Juno News - May 09, 2026


College student SLAMS land acknowledgements in essay contest

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Jorge Ramos Compelled Speech Ladysmith Cowichan Mark
Immigrant who pulled loaded gun won’t face deportation Gad Saad joins The Candice Malcolm Show to discuss his new book, Suicidal Empathy： Dying to Be Kind

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Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

160.97

Word count

2,031

Sentence count

71

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

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Summary

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

In this episode, our guest is George Ramsey, a recent graduate from Camison College in Victoria, BC, who won first place in the Patricia Trottier and Gwynne Morgan Student Essay Contest and joins us to discuss his essay, "The Tyranny of Land acknowledgements and Compelled Speech."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 our guest is george ramsey a recent graduate of camison college in victoria bc he studied
00:00:12.100 kinesiology he's looking at a career as a personal trainer or in the physical fitness field now he
00:00:19.000 won first place in the patricia trottier and gwynne morgan student essay contest and joins us
00:00:26.020 from Victoria. Welcome, George. Hi, Mark. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
00:00:29.840 All right. This is a fabulous op-ed that you've written, The Tyranny of Land Acknowledgements
00:00:34.220 and Compelled Speech. First of all, tell us about your essay and what got you interested in that
00:00:42.140 particular topic. Right. So just to summarize quickly, my essay was essentially a critique of
00:00:48.220 the current situation that we're in in Canada with making these land acknowledgements in sort of all
00:00:56.020 society. And in certain cases, many people feel compelled to do so either by social mandate or
00:01:04.080 by actual policy with the institution they work for. So I wrote this essay while I was still in
00:01:10.860 school in my final semester. And what spurred me on to write it was just the environment that I was
00:01:16.320 in. We were being instructed on land acknowledgements, but what we were being taught in the
00:01:22.460 curriculum was that land acknowledgments were essentially this unquestionable thing that
00:01:27.160 surely we must only interpret in a positive way. And a criticism wasn't even on the table. It
00:01:33.220 wasn't even suggested that we might think of criticizing the concept. So I felt frustrated
00:01:38.520 in that we were being led down a particular mode of thought without any opposing viewpoints
00:01:45.420 being discussed. Now, a lot of this is considered controversy, particularly amongst
00:01:50.220 the woke academics out there they think you have no business you know questioning this sort of thing
00:01:57.860 did you run into much opposition from those quarters as far as your essay goes
00:02:05.160 luckily the professor that was teaching the course was actually reasonable in the end
00:02:13.860 although I wouldn't have known that writing a critical essay in that class because the rubric
00:02:19.860 of the assignment um would only break down and and provide marks for writing a positive
00:02:25.700 interpretation of land acknowledgement so i wrote an essay um similar to what i ended up submitting
00:02:31.940 and the professor actually gave me a hundred percent and you know emailed me with like an
00:02:36.820 explanation and stuff um so i was lucky but in in academia today you don't know if you're gonna
00:02:43.380 to get lucky. You might have a professor that doesn't take kindly to you pushing back against
00:02:49.960 their ideas that they've kind of, they hold is like almost sacred in a way. Yeah, it's a little
00:02:56.360 different. I think when you get into the university system, they're a bit more awoke. Maybe at the
00:03:00.520 college level, they're not quite as bad. I don't know. But I want to quote from your essay,
00:03:05.260 compelled speech requires people to use certain words or phrases or to partake in upholding
00:03:13.420 certain ideological beliefs. It is just as dangerous to free expression as overt censorship,
00:03:20.620 and I really think that that's a deep thought. And you obviously put a great deal of effort
00:03:26.300 and thinking into this, George. How did you come to that determination?
00:03:30.700 well i guess having gone to school in a place like victoria i became very aware and sensitive
00:03:39.980 to the fact that there's many different topic areas that are extremely controversial contested
