The University of Lethbridge has a "safe space" policy, and they use it to shut down opinions they don't like. We talk to constitutional lawyer Glenn Blackett about what a safe space is and why it's a bad idea.
00:01:26.920Yeah, in fact, your employer owes you a safe space, so you can definitely get one.
00:01:30.920Oh, really? Okay. I'll let Derek know.
00:01:35.140A safe space is, I mean, I use the term safe spaces to describe the obligation that employers are under the Occupational Health and Safety Act
00:01:44.020to protect other employers from psychological hazards, let's call it.
00:01:49.220And those include harassment in the traditional sense, sexual harassment, but also include much more, I'd say, benign behaviors, including basically comments that might make another worker feel uncomfortable or offended or something like that.
00:02:09.640Now, that seems like a fairly broad definition.
00:02:14.320There's got to be a certain amount of give and take in conversation.
00:02:20.960Well, so I brought a copy of it with me and I'm going to read you the definition of harassment.
00:02:25.780So the Occupational and Safety Act requires an employer to ensure that their employees don't participate in harassment and are subject to harassment.
00:02:34.700Okay. So, and you hear harassment and you think, oh, well, that means some lech that's whistling at women in the water coolers or something like that. But so what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the definition. It says harassment means any single incident or repeated incidents of objectionable or unwelcome conduct, comment, bullying, or action by a person that the person knows or ought reasonably to know will or would cause offense or humiliation to a worker or adversely affect the worker's health and safety.
00:03:01.800and then goes on to specify certain things that...
00:03:05.500Okay, so now here we're talking about employers
00:03:35.360So there's a little history there too.
00:03:37.180Right, and she's a tenured professor who has spent her entire life in the area of Indigenous policy.
00:03:43.580And her life's mission is to basically resolve the socioeconomic disparities between Indigenous and other Canadians.
00:03:50.060Namely, she wants to find a solution to poverty, high crime rates, high substance abuse rates, and just generally socioeconomic disadvantage.
00:04:02.060Well, with the provincial government's emphasis on improving performance in universities by indigenous students, that sounds like somebody they should be listening to.
00:04:17.300So she was invited by a professor named Paul Viminence, who was subsequently terminated, I think in part because he because he extended the invitation to her, another tenured professor.
00:04:30.020And she was invited to talk on the issue of whether or not wokeism is a threat to academic freedom.
00:04:37.160Not really, not in her original area of expertise, which is indigenous issues, but rather in her new area of expertise, which is woke cancellation, because she was.
00:04:47.300cancelled. I would say a woke cancellation by Mount Royal University. And every time she tries
00:04:52.220to speak at a university in Canada, or almost every time, she's denied a permit because of
00:04:56.580safety considerations, all on sort of wokey premises. I think she just goes and does it
00:05:01.500anyway, doesn't she? She kind of does. I mean, she does and doesn't. Like at the University of
00:05:05.560Lethbridge, she was going to go and she was going to speak in a big hall. There would be microphones
00:05:08.800and, you know, it would have been a much more sort of sophisticated enterprise. When she goes
00:05:15.100on to university campuses now after she's denied. She does a thing called Spectrum Street Epistemology,
00:05:19.980which is kind of a, you know, sort of a Charlie Kirk-ish attempt to engage students on university
00:05:26.840campus just in rational inquiry. You know, she doesn't lecture on any particular topic. Rather,
00:05:33.260she picks an issue and she just tries to get students to engage with her on the issue and
00:05:37.380sort of acknowledge that I think generally her concept is let's acknowledge that our minds could
00:05:42.940change of certain arguments or certain facts were presented to us let's let's let's admit that there
00:05:47.840may be some reason for questioning facts yeah so so she still comes onto campus but she so she was
00:05:54.300invited onto campus by paul viminance there was a massive explosion of of protest against the idea
00:06:00.020from the indigenous studies groups from the indigenous uh sort of representative um at the
00:06:06.100university and a number of students and other faculty wait a minute she's on their side you
00:06:10.560said she had a life mission to improve things for the indigenous community right right so what what
