrum Street Epistemology on the claim that the residential schools were genocidal.
00:03:17.840And the reason why I wanted to collaborate with Anthony Hall is because he believes that there's evidence for the residential schools being genocidal.
00:03:24.660So we thought it would be a really great opportunity to showcase civil disagreement before any student or faculty member who wanted to come join us.
00:03:35.140But the University of Lethbridge was very not going to be having any of this and sent out an email to all students and faculty saying that a controversial figure was on campus with upsetting and disrespectful views.
00:03:50.040And this resulted in an angry mob of students hunting us down and stopping any discussion that we were trying to have on that matter.
00:04:00.780So Professor Hall believes in the genocidal claim.
00:06:21.780And the university, which is supposed to be a place where you think, you explore ideas, you criticize, you question, said this was too much.
00:06:33.060Yes, yes, they actively, well, it was the students were emboldened by the university administration. And this has happened not just at University of Lethbridge. University of Lethbridge is just the worst example because they have been so aggressive in trying to paint me as an odious person who's doing these terrible things.
00:06:53.780But, you know, we've had problems at the University of Winnipeg where my cameraman there, Daniel Page, feared for his life because of the gangsters that showed up.
00:07:05.280We had, I'm just thinking about the other kind of areas of the street epistemology.
00:09:18.720The other interesting thing about it is it has the absolutely agree and the absolutely disagree mats.
00:09:25.020Personally, I almost never get on the absolutely mat because I always want to leave a little bit open for being able to be convinced, you know, that I'm not 100% correct.
00:09:39.620I must say, though, in Chestermere0.99
00:18:59.400That's what they're doing to shield their own activism from scrutiny. And people have to be very concerned about that, because if we have that approach in the universities, we're not going to be able to understand anything.
00:19:15.340And universities are very important institutions. They're where we disseminate knowledge. They're where you train professionals. And they actually used to provide quite a good bulwark against authoritarianism. But because these activists have taken over the machinery of these institutions, the universities are not operating the way they should anymore.
00:19:36.980you were hired by mount royal university and i want to talk to you about that in your firing
00:19:43.440when we come back after the break because um you had controversial opinions before
00:19:48.240and you weren't fired in fact you got hired because of them then you got fired we'll talk
00:19:54.220about that when we come back but but first a little capitalism francis i gotta pay the bills
00:19:59.080here i want to tell you about the post media merch store that's right post media dot store
00:20:05.700um we've got something new that i didn't know about before today if you love the old brickland
00:20:12.620do you remember the brickland sports car they were going to build in down in new brunswick
00:20:16.780it was in i believe it was in back to the future all of this well we've got the brickland gullwing
00:20:22.560gamble uh post media store merch you can go to postmedia.store or you can just go and get you
00:20:29.240know the toronto sundat hat the national post tote bag all of that postmedia.store shop now
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00:20:54.920at 1-866-531-2600 text us at 247-247 or chat with us at www.connectsontario.ca
00:21:03.100Standard message and iterates may apply.
00:21:33.100and behind-the-scenes scoops from Parliament Hill and beyond.
00:22:33.740But the only way to get behind the scenes and right into the source code of what politicians and the people around them are really thinking is to get political hack.
00:22:41.940Go to nationalpost.com slash newsletters.
00:22:46.900This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?
00:22:50.320where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.
00:22:58.080Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes from season two.
00:23:03.180And if you missed it, there are even more episodes from last season.
00:23:06.700So make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What? Everywhere you get podcasts.
00:23:11.400OK, quick correction, because I was just told in the break that it was not the Bricklin in the Back to the Future movie.
00:23:18.780It was the DeLorean. And since we're talking about truth, it's important to be truthful here.