00:03:47.040 and if you go outside of the boundaries of what's considered like the acceptable opinion
00:03:52.380 you can be treated very poorly so there's this sort of aura of conformity at university nowadays
00:03:59.380 which I think is very obvious to most of us. And this land acknowledgements wasn't a particular
00:04:05.540 interest of mine. I was more so interested in the sort of groupthink being imposed. And it just so
00:04:13.660 happened that land acknowledgements was another one of these topics that I ended up colliding with.
00:04:19.220 Now, you have applied to go for your master's degree. I mean, you've,
00:04:23.220 I guess, gotten a bit of fame and notoriety as a result of this.
00:04:27.600 you don't suppose that that is working against you in terms of applying to get your master's
00:04:35.120 degree and getting the go-ahead from another institution is it possible that people are
00:04:40.860 aware of what you've written and don't want you at their institution unfortunately i think it's
00:04:47.360 um yeah entirely it is entirely possible um so the problem a lot of a lot of universe well
00:04:54.080 probably all universities in Canada will have somewhere in their values.
00:04:57.240 They'll say, we value DEI and we value, you know, reconciliation,
00:05:03.140 whatever that actually means.
00:05:04.760 I haven't, I haven't said anything one way or the other on this concept of
00:05:07.800 reconciliation.
00:05:08.180 I was just critiquing land acknowledgements and compelled speech, but you know,
00:05:11.420 every university in Canada is plastered in land acknowledgements.
00:05:14.600 They have them on their website. They have them in their emails.
00:05:17.180 They make them like before classes start,
00:05:19.200 like every single class has a land acknowledgement.
00:05:21.140 um so i i wouldn't be surprised if if applying to a school and someone on the um administration
00:05:29.660 looks up my name and like knocks me down a few pegs which is unfortunate um that that's the
00:05:34.640 state that we're in in canada that is very sad i mean you came in number one you had the best essay
00:05:40.480 it was well written you got a hundred percent and that may be discouraging some institutions
00:05:48.140 from allowing you to come to their institution to go for your master's.
00:05:54.120 I mean, I have to say, that's a sad commentary on Canada today.
00:06:00.060 What do you think?
00:06:01.820 Yeah, I think it's a really troubling position that we're in.
00:06:05.020 And part of the logic behind it is because, say these administrators, they read my piece.
00:06:10.520 They wouldn't just say, okay, he has an opinion that kind of disagrees in a sort of philosophical,
00:06:16.000 intellectual sense.
00:06:16.860 his words are like they often equate words with being harmful or even like violence so
00:06:23.560 they would say you know these these words go against our values they're challenged to our
00:06:29.080 values and they are potentially harmful to a minority group you know this student might be
00:06:34.720 racist like they'll throw all these labels and all these ideas out here just for having a critical
00:06:39.800 opinion of something that's become so sacred and so contested whereas like my base position just
00:06:45.920 arose from just kind of critiquing the underlying premise of what a land acknowledgement is actually
00:06:51.220 saying and sort of my own personal like value that everyone should essentially just be treated
00:06:56.840 equally irregardless of of race or background now the cowachin band as you're probably aware
00:07:03.540 won a huge land decision on the mainland and some attribute that to just these land acknowledgements
00:07:12.320 And the indoctrination, if you want to refer to it that way, that is going on at the municipal level and judges, of course, you've got activist judges available.
00:07:24.940 What do you think of that? I mean, is that undermining property rights in B.C.?
00:07:32.320 I think it most certainly undermines them.
00:07:35.240 I mean, we we can't say for certain if the Cowichan decision would have happened the exact same way if no one had ever made a land acknowledgement.
00:07:42.860 But the mayor there in Richmond does not make land acknowledgements at public events specifically because of that legal case ongoing, because it can be used as evidence in court.
00:07:53.080 And this is his position. This is a publicly known fact.
00:07:56.400 And even so, I was I live on Vancouver Island.
00:07:58.880 I was driving up Island the other day and there's there's a municipality called Ladysmith here.