00:06:16.480drove that well she her view is that the way you're going to find improvement is by using
00:06:24.000rational inquiry to look at the facts and look at different solutions and then arrive through this
00:06:29.120you know scientific process um at some solutions that may benefit indigenous people um the woke
00:06:37.200mindset instead is really, there's just dogmas, right? We know ahead of time what the problems
00:06:42.940are. We know ahead of time what the solutions are. So for you to come onto campus and start
00:06:46.760asking questions about what the causes are, what the solutions are, is really to, you know,
00:06:52.820dissent from dogma, which is not acceptable. So that's why, and specifically, she's a persona
00:06:58.940non grata amongst that community now, because I would say first, she wrote a book called
00:07:04.460disrobing the aboriginal industry in which she argues that really one of the reasons that we
00:07:08.960have continued socioeconomic disparity is we have this superstructure of lawyers academics and
00:07:15.420consultants that get rich off poverty um and so they're quite happy to see things remain the way
00:07:21.220they are um and number two um yeah she she asks questions about these things and she and she
00:07:27.640thinks for example that uh a western education would be something that would benefit indigenous
00:07:32.040of students. And that's now anathema. You just can't say that. So, okay. What would she consider
00:07:37.580a Western education? She would say that Western education is characterized by rational disputation.
00:07:43.700It's a search for knowledge from ignorance to knowledge. And the way you get there is through
00:07:48.080a process of rational disputation. Rational disputation. So that sounds like it could be
00:07:54.360a little unsafe if you were of a tender mind. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, rational disputation,
00:08:00.320right? You know, I, I'm going to, I'm going to propose some premise, and you're going to oppose
00:08:07.420my premise, which means you're going to tell me that the thing that I truly believe to be correct
00:08:11.080is dead wrong, and maybe destructive, right? Okay, so let's go back to our definition. Is that
00:08:16.260harassment? Well, is it a single incident, like a comment that I know will reasonably cause
00:08:22.400offense or humiliation or affect your mental health? I mean, presumably it is. So yeah,
00:08:28.260There's a major problem with the safe space obligation on employers when you take, I mean, in any context, there's a major problem.
00:08:34.820But when you put it into a university, there's a particular problem because workers at universities are supposed to be exposed to very uncomfortable ideas.
00:08:42.920That's the entire purpose of a university.
00:08:45.380My economics professor when I was at a university was a Marxist.
00:09:01.340You would think that anybody, we happen to be talking about Indigenous students, I guess,
00:09:08.180but you would think that anybody would, in actual fact, want a preparation for life that better fitted them to deal with the issues they're going to have to deal with.
00:09:22.040Right. So there was a case. I think the reason this is in the news is that an appeal court has upheld the decision of a lower court. You're the lawyer. You're fighting this thing.
00:09:37.780What we've established is that she was invited, disinvited, and then, well, what happened?
00:09:55.180Yeah, well, she did show up anyway, actually, and she walked into Anderson Hall, and she met a mob of about 300 people.
00:10:03.220yes uh she was intending to go in there and i think she was going to try to give her lecture
00:10:07.740in that space uh to whoever she could speak to but the object of the exercise this of this cancel
00:10:13.580mob was to make sure that she couldn't speak so they were all screaming and playing electric
00:10:17.780guitars and banging drums and yelling obscenities and all that kind of stuff so that she it was
00:10:22.480impossible for her really to speak it was including she was standing right beside an indigenous guy
00:10:26.860who came up to her i think he objected to what she had to say but he started to engage with her
00:10:31.200in conversation and she couldn't even speak to that guy and he turned around to the crowd and
00:10:35.700said hey you know you're trying to silence now an indigenous person that's not right that's not how
00:10:40.260it's supposed to go but you know he's not indigenous now if he's trying to have a conversation with her
00:10:44.940so he was silenced so she sued yeah so so originally she the professor who invited her and one of the
00:10:53.320students who wanted to attend a guy named jonah pickle all sued uh the court first struck the
00:10:58.140claimed by Paul Viminance, the inviting professor, for reasons we don't necessarily have to get into.
