Juno News - Has the media irreparably squandered its trust？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.560 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:12.920 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:00:15.560 This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, The Andrew Lawton Show on True North.

00:00:20.260 I've been plugging it all week, but you know what?

00:00:22.520 If you can't handle it, then you probably aren't watching the show anyway.

00:00:26.300 My book, Pierre Polyev, A Political Life, is now out.

00:00:29.440 I'm mentioning that in particular right now because this is actually a pre-recorded episode.

00:00:33.720 It's not a rerun. It's new. It's fresh.

00:00:35.680 But I am on the road right now.

00:00:38.000 I actually have an event in Ottawa, which by all accounts is...

00:00:41.720 I mean, I'll give you the full report when I'm back, but it sold out very quickly.

00:00:45.540 They moved it to another room and then it sold out again.

00:00:47.840 So I didn't think Ottawa would be the city to welcome me so warmly of all the ones on the tour.

00:00:52.840 But it is, and I know some of you might be coming out yourself,

00:00:56.100 but we are having a little book launch event there.

00:00:58.680 So in the meantime, because I'm on the road, I wanted to deliver some evergreen content

00:01:04.180 because the two things we can always accept are that the media is just out of touch

00:01:09.520 with the realities of the world and universities are out of touch with the realities of the world

00:01:14.380 and their mandates, which I think is supposed to be one that upholds academic freedom.

00:01:19.200 So I'm going to take a look at these two big picture issues on this show.

00:01:21.860 We'll talk about academic freedom a little bit shortly with Jeff Horstman,

00:01:26.360 a professor from Wilfrid Laurier University.

00:01:29.560 But I wanted to begin by delving into the media.

00:01:32.600 So last week, and we talked about this on Off the Record,

00:01:35.780 William Macbeth, Harrison Faulkner and I,

00:01:38.420 City News Vancouver, you may have seen,

00:01:40.080 had posted this rather distorted anniversary post on X

00:01:45.240 about the announcement of unmarked graves

00:01:47.920 at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

00:01:50.540 It was a post that they ended up walking back.

00:01:53.920 They made some changes to the story.

00:01:55.440 They stripped the reporter's byline off because they had very much distorted

00:02:00.300 and torqued what had been announced and what had happened.

00:02:03.960 They claimed that bodies had been discovered.

00:02:06.040 No such bodies have been found.

00:02:07.660 And even the band itself, the Kamloops band,

00:02:10.580 has walked back its initial claim that there were bodies there

00:02:13.820 by saying now that the ground penetrating radar actually discovered anomalies,

00:02:18.220 which could be unmarked graves.

00:02:20.940 And I don't want to rehash all of this.

00:02:22.660 You can watch that episode of Off the Record if you're so inclined.

00:02:25.460 My colleague Candace Malcolm has also done a lot on this.

00:02:28.500 And True North published a book called Grave Error

00:02:31.320 that was edited by CP Champion and Tom Flanagan

00:02:34.440 that has essays on this very subject.

00:02:37.440 But if we bring this back to basics here,

00:02:40.220 there was a profound media malfeasance that took place in 2021 around this issue.

00:02:46.600 It was the media adopting a narrative without question, without inquiry,

00:02:50.800 that then led to the political class and the political establishment doing the same.

00:02:55.320 And if you say that truth is the first casualty of war,

00:02:57.960 in this case, we didn't even need war to consequently sacrifice truth.

00:03:03.700 There was an agenda that was put front and center.

00:03:06.760 And by the way, I am not putting any ill will at all

00:03:11.240 onto the indigenous people in Kamloops.

00:03:14.640 I am not defending residential schools.

00:03:16.680 I'm saying that if we're going to have an honest and fair discussion

00:03:19.080 about the legacy, about how we go from where we go from there

00:03:22.700 and how we do that, we need to be grounded in facts.

00:03:26.360 And there was a lot of sensationalist reporting.

00:03:28.860 And then media turns around and wonders

00:03:30.540 why it has such a chronic lack of trust among its consumers.

00:03:36.280 Could there perhaps be a little bit of a secret there

00:03:38.660 to how media can save itself that doesn't rely on government bailouts?

00:03:42.640 Well, I wanted to delve into that with Peter Menzies.

00:03:45.960 He's been on the show a number of times,

00:03:47.220 a former vice chair of the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission,

00:03:51.400 but also the author of a fantastic substack called The Rewrite,

00:03:55.040 which had a great piece there.

00:03:56.800 Shockingly irresponsible reporting on residential school cemeteries

00:04:00.500 will drive the nation's news industry into oblivion.

00:04:04.440 It's a very important piece for you to read.

00:04:06.640 I think you should subscribe to The Rewrite anyway

00:04:08.240 and heed the words of Peter Menzies, who joins me now.

00:04:11.800 Peter, always good to talk to you.

00:04:13.040 Thanks for coming back on the show here.

00:04:14.720 Thanks for pumping my tires and thanks for having me on your show.