00:08:03.540 and and the sign says welcome to ladysmith but above it it says unseated territories of
00:08:09.180 blank i couldn't read it because it wasn't in the english alphabet so we're driving past i
00:08:13.780 couldn't read it quickly enough um so you have all these governments and municipalities that
00:08:19.080 are bending over backwards to say that their territory is unseated and beyond the just
00:08:24.120 divisive element of it saying welcome to fill in the blank but you're actually kind of unwelcome
00:08:30.020 here because this is not actually this is unceded stolen territory um beyond that element you know
00:08:35.220 there's definitely legal implications of saying well this is not actually our land maybe maybe
00:08:41.140 there should be land claims from different aboriginal groups um to undermine you know the
00:08:46.740 private property yeah absolutely i mean how has your essay uh been greeted by say your friends 0.99
00:08:58.820 family i mean i i would think that they'd probably be open to it but maybe colleagues in school
00:09:06.820 how have they created it if they said hey good on you have you had other people attack you for it
00:09:12.820 what's been the reaction from those people it's definitely it's definitely a mixed bag um so yeah
00:09:19.780 some people are supportive and and like happy for me and then um some people they're they're quite
00:09:25.940 uncomfortable um with the whole situation and i i'd say like it's kind of unfortunate like i'm
00:09:33.220 quite selective of who i who i tell that i i wrote this essay um because i can kind of gauge what
00:09:41.700 the reaction might be from them so not that actually not that many people in my personal
00:09:47.060 life even know that i wrote this essay necessarily well are you going to be doing more writing are
00:09:54.180 Are you going to be maybe posting more op-eds up there?
00:09:58.660 Or is this it for you in terms of your writing?
00:10:02.520 No, I hope so.
00:10:04.760 I guess I've become a bit of a skeptic throughout my degree.
00:10:08.880 And this essay wasn't the first time that I've pushed back against certain things at
00:10:12.940 home or orthodoxies in academia.
00:10:17.060 I mean, as you mentioned, I study kinesiology, so exercise science for those that don't know.
00:10:21.680 and one of the topic areas as you could imagine in kinesiology that there's a you know conformist
00:10:28.000 group thing pushed by academia is this the sports issue and sex versus gender identity in sports and
00:10:33.100 women's sports so that's that's one of the topics that um we kind of have some indoctrination
00:10:38.620 of one viewpoint being pushed on us and i ended up um pushing back on that topic which i guess set
00:10:45.860 me up to be more prepared to to write this current essay about land acknowledgements because i had
00:10:50.040 already gone through being a social outcast and pushing back against um these conformist ideas
00:10:56.760 yeah yeah i mean since you're aware of the science of fitness i mean you understand
00:11:03.440 there's just the basic physiological differences between men and women and how you know you can't
00:11:09.540 put them in the same boxing ring and expect that there's going to be any kind of fair fight you
00:11:15.620 know i mean yeah yeah i think at least pushing back within within a department like um kinesiology
00:11:21.260 is maybe a little bit easier on that topic than like a liberal arts um where they're not as like
00:11:27.500 i'm grounded in sort of that reality they're more they're more abstract thinking but you know in
00:11:32.420 kinesiology it's it's pretty we're all pretty aware of like how the body works yeah absolutely
00:11:39.680 Anyway, I hope that you could continue to reach out and try to get that master's degree.
00:11:48.340 And the fact that institutions have perhaps been discriminating against you because of your views expressed in this essay is really disturbing.
00:12:00.700 I think a lot of people should be aware of the kinds of things that you go through just
00:12:06.220 by deviating from the group think in places like what we see and right across the country.
00:12:12.580 So thank you for sharing this with us.
00:12:15.740 Yeah, thank you very much.
00:12:17.360 Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
00:12:19.060 George Ramsey joining us.
00:12:21.380 If you enjoyed this show and consider please supporting independent journalism by becoming
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00:12:33.580 we do here at Juno News. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next time.