00:11:03.400And now we are about to go into the hearing on the main question,
00:11:08.520which is whether or not the university breached the constitutional rights of both Francis Whittowson to speak and to be heard,
00:11:16.980and Jonah Pickle to sit down and hear the same, and also engage with Francis Whittowson, and to assemble with other students.
00:11:23.740But while we were preparing arguments for that, the University of Lethbridge raised for the first time that, well, we had this obligation under the Occupational Health and Safety Act to protect people's mental health, and this was relevant to our cancellation.
00:11:39.080And so we said, okay, well, if the Occupational Health and Safety Act exerted pressure to force the cancellation, then the Occupational Health and Safety Act is having an unconstitutional effect.
00:11:51.680We'd like to challenge the constitutionality of these safe space provisions.
00:11:55.900So what we wanted to do was really just amend our pleading so that we can argue that.
00:12:00.860And when I went to court to ask to please amend my pleading so I can argue that, the
00:12:04.560court said, no, it's a hopeless claim.
00:12:06.620It's impossible to imagine that the Occupational Health and Safety Act, which expressly requires
00:12:11.860the suppression of speech, could be a charter infringing provision.
00:12:19.120And so we then went to the Court of Appeal on that issue,
00:12:21.640and the Court of Appeal agreed with the lower court.
00:12:23.560Basically, we don't have the right to even challenge the legislation under the Charter.
00:12:28.000So Section 52 of our Constitution says the Constitution is the supreme law of Canada,
00:12:34.060and any statute which is inconsistent with it shall be struck down.
00:12:37.740We say, okay, this is a statute which is inconsistent with it.
00:13:31.300And from those who've taken it, I don't believe it's particularly onerous,
00:13:35.260but if you don't do it, you can't practice law in Alberta.
00:13:39.240So the Law Society is taking a very definite, just in case they come after you, this is me saying this, this is my interpretation of what I'm reading.
00:13:53.200They are taking the view that they have the right to determine what lawyers will take into account.
00:14:02.160I guess they can't control what they think, but what lawyers will take into account when they're making their reasonings.
00:14:49.300I mean, on the Law Society, one of the problems is that
00:14:52.640there is this mandatory political indoctrination,
00:14:55.040and it's framed as cultural understanding we're just going to learn that indigenous people
00:15:00.520think and behave differently than we and if we don't understand how they think and behave
00:15:04.420differently then how can we have a successful relationship with an indigenous person and how
00:15:08.320can we not re-traumatize them with certain kind of improper behaviors which the a that's not really
00:15:15.560what the path was about the path had one small section on cultural understandings and it was
00:15:19.660you know it took it starts by saying there's hundreds of different indigenous cultures across
00:15:25.020Canada and it's ignorant to treat them all as the same and then the next chapter is and here's how
00:15:29.900they're all the same and it gives you a bunch of you know useless stuff like you know don't be
00:15:35.100arrogant or have fun or things like that like I okay I mean this is not sophisticated cultural
00:15:42.300lessons or have fun yeah like sometimes when an elder is making you know making fun at you
00:15:48.700instead of getting upset you should just laugh along because you know or something like like I
00:15:52.860I mean, just basic human social skills, right?
00:15:56.780So I don't, it had no value as a way of teaching you about cultural understandings.
00:16:04.300But then it went on to say that lawyers should basically participate in this project to be shoehorring Indigenous people into this parallel system of justice and a system of really much more significant racial segregation than they already experience.
00:16:19.520That doesn't sound like cultural understanding to me.
00:16:21.640Now, it is a kind of a cultural understanding if you put your woke helmet on and you go, well, culture means that Indigenous people have to live in a certain environment.
00:16:28.980Sounds like it's the racism of low expectations.