00:04:17.800 Well, they are well-deserving of the pumping.

00:04:20.820 This piece you had the other day I found quite powerful.

00:04:24.560 Shockingly irresponsible reporting on residential school cemeteries

00:04:28.000 will drive the nation's news industry into oblivion.

00:04:31.660 You and I have spoken on a number of occasions

00:04:34.300 about the regulatory environment right now we see for the media

00:04:38.080 and basically increasingly news companies looking at the government

00:04:41.340 and seeing subsidies as their way through.

00:04:44.020 But you go right back to basics here really and say,

00:04:46.380 well, hang on, your coverage itself is hardly the stuff of legend right now.

00:04:53.020 Yeah, there's some fundamentals of journalism that get ignored

00:04:55.880 and they got terribly ignored in the initial reporting of these events

00:04:59.980 regarding the Kamloops Residential School

00:05:02.460 and the incorrect release that was sent out by the band at the time

00:05:06.780 that has since been corrected, but nobody wants to do it.

00:05:09.860 And one of those is assumptions.

00:05:12.740 It's right at the basis of good journalism

00:05:15.120 is don't allow yourself to be ruled by assumptions.

00:05:18.580 Don't make any assumptions.

00:05:20.740 And the other one that I didn't mention too much in here,

00:05:23.580 but I will be getting to eventually with the rewrite

00:05:27.120 because it's about journalism principles is, you know, check things out.

00:05:31.640 Like the old Chicago City Bureau phrase that I was taught

00:05:36.000 as a young aspiring journalist is like, check it out.

00:05:40.860 Check everything out.

00:05:42.180 Like if your mother says she loves you, check it out.

00:05:45.680 And none of that was done.

00:05:47.100 And then the prime minister behaved incredibly irresponsibly

00:05:50.120 and blew the whole thing up.

00:05:52.380 And now we've got, you know, this history based on unproven news sources.

00:06:02.220 Yeah, and I think therein lies the issue here.

00:06:05.500 The original claim made by, to go back to the beginning here,

00:06:08.940 made by the Kamloops band was one that they did eventually soften,

00:06:13.760 but it was not what the media reported it to be.

00:06:16.640 I mean, the New York Times was one of the most exceedingly irresponsible

00:06:20.500 when they took this and reported on mass grave,

00:06:23.060 which has a very specific meaning.

00:06:25.040 But Canadian media as well, they took a lot of these claims at face value.

00:06:29.080 None of the rigor and inquiry that would go to a claim made

00:06:33.380 by anyone else of that nature occurred there.

00:06:36.600 And I must say, as someone who's observed this for a while,

00:06:38.780 how much did that surprise you or did it not?

00:06:41.580 Sadly, it didn't surprise me.

00:06:43.000 I mean, there's no question that there's issues about unmarked graves.

00:06:47.000 Like in my piece that you mentioned, I was there just outside Regina

00:06:51.760 when, you know, the old cemetery of the Regina Indian Industrial School

00:06:57.020 was basically reclaimed and honored and markers put on the graves

00:07:04.100 of children who died there.

00:07:05.400 You know, children died at residential schools.

00:07:09.740 There is no proof.

00:07:12.000 There are many allegations that have been thrown around,

00:07:14.620 some very wild about priests decapitating babies

00:07:17.980 and all kinds of things that got reported without being checked.

00:07:23.220 And those are very, very serious allegations, right?

00:07:26.900 You know, people, you know, may remember certain things

00:07:30.420 in certain ways and that sort of stuff.

00:07:32.180 And, you know, you don't want to get in,

00:07:34.140 and that's probably where the reporters fell down there. 0.84

00:07:36.440 They're afraid to challenge it.

00:07:38.340 But you have to at least ask, do you have any proof for that, right?

00:07:43.200 No, no, no, this is just my part of my memory.

00:07:45.640 Well, that's not good enough for reporting.

00:07:48.220 So if you really want to get into it,

00:07:50.000 if there really were priests decapitating babies,

00:07:53.140 then you get into that story, get to work on it.

00:07:56.040 If there weren't, then don't get into printing unfounded allegations.

00:08:01.620 Like I said, if your mother says she loves you, check it out.

00:08:05.560 Find other people who believe that.

00:08:07.920 You have a comment in the piece I wanted to quote

00:08:11.060 because I found it quite, I actually found it quite meaningful.

00:08:14.500 You said,

00:08:14.760 there is no room here for allyship other than to the truth, unquote.

00:08:20.140 And why that stood out to me is because increasingly you have voices saying

00:08:24.340 that the media needs to start doing all of these things

00:08:27.600 that look a lot more like taking a side in a particular culture war.

00:08:31.420 You know, media needs to commit itself to the principles of reconciliation, say.

00:08:35.480 Media needs to commit itself to the principle of social justice.

00:08:39.000 Media needs to be anti-racist.

00:08:40.680 Media needs to be anti-oppressive.