00:23:23.180uh francis uh i walk through the university of toronto campus on a pretty much daily basis with
00:23:31.480my uh my little pup chloe the wonder dog and uh above the doorway at victoria university on the0.98
00:23:39.000campus it says the truth shall make ye free um not always sometimes it's giant pain in the ass0.97
00:23:45.560you wrote the book um disrobing the aboriginal industry in 2008 that same year you get hired by
00:23:55.900mount royal university in calgary so they knew who they were getting you wrote books on topics
00:24:02.900that would be controversial after that i mean disrobing was well regarded did you win awards
00:24:08.720or were you just up for awards on that one yeah we were shortlisted for the donner prize yeah so
00:24:13.900So, like, you know, the establishment was accepting of a book that now probably wouldn't get published, never mind by McGill Queen's Press.
00:24:26.580What changed between when you're hired by Mount Royal University in 2008 and when you're fired because of comments you made about Black Lives Matter and about residential schools in 2021?
00:24:43.900there's a couple there's a number of things that are happening you know we have a cultural shift
00:24:48.860that it's underway in society but at the university and i was watching this so i i was
00:24:54.880had a front row seat in seeing mount royal being destroyed i didn't understand the time that this
00:25:00.500was going to be the end but um i was worried i was very worried and it took place in 2014
00:25:06.940i remember specifically two things that happened where i thought wow this is not what is going on
00:25:13.580here and one of them was the provost kathy shaler told us that we would be indigenizing mount royal
00:25:20.740university she announced that an arts faculty council meeting the second one was an equity
00:25:26.080workshop put on by the canadian association of university teachers and canadian news association
00:25:33.420of university teachers for people who aren't familiar with that organization it was formed
00:25:37.300specifically to protect academic freedom in Canada and to have this organization putting
00:25:43.960on an equity workshop where people were being encouraged to put territorial land acknowledgements
00:25:50.220on their syllabus. We were being told to hire on the basis of other things besides, you know,
00:25:56.880the merit of people, all sorts of activist kinds of things. And I thought, how can the
00:26:06.160canadian association of university teachers be putting forth this argument anyway that was just
00:26:11.780the beginning of the institutional takeover by equity diversity and inclusion activists and the
00:26:20.980professor the professors that were being hired at that time too were were very different than how
00:26:28.100they had been hired you know at the time i was hired so as we moved through the 2010s
00:26:35.040You had more and more, you know, sort of woke academics being hired, you know, people who were proponents of queer theory and all these kinds of things.
00:26:45.680And so what happened is gradually we had more and more professors who thought that it was appropriate to be able to stop people from making the kinds of arguments that I was making.
00:26:55.200And then that resulted, of course, in 2020. And it started with me defending the journalist Wendy Mesley at CBC because she referred to a book title which had a racial slur in it. The point was being made by Pierre Valliere, who was talking about class, not race, being the important thing to think about. Anyway, Gabrielle Weasel had one of my colleagues.
00:27:23.060Well, in that incident with Wendy Mesley, my understanding is she was fired because she used the name of the book title in a story meeting to talk about the book and the issue.
00:27:36.260Yeah, I think there was a couple of different, but one of, like that was another, she was mentioning, she had a guest coming on and, you know, they were talking about the problems he'd researched.
00:27:45.800And she's using this word in an anti-racist context, but it didn't matter because she had just mentioned this word.
00:27:55.060And you and I can't say it because we'll get canceled for saying it.
00:27:58.040People might notice that, you know, because I don't want to get anyone in trouble.
00:28:01.640You know, I've been burned by this so badly, the ridiculousness of it.
00:28:06.580I don't want to get anyone in trouble.
00:28:08.640So I'm just, you know, I think people know what I'm referring to.
00:28:13.160Yeah, it's a word used often in a certain type of popular music. It's played on the radio.
00:28:19.720It shows you, I've been censored, because I would typically just mention this word, but since, you know, I've just had so many, and even in academic freedom context, I was at a conference at Stanford, and I was just relaying my case, and there's this huge conflict that emerged.
00:28:38.140Anyway, that was the backstory of how things started to go off the rails, and when I just insisted that I was going to be able to just refer to this book title, and that was it, I was not going to have any indigenization activists telling me that I was a racist and so on.