00:16:39.880And I think Francis Whitteson would probably agree, which is the idea that, you know, the basic premise is that in order for us not to traumatize Indigenous people,
00:16:49.840we have to insulate indigenous people from Western values. Okay. So free speech, free thought,
00:16:56.920legal equality, rationality, reason, empiricism, all these different things. If we expose an
00:17:02.960indigenous person that it's going to make them feel awkward and traumatized because that's not
00:17:06.800the way indigenous people as a race really think and feel, which is a, I think racist bigotry and
00:17:14.560B suggests that the environment that we're supposed to put indigenous people in or help them
00:17:19.740you know, usher them into is one that would be characterized by not by democracy, but by
00:17:25.420authoritarianism, not by reason, but by spirituality, not by, you know, rule of law,
00:17:31.900but by rule of man, etc. Okay, so what we've got here is we've got woke lawyers. It would appear
00:17:40.700to me that we have woke justices who don't want to upset or challenge this way of thinking,
00:17:49.020certainly not by rendering a decision, you get a provocative professor of the kind that you and I
00:17:55.900encountered all the time in our own university educations, people who, you know, took your
00:18:01.580comfortable grade 12 assumptions and stood them on their end and say, no, argue out of that,
00:18:07.500which is really what a Western university education is about. It is a Western university
00:18:14.460education that the provincial government says that it wants for indigenous people and if you
00:18:20.540actually talk to indigenous leaders i suspect that they would say the same privately privately
00:18:30.700but when somebody tries to deliver it and challenge assumptions they are shut down and the courts
00:18:37.100governments don't even want to hear the case. Is there any further level of appeal? The federal
00:18:45.680court, the Supreme Court, where do you go from here with this case? Well, I mean, first of all,
00:18:51.960I don't know that I can quite come to an agreement that we're dealing with a woke judiciary or a woke
00:18:57.280legal profession. I mean, in my Roger Song file versus the Law Society of Alberta, our great
00:19:01.700concern is that there's a lot of pressure on the legal profession to become woke. And I think the
00:19:34.620And basically, so the provincial court in Alberta, now called the Court of Justice, is the only court that's appointed by the provincial government.
00:19:43.940Our king's bench is appointed by the federal government.
00:19:46.140And in fact, most of the judges I now appear in front of are Trudeau appointees.
00:19:52.300And so, but with respect to the provincial court and the provincial appointments, there's a new piece of legislation, Bill 14, which awaits proclamation.
00:20:02.820It's basically passed and we just need a pen stroke to make the thing law.
00:20:07.280It requires that in order for a person to be appointed to the bench, the provincial
00:20:11.660court in Alberta, they need to first go through certain kinds of training and the kind of
00:20:16.620training they need to go through is something called social context issues.
00:20:20.540So the legislation says they have to take training in social context issues, which I
00:20:25.520mean, why does a judge need to understand what social context is?
00:20:28.820It seems if your judge doesn't know social context, they shouldn't be on the bench.
00:20:32.700number one but number two in fact that just seems to be a euphemism for woke indoctrination
00:20:37.720so whose idea was this that train yeah i great question i i uh i think it was the ministry of
00:20:45.340staffs of women or something like that that had introduced it i i don't know if it was
00:20:49.200any of these only does this only apply to federal appointments to king's bench well
00:20:54.560well that bill 14 the provincial legislation only applies to provincial court appointments
00:20:59.680to the provincial court but the federal uh there's federal legislation that mirrors it
00:21:05.280i see the federal legislation and the federal legislation uh in defense of the federal liberals
00:21:10.420is actually at least a little bit more honest because instead of just saying judges have to
00:21:14.280complete uh training in social context issues it says judges have i think they have to undertake to
00:21:19.640to complete ongoing training in in which makes sense because the dogma and propaganda is always
00:21:25.960changing. You've always got to be up on your latest propaganda in social context issues,
00:21:30.280including systemic discrimination. And so that word systemic discrimination is a real buzzword
00:21:34.840that tells you you're dealing with woke. Okay. So you have these two, Bill 14, is it passed?
00:21:41.340Yep. It is passed. The provincial legislation that bears it requires what? A vote?