00:08:42.100 And a lot of these things, they sound nice on the surface,

00:08:45.140 but at its core, you have a fundamental inversion here

00:08:48.480 of what was supposed to be the guiding principle of journalism

00:08:51.580 and was for a great many years, don't you?

00:08:54.560 Yeah, well, that's the truth part of that truth and reconciliation, right?

00:08:58.200 You can't reconcile until you've understood the truth, right?

00:09:03.040 That everybody has to.

00:09:04.060 And like I said, there's some terribly sad stories.

00:09:07.560 No, absolutely.

00:09:08.700 No argument for me.

00:09:09.640 And it's such an important issue that that's what I'm sort of crying out for.

00:09:16.500 We need grown-up journalism.

00:09:18.780 We need people who will search for the truth, give us information we can trust.

00:09:24.760 You know, people don't lead people to conclusions.

00:09:27.280 Don't begin with assumptions.

00:09:29.260 Don't begin with allyship or for any side.

00:09:32.360 Don't begin as a defender of the Catholic Church or the Presbyterian Church or the Anglican Church

00:09:38.120 or any of the others that were involved or the government.

00:09:40.820 Don't begin as a defender from the other perspectives.

00:09:47.300 Be a defender of the reader.

00:09:49.320 Be a defender of the reader's right to be informed fully and properly from the truth.

00:09:55.140 Like, do your job.

00:09:56.760 And the jobs that many, many journalists did in this were shabby and quite disgraceful, really.

00:10:04.700 And we're three years later and everybody's still pretending that they didn't do the bad job that they did.

00:10:11.880 And you also touch on another unrelated issue but related in the overarching sense in the weaponization of fact checks.

00:10:20.740 And, you know, on one hand, media asserting itself as being the authority on truth

00:10:24.960 but still taking, still doing what we used to learn in, you know, first-year philosophy as the appeal to authority

00:10:31.640 of taking, oh, this person that I've designated as an official source says this, therefore, that's the truth.

00:10:37.680 You raised one example here of a so-called fact check on Bill C-63.

00:10:42.720 This is the online harms bill, the bill that reintroduces hate speech to the Canadian Human Rights Act.

00:10:48.340 And this bill has been subject to a lot of misinformation, I think, from the government.

00:10:53.680 The government has tried to downplay what the bill itself says.

00:10:57.660 But you note here that Canadian press just took a Justice Department official at face value

00:11:02.160 to declare someone else guilty of misinformation.

00:11:04.700 Yeah, that's really, really surprising, right?

00:11:08.020 I mean, that reporter generally does some fairly good stuff.

00:11:11.940 And to see, but to see CP doing a fact check on a government bill

00:11:16.340 and just going to a government official to clarify is, like you said,

00:11:21.880 it's this sort of deference to authority, which you see all too often in journalism.

00:11:26.440 I mean, the whole point of having a robust journalistic sector is that it challenges people in authority in terms of that.

00:11:36.300 So in an issue like this where you're trying to understand a piece of legislation,

00:11:40.120 the Department of Justice will, of course, have its point of view on what it says,

00:11:44.820 and they need to be included.

00:11:46.320 But there are other experts, like I pointed out, David Fraser, Michael Geist, Philip Palmer,

00:11:52.880 who somebody should check with in terms of what the bill actually says.

00:11:58.000 Because there have been instances in the past with Bill C-11, for instance,

00:12:02.420 when the minister at the time was Pablo Rodriguez,

00:12:05.560 was insisting that user-generated content isn't covered in the Act,

00:12:11.200 and you could read the Act, and it was like right there, right?

00:12:15.620 So that's just fair to say that government officials don't always give you the straight goods.

00:12:22.380 So it's an odd place to go to get the straight goods.

00:12:25.740 Yeah, fair enough.

00:12:26.640 So to bring this back to the fundamental problem facing journalism,

00:12:30.500 I agree there are market realities that have nothing to do with how good or bad an outlet is,

00:12:35.620 that are forcing newspapers to change the way they do things, TV and radio.

00:12:39.460 There is a profound trust deficit in the media.

00:12:43.320 If the media were to deal with all of this,

00:12:46.840 and they were regaining the trust of their readers, their viewers, their listeners,

00:12:51.360 whatever the case may be,

00:12:52.440 how much of the business problem does that solve in your view?

00:12:55.580 Is it 10%? Is it 50%? Is it more?

00:12:58.880 Oh, that's a really, I mean, that's a tough question in terms of, you know,

00:13:01.660 if you regain trust.

00:13:03.400 I'm not even sure you can regain trust once you lose it.

00:13:05.980 Like trust is one of the, you know, a piece of social capital.

00:13:09.460 Like we all know, and from our personal lives, if you lose somebody's trust,

00:13:13.460 how do you get it back?

00:13:14.720 It takes a long time.

00:13:16.180 It takes a very long time.

00:13:17.360 And it can be, I think it can be rebuilt, but for our news business,

00:13:23.920 I think we're going to need some very good supervision.