00:28:54.640As a result of that, I was pursued by a mob. It was instigated by Gabrielle Wieselhead. It was a prized indigenization asset. And eventually I was pushed out of Mount Royal University because of the anger that arose when, instead of just taking this from this professor, I turned my Twitter account into a satirical character and satirized her identity.
00:29:24.640efforts to try to get me fired and congratulated her enthusiastically because she referred to
00:29:32.140herself as being loving and kind and just trying to bring people together with humility and grace
00:29:37.460and i was just trying to draw attention to the fact i didn't think that was really you know
00:29:41.660consistent with her her way she's referring to herself to try to get a professor fired for just1.00
00:29:47.040making academic arguments as a result of me satirizing her attempts to get me fired
00:29:50.920i was charged with harassment and and that's kind of everything started to happen on the basis of
00:29:56.620that so and jonathan swift wept yeah it's just it's really bad like the situation universities
00:30:03.900is just you know that that kind of thing anyway this this kind of grad it was it would have
00:30:09.440happened for one reason or another because of these the and the final thing i should mention
00:30:14.600is the administration. The administration changed quite significantly in early 2010s.
00:30:22.060We had fantastic administrators like Manuel Merton and Robin Fisher, and they were replaced by
00:30:28.360political opportunists who really wanted to just pander to all the activists on campus and didn't
00:30:36.540stand up against this kind of woke takeover that was starting to happen at the university.
00:30:44.600I want to ask you if you'd feel any kinship towards someone like Jordan Peterson. Politically, you'd be very different than Jordan. But his journey started a little bit later, 2016. He left U of T in 2021, same year you left Mount Royal.
00:31:02.680he as a psychologist objected to being told that he had to um agree to people's gender identity and
00:31:13.460ideology without question and that he would be charged if that that's kind of what started it
00:31:19.460for him and went down the road from there do you feel any kinship to someone like like jordan
00:31:26.060Definitely. I've interacted with him a lot and I've been on his Tammy Peterson's podcast a couple of times. And it's true. So Jordan and I have very different sort of religious and political views, but I really admired him.
00:31:48.100I admired him immensely, and I still do, I still admire him, because you could tell that he was trying to pursue the truth when he was doing things, and he understood the danger of people being forced to say things that they did not believe to be true.
00:32:07.220And we're seeing that all the time now, is that, you know, people who don't believe something, a territorial land acknowledgement, putting pronouns in their bios, being the two most obvious examples of that.
00:32:20.600None of which are in my email bios, but I don't even have an email signature, never mind pronouns or a bio.
00:32:26.900But people, I know people who do that, who don't believe it.
00:32:30.980They just think that it's going to get them.
00:32:33.060Yeah, they're told and they believe if they don't do it, they're going to be singled out and they're going to have some negative consequence happen to them. And that is the most soul-destroying thing that someone can do, is to have to mouth things that they don't actually believe.
00:32:48.260and it actually I believe you know changes your thought process because like this is kind of an
00:32:54.940interesting thing that Orwell was thinking about which was this idea of a thought crime and freedom
00:33:00.580of thought there's a relationship between freedom of speech and freedom of thought and if you aren't
00:33:07.060able to articulate things out loud with your fellow humans your thought process will be diminished
00:37:38.620They didn't just say I was an incompetent and I do bad research or so on.
00:37:43.440They're saying I'm actively intending to go on that.
00:37:46.080And they're never, ever going to be able to provide evidence of that.
00:37:50.100Yeah, that's why implying motive is always so dangerous.
00:37:53.080Yes. So I don't know, I guess. I'm sure there's some people who are psychopathic personalities that are doing this for whatever reasons.
00:38:04.080But I think what's happened is because of the assault on the pursuit of truth that happened in the 1960s, it allowed people to not really think very clearly about what the implications of things were.
00:38:23.420And this is what equity, diversity, inclusion has done.
00:38:27.600It's a very interesting area as to what that is.