00:21:48.460No, I think it just requires the Lieutenant Governor and Council to proclaim the thing
00:21:53.460enforced now doesn't really sound like something that danielle smith would be advancing i'm
00:21:58.560surprised it's got this far are you i'm not surprised it got this far um i'm a little
00:22:05.160surprised that it hasn't been uh repealed but i suppose it may be politically more convenient to
00:22:10.680just let the thing die uh than to actually go and repeal it because you're going to make more
00:22:15.440enemies by trying to repeal it but the problem is you leave it on the books and ndp government
00:22:19.260gets elected 10 stroke and now you've got a mandate now having said all that just because
00:22:24.680there's a statutory mandate that requires it or there is no statutory mandate that requires it
00:22:30.040is not to say the judges don't undergo that kind of training anyway voluntarily like there's a not
00:22:35.980I don't know if it's voluntary I don't know how the education system works in the court system
00:22:40.920but in the court system they have a strategic plan that says one of their four pillars like the
00:22:45.400Court of Kings Bench in Alberta has a strategic plan. One of their four pillars of their strategic
00:22:50.760plan is DEI. And part of that program is legal education. To get back to Leftbridge,
00:22:58.920the solution then is it doesn't look like it's any good looking at the courts.
00:23:03.640Right. Well, we'll see. I mean, I remain... Can the legislature fix this?
00:23:08.520Yes. The legislature... Well, can the legislature fix it? Yes. But the legislature's got to roll
00:23:13.320up their sleeves and get serious like the government the minister of education of advanced
00:23:18.440education i think it was in 2019 after there had been a spate of cancellations required university
00:23:24.760senates to pass these free speech policies and so university of lethbridge sure enough has a free
00:23:30.500speech policy that basically says we'd never do something like cancel francis widows okay but
00:23:35.740and they originally they said okay we can't cancel this thing they sent out a statement saying we
00:23:40.660can't cancel this thing because of the free speech policy and all that kind of stuff and then they
00:23:43.840changed their mind and they said oh actually we can cancel the thing and i think they also said
00:23:47.820because of the free speech policy so just having a piece of paper in front of the senate or the
00:23:53.740university that says something like there shall be free speech is not enough there's got to be a
00:23:58.060much more significant overhaul of the universities but uh yeah i mean i think there's definitely some
00:24:03.900And I think the provincial government has their foot on the neck of universities because they provide most of their funding.
00:24:13.100So if the provincial government really wanted to do something, they could.
00:24:16.960Or they could introduce a bill saying the OHSA safe spaces is great for the office towers, doesn't apply in universities.
00:24:27.920Yeah, I don't think it's great in the office towers either.
00:24:30.420You know, I mean, the problem, you know, part of the problem with the Occupation Health and Safety Act at universities is that the university is a place where you're supposed to encounter, you know, difficult ideas.
00:24:40.080But generally in a democracy, one where we have free thought, free expression, you also are supposed to be able to encounter challenging ideas.
00:24:48.380You know, so, you know, if I go to the water cooler and I see Sally there and I tell Sally that, you know, I think Trump's a great guy, that's part of democracy.
00:24:55.500But Sally would say, well, that's harassment because you made a comment that made me feel offended and humiliated.
00:25:01.240Right. Therefore, she goes to HR and she tells HR to fire Glenn and turns out Glenn's a MAGA lover and he gets, you know, canceled.
00:25:07.840And the problem with the Occupation Health and Safety Act, too, is if employers don't comply with these censorship obligations, they can go to jail.
00:25:16.100Right. You can go to jail for exposing workers to certain risks. Right.
00:25:21.000You can go to jail or you can be fined. It's like a quasi kind of a criminal statute. And it's a strict liability offense. So, boy, if I go to the water cooler and I say something that makes Sally feel uncomfortable and there is therefore an injury, okay, then de facto, my employer has committed an offense.
00:25:39.700Now, my employer has the obligation to disprove that it should be held accountable, you know, for a fine or imprisonment. So the, you know, yeah, it's bad enough at universities, but the idea that we're mandating woke censorship, which is I think what it comes down to, woke censorship on the entire, you know, public in their, you know, in their universities, in their sandwich shops, you and I sitting right here, I mean, all the things I've said right now, probably constitute harassment, right?
00:26:08.660So under this definition, so the idea that the, that the provincial government mandates
00:26:14.980employers in every industry to censor like this is a huge problem.
00:26:21.060This is a lot bigger than University of Lesbridge, Francis Widowson and an appeal court.