00:13:27.840 I think we need to get back to the attempt to conduct objective work,

00:13:34.520 not working from assumptions, not being an ally of any side except for the reader

00:13:43.300 in terms of that, and the truth.

00:13:47.140 And once you do that, then you have to do it over and over and over again

00:13:52.840 for a considerable period of time before you regain trust.

00:13:58.160 You can probably get it back up to 50%.

00:14:01.160 Trust in media has never been super high for that matter,

00:14:07.480 but it's because everybody has their own, everybody comes at,

00:14:12.140 everybody reads through their own biased lens.

00:14:15.860 So, but 50% would be sustainable for the industry.

00:14:20.760 Yeah.

00:14:21.280 And I guess therein lies the problem is that you have,

00:14:24.040 I think a fair bit of ignorance from many media companies about the fact

00:14:29.100 that they need a desperate reinvention of their business model.

00:14:32.080 I mean, not to say that True North is the way to go,

00:14:34.700 but True North has found a way that works and we're growing.

00:14:37.720 Rebel News has found a way that works and is growing.

00:14:39.980 The Hub, the Western Standard.

00:14:41.440 I mean, these are all relatively young organizations,

00:14:44.000 but they're doing something right that doesn't involve finding

00:14:46.620 some massive, massive legislative incursion that's going to transfer money

00:14:51.640 from government or force the transfer of money from companies

00:14:54.960 like Facebook and Google and these big players.

00:14:57.580 And again, I'm sympathetic to the reporters that set out to work

00:15:02.120 for the town newspaper, which has a very, very precarious future.

00:15:06.720 But there is no reinvention if the government is just keeping this thing strung along.

00:15:12.980 And I mean, at the very least, these companies could show

00:15:16.040 that they're looking in the mirror and sort of realizing

00:15:18.080 what you've been saying for the last few moments,

00:15:20.640 what you said in the piece here that, okay,

00:15:22.180 maybe we at least need to look at what we're doing first.

00:15:26.040 Yes.

00:15:26.320 Well, I mean, in that instance, like the Canadian press one,

00:15:29.040 I just, I found it really kind of shocking because it's kind of like,

00:15:32.820 guys, read the room.

00:15:34.540 You know, like people are mistrusting you because,

00:15:37.760 because of all this government funding, right?

00:15:40.640 And, and, and they're going to, they're going to be looking for examples

00:15:43.920 that look like you're being a government mouthpiece.

00:15:47.480 So for heaven's sake, don't be a government mouthpiece.

00:15:50.600 And that's exactly what, what, what, what that, what did it,

00:15:54.080 did it, did in terms of that.

00:15:56.940 It's, it's really a challenge right now,

00:15:58.920 I think because journalism schools are graduating a lot of students

00:16:03.320 that have been kind of indoctrinated in this.

00:16:05.540 Well, you know, we don't need to seek objectivity.

00:16:08.260 I hear it all the time.

00:16:09.740 Objectivity is impossible, right?

00:16:11.380 Sort of the thing like that.

00:16:13.160 So we're going to give up on it.

00:16:14.680 That's a terrible approach, right?

00:16:17.320 There's all kinds of things that are very, very hard to do.

00:16:20.620 Can you imagine if, if somebody sitting on the bench,

00:16:23.680 a judge or a justice sort of said,

00:16:26.340 I don't think it's possible to be, to be fair-minded.

00:16:29.920 So I'm just going to give up on it, right?

00:16:32.540 I mean, society would collapse.

00:16:35.120 If people lost faith in the judiciary, that,

00:16:37.500 that person sitting there, that,

00:16:39.500 that woman or man behind the bench isn't doing their utmost, to be fair.

00:16:45.960 And if they, and if, if journalists sort of run around and say,

00:16:49.740 we're abandoning objectivity, I mean,

00:16:52.460 you can have your commentary slant however you want.

00:16:55.780 If you want to be the Toronto Star, and, and,

00:16:58.400 and as they have always been proudly, you know, left of center,

00:17:02.260 or if you want to be the National Post,

00:17:04.480 which is proudly right of center or true north or rebel or rabble or wherever

00:17:10.660 you want to be.

00:17:11.360 I think people don't mind that, but when you do the news,

00:17:15.680 you better get it straight because people need to trust that,

00:17:20.220 that they're, that they are getting that,

00:17:23.340 all of the information they need to organize their lives properly.

00:17:27.300 And when they express their knowledge of, of an event,

00:17:31.120 that they're expressing full knowledge of an event.

00:17:34.760 Yeah, I, I think you're, you're very right there.

00:17:37.040 And I would actually go one step further on the objectivity thing,

00:17:39.860 because you have some people that say objectivity itself.

00:17:42.880 It's not that it's a great idea.

00:17:44.240 That's hard to do.

00:17:45.140 Some people say objectivity itself is this old passe antiquated concept.