00:38:31.520I've done some work on this myself. There's a couple of strands of EDI. One is what's called
00:38:40.340wokeism, which is Herbert Marcuse's turn away from class politics and the embracing of identity
00:38:47.840politics. And the idea that the revolution can be brought about through not bothering with the
00:38:54.440working class anymore, just bothering with the gender and the race and so on. So that's part of
00:39:00.960it. But the other part of it is something called corporate managerialism, which comes out of
00:39:06.640the public administration literature. Anyway, it argues that in order to reduce conflicts in
00:39:12.860society, you should increase the numbers of these groups that are oppressed in the professional
00:39:21.360managerial class. So if you've got 7% Aboriginal people, 7% of bank executives should be Aboriginal,
00:39:30.5407% of university presidents should be Aboriginal.
00:42:24.640Francis, although I know you're a fan of my work
00:42:28.500you don't really understand that it's actually
00:42:34.500you know uh wokeism i can't remember exactly the words but it's actually this you know sort of
00:42:41.620kind of woke stuff that is the the path forward that that's where we should be going and then i
00:42:47.060said uh you know after doing a territorial land acknowledgement um praying to the creator and
00:42:53.620putting my pronouns on twitter i have decided the right way for mount royal university and that is
00:43:00.540to do an oppression point system for all faculty members at Mount Royal and those that, you
00:43:07.380know, are white and male and so on, they should just do the right thing and resign their positions0.64
00:43:15.240from Mount Royal because this will be, so I did this incredible, well, I take pride
00:43:21.120in it, this open letter that was satirical about this mandatory anti-racism training.
00:43:29.860And you now know that satire in the online world do not meet ever, correct?
00:43:35.800Yes. So when I did that, and that's what I thought was kind of the Black Lives Matter was,
00:43:42.120was I just kind of saw that as a generic thing that was kind of making all these things like
00:43:48.140mandatory anti-racism training seem like it would be a good idea at the university. And when I,
00:43:54.560when i was talking to this this i think it was uh um i can't i can't remember that i just skipped
00:44:00.360my mind when i was talking the western standard about this i i just criticized i came out really
00:44:05.200harshly that i said that black lives matter has destroyed the university and i was really
00:44:09.500referring to this this idea that you should have this anti-racism kind of stuff you know imposed
00:44:15.720upon everyone in the university and i spoke out against it and as a result of that it was that
00:44:22.660And I said that the residential schools brought benefits that were not otherwise available.
00:44:29.340I think there was those two comments that everyone kind of latched on to and said that was totally unacceptable for anyone to be saying that in the university.
00:44:37.360And that formed the basis for the complaints that were made to the administration, which were then used to justify why my employment relationship was no longer viable.
00:44:49.260It's pretty unusual for people in a tenure position to be fired, though, isn't it?
00:44:54.420As far as we know, now, of course, there's many of these cases where they never get to the stage that I get to because you have settlements of various kinds.
00:45:05.200Now, I'd like to get your thoughts on residential schools and the claim of the 215 graves in Kamloops.
00:45:13.200have you sat down and and and spoken to people who've gone to residential schools
00:45:18.140in particular people who had bad experiences um i'm just trying to think i i have face to face
00:45:26.540so um at university of winnipeg for example you can you can listen to uh interaction between me
00:45:33.880and grandma uh her name's geraldine shingoose otherwise known as grandma shingoose viv ketchum
00:45:41.100um other people who are not like people went to residential schools but but had their parents went
00:45:47.400to residential schools and when I was talking to them I'm saying look I I'm not I'm on the neutral
00:45:54.340mat about many of these things about the residential schools I'm here not because of any of that I'm
00:46:00.360here because I want to talk about the Kamloops case the Kamloops 215 deception because you can
00:46:06.860have many people who suffered terrible experiences at the residential school and that still doesn't
00:46:11.640mean that a whole bunch of nuns and priests you know murdered 200 plus children and put them in
00:46:17.400clandestine graves in the in the old apple orchard when not one parent has said that their child went
00:46:22.980missing from what I understand the Kamloops school it was one of the better schools they did all
00:46:29.240sorts of things like having a swimming pool where they gave children swimming lessons they had
00:46:36.820all sorts of dancing classes and there's tremendous amounts of work we're done of students getting on
00:46:45.080a plane on a trip to mexico yeah so kamloops is seems to be one of the better schools i'm sure
00:46:50.860there were terrible you know teachers and so on at various schools but you know i'm saying to
00:46:56.960people look i we can talk about all those other things if you want and you can convince me you
00:47:03.060know Geraldine Shingoos whose story I might add has changed quite a bit over time is now talking
00:47:09.860about all the horrible sexual abuse and everything that she has endured at the school and she could
00:47:14.340be misremembering she could have you know sexual abuse happen in other contexts being you know
00:47:21.360implanted and so on so I don't know and this is a very difficult area obviously but that's not to
00:47:27.080deny that a number of people would have suffered sexual abuse, would have suffered sexual abuse,
00:47:34.280would have suffered various indignities and insensitivities, and that the schools were
00:47:40.060often poorly built, and that the food in the schools was substandard, etc., etc. So this is
00:47:47.560all arguments that need to be explored, and you need to get all the evidence to look at that.
00:47:55.020And that can't happen, obviously, now, because if you even suggest that someone like Rodney Clifton's wife, whose name is Elaine A. Youngman, she just wrote a piece in the C2C Journal about how herself and her parents had incredible experiences at Old Sun Residential School.
00:48:16.800she is a great beneficiary of the residential schools she met her husband Rodney Clifton
00:48:23.480who was also a supervisor and a couple of residential schools and has all sorts of
00:48:29.980information about residential schools so you know that's that's got to be brought in too
00:48:35.720to look at it I think the general reason for the residential school schools is not well understood
00:48:43.960which was you had a collapse of the hunting and gathering economy in the fur trade and the
00:48:51.980buffalo hunt you had people who now would have to become part of a more complex highly developed
00:48:59.660highly organized society and in order to participate they would need to be able to
00:49:04.340read and write and participate in modern economic activities and in order for that to happen
00:49:12.240you have to have formal schooling there's serious the last the last schools opened in the 1970s and
00:49:20.040closed in the 1990s uh there were uh communities writing to pierre trudeau when he was prime
00:49:27.720minister asking for schools i was at stephen harper's um official apology on parliament hill
00:49:35.620and they brought in people who went to schools across the country and francis i don't think
00:49:41.200that event would be allowed to happen today in the way that it did, because I spoke to people
00:49:45.200who had horrific experiences at the schools. And I don't doubt that there were horrific
00:49:50.420experiences. But I also spoke to people who said, I had a great experience. That wasn't the way it
00:49:55.940was for everyone, but I had a great experience and I got a great education. That last part,
00:50:01.440you're not allowed to talk about today. And I guess that's where you and I will agree,
00:50:07.500is that we've got to be able to have those discussions.
00:50:10.780Now, on the 215 claim, you've got people who will say,
00:50:15.740nobody ever died at residential schools.
00:51:01.080And this seems to me to be a straw man that has been created by Sean Carlton and Negan Sinclair.
00:51:07.040Another important thing, which I should mention, which I should have said before, is the child welfare problem was a big part of the residential schools as well.
00:51:16.100So there was a lot of neglected children who had alcoholic homes, violent homes, abusive homes.
00:51:21.580And you see in the 1991 Fifth Estate program about the Williams Late Residential School, where you have a woman saying the residential school was the only place where she felt safe. And that was not an unusual kind of situation, which, of course, you're never allowed to say anything like that now, because that would draw attention to the terrible abuse that exists in Aboriginal communities, which is still going on and causing huge amounts of child welfare problems.
00:51:49.120But in terms of how, like, the claim for Spectrum Street epistemology would be something like, to what extent were the deaths at residential schools due to nefarious motives or, like, neglect?
00:52:10.200It can be you knew that these schools were poorly built, yet you didn't do anything to address that, you know, that kind of thing, which is often the claim.