00:17:49.820 I mean, we've seen that on Israel reporting, for example,

00:17:53.560 there's a subset of activist journalists that say,

00:17:56.160 oh no,

00:17:56.480 you can't be objective when genocide is occurring or something like that.

00:18:00.000 Not realizing that that is not a neutral objective fact that they believe

00:18:04.420 journalists should to go back to what you said of an allyship to the truth,

00:18:07.820 pick a side and things.

00:18:09.460 Yeah.

00:18:09.600 You can't be,

00:18:10.260 you can't use the term,

00:18:11.420 you know,

00:18:11.780 when I see,

00:18:12.700 see the term activist journalist,

00:18:14.620 I think you can't call yourself a journalist.

00:18:16.840 If you're an activist,

00:18:18.340 you can be,

00:18:18.720 which one are you?

00:18:20.020 Yeah.

00:18:20.480 Yeah.

00:18:20.640 I mean,

00:18:20.840 you can be,

00:18:21.400 you can be a good writer and you can be,

00:18:24.020 you can be a good,

00:18:24.980 you know,

00:18:25.640 keeping a good journal of events through your eyes in terms of media.

00:18:31.100 I mean,

00:18:31.220 that goes back years and years.

00:18:33.240 Jack Reed did that with the Russian revolution.

00:18:36.740 You probably may have seen the movie Reds in terms of that.

00:18:40.380 I mean,

00:18:40.680 he was,

00:18:41.000 he was,

00:18:41.340 he was writing for all kinds of newspapers in the States,

00:18:44.600 but he wasn't objective.

00:18:45.660 He was really part of the revolution in,

00:18:48.760 in,

00:18:48.980 in terms of that.

00:18:49.960 And,

00:18:50.460 you know,

00:18:50.720 some stories that should have been told,

00:18:52.280 weren't told,

00:18:53.560 but so that's not new,

00:18:54.800 but I don't consider that journalism.

00:18:56.720 I consider it writing,

00:18:58.540 recording of events and that sort of stuff.

00:19:01.100 But,

00:19:01.500 but I don't,

00:19:02.300 I don't think you can use activist and journalist in the same term,

00:19:06.120 unless your activism is being a journalist.

00:19:11.300 Yeah.

00:19:11.740 I think that's a good distinction.

00:19:12.860 Not all writers are journalists.

00:19:14.860 That's true.

00:19:15.780 I mean,

00:19:15.920 I deliberately take a broad view of,

00:19:18.300 of what journalism is.

00:19:19.480 If only because I don't want government deciding what journalists are,

00:19:22.760 because I've,

00:19:23.360 well,

00:19:23.580 I wound up in federal court to make that case and I won.

00:19:25.960 So anyway,

00:19:28.820 it was a fascinating piece.

00:19:30.360 You wrote over at the rewrite by Peter Menzies,

00:19:33.520 Peter,

00:19:33.780 always good to talk to you.

00:19:34.640 Thanks for coming on today and for your,

00:19:36.120 your wisdom and insights on this.

00:19:38.500 Yeah.

00:19:38.680 Thanks so much.

00:19:39.320 Thanks so much for your interest.

00:19:40.280 And thanks for having me on your show again.

00:19:41.780 Much appreciated.

00:19:43.840 Always good to talk to our good friend,

00:19:46.180 Peter Menzies.

00:19:46.840 Thanks again,

00:19:47.280 Peter,

00:19:47.560 for coming on the show and do head over.

00:19:50.740 I just love Substack,

00:19:52.120 by the way,

00:19:52.460 I'm not saying I do my own Substack,

00:19:53.780 but I love it because it's apart from X,

00:19:57.720 it's like one of the only platforms around now that loves free speech.

00:20:01.400 And unlike X,

00:20:02.560 you don't see like just spontaneous pornography everywhere on Substack.

00:20:07.300 That's like one of the downsides or upsides.

00:20:09.020 I I'm not judging depending on what you go for,

00:20:10.840 but that's one of the downsides of the,

00:20:12.220 the Elon Musk X is that everything is,

00:20:14.660 it's a free for all on,

00:20:15.800 in all sorts of ways,

00:20:16.760 but we'll switch from journalistic ethics to the academic realm here.

00:20:21.960 I have always put a spotlight on academic freedom.

00:20:24.880 I'm a member of the society for academic freedom and scholarship.

00:20:27.920 I'm not really a scholar anymore.

00:20:30.740 I almost did a master's degree this year.

00:20:32.820 That's another issue entirely,

00:20:34.520 but I do absolutely value academic freedom and open inquiry.

00:20:38.980 And I I've had a great chance to chat about it casually with my next guest,

00:20:44.080 professor Jeff Horstman,

00:20:45.400 who's with Wilfrid Laurier university,

00:20:47.660 which of course has been the hotbed of this very discussion.

00:20:50.840 It's where my colleague Lindsay Shepard infamously got into a bit of trouble 1.00

00:20:54.500 there.

00:20:55.220 Jeff,

00:20:55.520 it's good to talk to you.

00:20:56.220 Thanks for coming on today.

00:20:57.740 Oh,

00:20:57.860 thanks for having me.

00:20:59.460 So you are the,

00:21:00.760 one of the co-chairs of the heterodox Academy campus community at Laurier,

00:21:05.100 and you had alerted me to an event that you had coming up,

00:21:08.240 which I want to talk to you about here.

00:21:09.580 And also some of the broader issues in heterodox in the academy here,

00:21:14.600 but you've decided to put a spotlight on the ministry of education in

00:21:18.800 Ontario.

00:21:19.580 Explain.

00:21:20.960 Well,

00:21:21.560 what's what we're interested in really is some of the profound changes that

00:21:26.600 have been occurring in K through 12 education over the last probably couple

00:21:32.580 of decades,

00:21:33.420 sort of quietly and probably in the last five years or so.

00:21:38.400 And certainly since the pandemic,

00:21:39.640 parents have really started to notice dramatic changes.

00:21:43.460 And we've got a couple of scholars from OISE.

00:21:46.860 This is the Ontario Institute of studies and education at the university of

00:21:51.240 Toronto to come and talk to us about some of these trends that have been

00:21:54.900 happening.

00:21:55.400 some of the competing policy models that have been behind these changes and really just engage

00:22:03.940 in a real data driven empirical discussion about these educational changes, which really

00:22:09.800 has been lacking on campus.

00:22:11.420 So I think this is an opportunity for people to actually get a chance to hear from some experts and ask some questions

00:22:18.000 Yeah, I mean, I know Jamil Javani, who's now a conservative member of parliament, in his acceptance speech, he talked about the woke liberals, basically, that have infiltrated the Ontario education system.

00:22:30.940 And what a lot of people found so shocking about that is that there's a conservative government in Ontario, at least nominally so.

00:22:37.120 And what's interesting is that a lot of these issues tend to prosper, irrespective of who's in power.

00:22:42.780 I mean, there seems to be this education bureaucracy that basically gets free reign over these sorts of issues.

00:22:48.820 Yes, I think it is, it really is, it's kind of this permanent staff, I think that occupy a multiple, multiple levels of the bureaucracy, I think, first of all, the Ministry of Education itself, I think many people are surprised that, that these, this infiltration of this social justice, policy, worldview is occurring under a conservative government in the province of Ontario.

00:23:15.700 And that really reflects, I think, just the permanent staff, that don't really change with government, and it's unclear how much they really take direction from the politicians, or how much the politicians are motivated to make these changes.

00:23:32.560 And then also the schools of education themselves, I think, are really dominated by this ascendant social justice worldview.

00:23:40.600 Most of the younger professors, especially, are openly advocating for social justice education.

00:23:47.060 So, you know, there's these different levels.

00:23:49.120 And of course, the unions is another important piece of this puzzle.

00:23:53.000 They are quite openly picked an ideological side as well.

00:23:56.920 So you really have it from a variety of fronts that are pushing this.

00:24:01.340 You know, I recall going back to when I was a student, there was certainly some empowerment there of, you know, I had teachers that were saying, you know, you can go and, you know, build a well in Africa like this young guy did, or you can go and, you know, change the world by inventing this, you can discover the cure for cancer.

00:24:18.400 There was certainly an activation of young minds, which, you know, I'm just sitting behind a microphone in my basement.

00:24:24.360 Other of my classmates have done far more impressive things.

00:24:27.940 But now there's like a different type of activation taking place.

00:24:30.980 And I know you mentioned this when you announced the event, that social justice is about training students to use your words to be, quote, activists of revolutionary change, unquote.

00:24:40.280 Right, well, to be clear, those aren't my words.

00:24:43.100 These are actually words of the people who, of the OISE experts helped craft that.

00:24:47.960 But so they probably can tell you a lot more about this.

00:24:51.100 But I think really what they're referring to is that there is this idea, and I think this is the social justice idea in education, is that we have a variety of things that we need to correct in the world, right?

00:25:07.320 Really, it is an oppression, a world of different types of oppression that we need to correct.

00:25:13.820 And really, we need to teach students to work to overcome these various types of oppressions.

00:25:20.560 There's an anti-oppression sort of mindset in this critical pedagogy that is seeping through things.

00:25:28.280 So I think that's one of the underlying features of the new educational policy direction.

00:25:33.820 I know when I started talking about these issues, however many years ago it was, there was always this hiving off of sociology departments and, oh, the postmodernists are doing this, and, oh, the sociologists are doing this.

00:25:47.560 It really is everywhere now.

00:25:49.380 I mean, you're in the hard sciences.

00:25:51.720 You're in chemistry and biochemistry.

00:25:54.060 So just before the interview started, I just Googled decolonizing biochemistry to see what came up.

00:26:00.580 And the first hit, decolonizing and diversifying the biosciences curriculum, why we need to decolonize the biosciences curriculum, decolonization in the Faculty of Science, a place to start, decolonizing chemistry, teaching, and learning.