00:52:20.760Like because, and this is Peter Bryce's arguments, Peter Bryce was trying to sound the alarm about the poor ventilation and so on.
00:52:30.980The government did respond to Peter Bryce's report.
00:53:05.740Duncan Campbell Scott, who is one of the major villains in this story, which I think he's been, it's been exaggerated, his nefarious, or whatever, his villainy, because he was a bit of a disciplinarian, right?
00:53:19.260He didn't have a lot of time for people criticizing what he was doing.
00:53:25.740He thought he was right, he was going ahead.0.99
00:53:28.380And, you know, he said, you know, I will not stop until all Indians are absorbed into the body politic.
00:53:34.280When that was a very kind of coercive kind of sentiment about this.
00:53:38.220And, you know, a lot of things that Aboriginal people were having removed from them were very, very important to their psychological well-being.
00:53:46.980And it's a very complicated story, too. I'll just raise one more issue, which is quite often talked about, which was the case of Israel Wood Powell in British Columbia, which I'm very familiar with because Simon Hargott and I did a documentary called What Remains, which was on the Powell River kind of case and the Kamloops, how the Kamloops case affected that.
00:54:09.940There was a number of Aboriginal groups. The potlatch was banned at some periods of time, and potlatch is a gift-giving kind of ceremony. Israel Wood Pell didn't want to ban it. He wanted to be persuasion. He wanted to use persuasion.
00:54:27.540but four aboriginal groups who were poor came to him and said please you know we want there to be
00:54:35.580bans on the potlatch because we're poor and the potlatch is a is a forced gift exchange if someone
00:54:42.660gives you a whole bunch of gifts you have to return that that's part of the culture and we
00:54:46.940can't afford to be you know involved in these really you know expensive gift giving things so
00:54:52.720could you please do that so that was part of the the kind of lobbying that that led to bans being
00:54:58.960made on the potlatch so you know what was israel wood powell supposed to do was he supposed to
00:55:03.740sacrifice the most vulnerable and the poorest aboriginal groups um to the richer ones like
00:55:10.500what was these things are very complicated in terms of what should be done and and that that
00:55:15.500kind of discussion you're not allowed to have anymore uh because people are very worried like
00:55:20.680if they say the wrong thing they're going to you know land on uh they're going to put their foot
00:55:24.920on a landmine their career is going to be over they're going to be vilified they're this is the
00:55:30.140kind of thing that goes on and uh you know that's why you need university professors able to do this
00:55:35.920work which i would have been doing if i was still in the university but because i'm now ostracized
00:55:43.820and vilified i have to go in and i have my street epistemology mat stolen and vandalized
00:55:49.920i have to go in with my billboards what remains and denial of truth which of course is seen by
00:55:56.640the university of victoria which just recently uh you know we had such a bad mob scene that my
00:56:04.100my my cinematographer simon here got was uh was punched several times and had his camera destroyed
00:56:09.920and was pursued through the university by a bunch of stalkers and the police stood by and did
00:56:14.920nothing um you know this kind of uh uh ability even to ask a question now is completely shut
00:56:23.980down at universities nuance is not allowed francis thanks for your time thanks for speaking out we'll
00:56:30.280uh let the audience can have their say and they can have their say in the comments thanks so much
00:56:34.740thanks thanks very much it was a pleasure full comment is a post media podcast my name is brian
00:56:40.160Lilly, your host. This episode was produced by Andre Proulx. Theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin
00:56:44.820Libin is the executive producer. Thanks for listening. Make sure that you hit the subscribe
00:56:49.060button wherever you get your podcasts. Share this on social media and let your friends know about us.
00:56:53.940Thanks for listening. Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.
00:56:59.020Here's that clip from Canada Did What? Season 2 that we promised for you. You probably already
00:57:04.880knew that Rob Ford admitted to smoking crack in November 2013, setting off one of the most
00:57:10.320dramatic political flame-outs in Canadian history.