00:26:14.720 Now, I don't know what's in any of these resources.

00:26:17.080 I'm just rhyming off the headlines here. 0.93

00:26:19.000 But suffice it to say, unless, you know, Avogadro was an evil, dirty, stinking colonialist, I'm not entirely convinced that there is a connection between colonization and chemistry. 0.93

00:26:28.860 But even your hard sciences has not been immune from this. 0.95

00:26:32.840 No, it's not.

00:26:33.720 I mean, I think for the most part it has been.

00:26:39.420 But it's coming.

00:26:40.660 You can see it in different ways.

00:26:42.800 There are different steps that are coming.

00:26:45.040 I believe you talked to Lee Revers, maybe.

00:26:48.340 And certainly in his department, it seems to be perhaps more advanced than it is at ours.

00:26:53.980 But certainly there is a push for it.

00:26:56.420 There's a push to decolonize.

00:26:59.420 No one really can define exactly what that means.

00:27:03.120 I was going to say, if you were to just go social justice, Jeff, and you say, OK, I'm all in.

00:27:08.200 What does that even mean to decolonize chemistry?

00:27:10.880 Like, how do you even do that?

00:27:13.180 That's a really good question.

00:27:15.200 I mean, Lee has talked about this a little bit.

00:27:17.300 I think he's trying to think about this.

00:27:20.660 You know, and I don't know.

00:27:22.100 I mean, it really just ends up being a little bit silly when you start to do it because it would be more about using words that are not oppressive.

00:27:31.500 Right.

00:27:31.660 So trying to change the language, you know, maybe, you know, with cis trans isomerization, you might not want to use that language because that could be offensive.

00:27:42.300 So you'd use things like the E and Z isomers. 0.99

00:27:44.900 It might be that type of thing.

00:27:46.280 But I mean, ultimately, no one really knows.

00:27:48.400 And I don't think anyone's thought about it, to be honest.

00:27:52.600 Maybe some people have, but most people are just scared to challenge it.

00:27:56.100 And that's about all we know.

00:27:57.320 So we have seen in the last few years, I think, this tremendous resurgence of people like you who are really minded towards academic freedom.

00:28:06.760 I mean, Jordan Peterson is probably one of the most famous anywhere in the world.

00:28:09.660 But by no means is he the only one I know at Laurier, you've got a small contingent of rabble rousers of heterodox thinkers.

00:28:16.880 I've had a few of them on the show, David Haskell and Will McNally and yourself.

00:28:21.180 And I know at other schools there are.

00:28:22.860 So in some way, there seems to be a bit more of a resistance now.

00:28:26.420 Would you say things are better or worse now than, say, five years ago?

00:28:31.380 I think it's a good question.

00:28:33.840 Five years ago, I didn't even pay attention to this much.

00:28:37.060 So I might say things were better five years ago.

00:28:40.480 But when I started to notice, you know, three years ago, I thought things were very dire.

00:28:45.720 But what I have noticed in the past year or two is that people are starting to find one another and they're starting to just speak again.

00:28:53.760 You know, I think in the lockdowns of people who are apart and isolated, they all thought if they were worried about some of these things, they thought they were the only ones.

00:29:02.220 But when you start speaking and you start meeting other people and then when you start being able to discuss and try to challenge each other and try to find people to explain what exactly do things like decolonization mean?

00:29:15.160 What exactly, you know, what are the benefits of hiring based on race and sex?

00:29:21.880 Can anyone explain this?

00:29:24.040 And very often you find that the explanations are very unsatisfactory.

00:29:27.920 And I think people are really starting to to realize that and they're starting to get a little bit of courage, just a little bit.

00:29:35.420 But I think if we as long as we can explain politely and make our case with evidence and write letters and try to open up that Overton window again so that we can actually do science in the broadest sense where we hear both sides of an issue.

00:29:50.760 So they can really try to get to truth and what I would say about the green shoots, so to speak, or the optimism, I feel, is that our Heterodox Academy group is growing and we do have more and more active members.

00:30:05.100 And I think that is really positive.

00:30:07.720 We're starting to other people from other universities, from the public are getting interested.

00:30:11.740 So I think it is really starting to have an impact.

00:30:15.540 And the fact that we're able to just have discussions on campus that you wouldn't have been able to have a couple of years ago, I don't think.

00:30:23.220 And, you know, it hasn't been easy.

00:30:24.480 We often have to do security reviews and you get in, you know, you kind of have trouble in small ways.

00:30:30.660 But I think it's hard now for the administration to really shut it down in a way that they could have a short time ago.

00:30:36.020 Because I think just too many people are not behind them anymore.

00:30:38.700 I think the public, I think you talked to Eric Kaufman a few days ago on your show and his work on the polling data is super clear that the public is just not on board with this stuff.

00:30:51.820 So I really think we'd now have an opportunity now for a full court press to really push back and hopefully reestablish classical liberal norms of a liberal democratic society.

00:31:03.340 Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, it's good because I had Bruce Party on recently and he's just the perennial pessimist on this.

00:31:08.280 So I like that you offer a bit more of a rosy picture of things.

00:31:11.940 And there is something to the idea that it has to get worse for people to see how bad it is and want to make it better.

00:31:16.700 I, I've always been a subscriber to that.

00:31:18.640 The problem is that when you think you've hit rock bottom, somehow it manages to get a little bit worse at times.

00:31:23.280 But the one thing that I also find encouraging is that universities have learned now, perhaps not all of them and perhaps not as much as they should,

00:31:31.480 but they've learned that there is a cost to censoring.

00:31:34.480 There's a cost to shutting things down.

00:31:36.080 There's a cost to targeting people because there is a whole group of people that are all too willing to stand up and point the finger at them and say,

00:31:42.640 what did you do there?

00:31:43.480 And I mean, your school has been subject to, I think now years of litigation going on because of the Lindsay Shepard thing.

00:31:49.840 And while the school hasn't just, you know, done the complete apology and, you know, everything yet, it's, there's been a cost to doing what it did.

00:31:57.600 And I think other schools as well have probably looked at that and said, you know, maybe, maybe I don't want to treat that, that TA the same way that Laurier treated Lindsay Shepard.

00:32:06.280 And that, that I think is very crucial here.

00:32:08.760 And that's where I get to play my tiny little role in independent media and in showcasing these stories,

00:32:13.020 because there should, there's, there needs to be a cost if you go and, and trample on, on academic freedom, I think.

00:32:19.880 Yes, I think, I think they're starting to realize that a little bit.

00:32:22.800 I mean, it just takes a few people, you know, like us to, again, write a few letters.

00:32:29.420 They know, okay, this is going to be embarrassing if, if people start paying attention to this.

00:32:35.320 But I would just like to, you know, if any administrators are listening, this is an opportunity.

00:32:39.360 I think right now, if you're a university administrator, you have a tremendous opportunity because young people are getting really tired of the social justice worldview at universities.

00:32:51.080 I can't tell how many students talk to me about this is just so boring, this whole thing.

00:32:57.160 I'm really tired of it.

00:32:58.480 So I really do think that there's, if a university administrator is really smart, this is what they do.

00:33:04.660 They would come out, we're going to be the first, we're going to be a true free speech university.

00:33:08.300 We're done with the, the EDI, the racial discrimination.

00:33:12.220 That's all over.

00:33:13.540 If you want to learn, if you want to do hard things and you want to be competent and you want to explore ideas, you come to our university.

00:33:21.080 And I think the first mover opportunity is just huge.

00:33:24.720 I don't know why someone would just reach up and grab it and like, yeah, come in.

00:33:28.540 There have, there have been a couple in the U S that have, but in Canada, that, that lane is just wide, wide open.

00:33:34.300 It is, it's wide open.

00:33:37.160 All the universities are almost identical on this.

00:33:40.720 All right.

00:33:41.380 Well, if you're a, I'm not sure how many university administrators we have in our ranks in the audience, but if you know one, or perhaps you're married to one, go and show them this episode.

00:33:50.660 They could, they could be the star.

00:33:52.020 It's funny you mentioned that.

00:33:52.800 So I don't know if you remember a couple of years back when the Toronto public library defended its right to rent space to, I think it was Megan Murphy.

00:33:59.980 It was this one librarian, Vickery Bowles.

00:34:02.760 I'll always remember her name.

00:34:03.820 Who was like the librarian standing, standing athwart history, yelling, stop to the censors.

00:34:09.100 And, uh, exact, and I'll always remember her until, uh, maybe not the end of time, but certainly the end of my time because of that.

00:34:15.240 So, uh, there could be a university administrator that does the same thing that becomes just like the beacon of freedom and free speech and, and academic inquiry in Canada.

00:34:23.200 So the opportunities there, just take, you deliver the inspiration.

00:34:26.680 Uh, the event hosted by the heterodox Academy at Wilfrid Laurier.

00:34:30.220 What is the ministry of education promoting in our schools?

00:34:33.580 Uh, you can see the details up on the screen there.

00:34:35.940 It is on Thursday, June 13th.

00:34:38.420 I, I'm going to be out of town, but I hope it goes well.

00:34:40.360 And I expect to, to get a full report afterwards, but, uh, professor Jeff Horsman, good to talk to you.

00:34:45.220 Thanks so much, Jeff.

00:34:46.400 Thank you very much, Andrew.

00:34:48.880 All right.

00:34:49.420 That does it for us for today.

00:34:51.000 We'll be back with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show on true North tomorrow.

00:34:55.020 Thank you.

00:34:55.620 God bless.

00:34:56.100 And good day to you all.

00:34:58.060 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton show.

00:35:00.420 Support the program by donating to true North at www.tnc.news.

00:35:05.940 Thank you.

00:35:10.880 Thank you.

Juno News - June 05, 2024

Has the media irreparably squandered its trust？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript