Western Standard - Compelled speech, the new threat to free expression in Canada

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show

00:00:21.120 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, April 23rd. I think, I hope, we're all ready to jump

00:00:27.600 up and defend free speech, but how are we doing in the fight against compelled speech? There's

00:00:34.160 lots of people who demand you not only see things their way, but say it out loud. Here are the

00:00:39.600 Western Standard. We've got a man suing us who says he's a woman, but we keep calling him a man

00:00:44.800 because he is, but he wants to compel us to say something we know just ain't true. Feel free to

00:00:52.400 donate to our legal defense fund by the way now another area of compelled speech is the good old

00:00:58.400 indian land acknowledgement with me today is somebody who's hit this like a boat hits a rock

00:01:05.600 with me today is victoria-based writer george ramsey we ran something he wrote about this a

00:01:11.920 few weeks ago and there's more to be said george welcome to the show hi nigel happy to chat thanks

00:01:18.240 for having me oh you're very welcome george you originally wrote this piece for c2c journal

00:01:24.400 and what we ran was a bit shorter so can you just explain why you care about this you were a

00:01:31.600 university student in victoria you're studying kinesiology can you explain what happened to you

00:01:39.920 that made you very sensitive to land acknowledgements and why they make you cross yeah so

00:01:46.160 i think going to university in a place like victoria in the current day i have become very

00:01:52.480 sensitive to topics where i feel there's a groupthink element going on and a conformity being

00:02:00.640 imposed and land acknowledgements were one of those things i would say i don't care as much

00:02:07.120 specifically about the land acknowledgements it's just the fact that people lose their ability to

00:02:13.520 think critically about these things. So I was taking a course called Outdoor Adventure Education

00:02:20.400 and in this course we had to do an assignment based on land acknowledgements and we were asked

00:02:26.080 to write a few different essays and writing assignments explaining the benefits of a land

00:02:31.600 acknowledgement and the premise of the assignments were not that we could openly criticize or say

00:02:39.360 why these things are not helpful or performative the rubric of the assignment kind of led you down

00:02:44.560 a path of thinking um to have like one specific conclusion and within the classroom there's just

00:02:51.440 this sort of atmosphere of fear of stepping out of out of the boundaries when we're having class

00:02:57.200 discussions like everyone is silent and afraid to have a an opinion that might get you socially

00:03:04.160 ostracized. So that's something that I noticed very strongly. And I felt frustrated that we had

00:03:10.820 this one way of thinking be imposed upon us on ideas that are not really like a concrete right

00:03:18.460 or wrong. It's more of a philosophical discussion. So I think in a university, it should be more of

00:03:23.440 an open discussion rather than you must go down this line of thinking. George, you're talking

00:03:28.060 like somebody who was born 50 years ago. Come on. Everybody knows that universities these days are

00:03:33.060 places where you pay a lot of money to learn to be indoctrinated in a set of ideas and principles

00:03:40.380 that will enable you to get a job with the federal government come on what were you expecting

00:03:44.760 seriously may i ask how did this did you actually challenge this and what happened when you did

00:03:52.220 yeah so for my writing assignment for that class um i i was a bit frustrated and i feel like for

00:04:00.460 me I kind of I like to get my thoughts out there and sort of helps me kind of like cope with being

00:04:06.620 in this environment so I ended up writing my assignment having a fairly critical perspective

00:04:11.700 and my writing assignment for that class actually evolved into what I submitted to the C2C journal

00:04:16.460 and luckily the professor wasn't actually a total ideologue he was reasonable and actually gave me

00:04:22.840 100% mark on this assignment. But I wouldn't have known that going into it because the rubric of

00:04:31.380 the assignment only gave you marks for a positive interpretation of land acknowledgements. So he had

00:04:36.700 to actually break his own rubric and mark mine like very individually. So I was just willing to

00:04:42.200 take that risk. And luckily, it worked out fine. But no other students in the class did that. And

00:04:49.280 in fact, I actually saw some other of my classmates assignments in that course. And they

00:04:54.860 were all praising land acknowledgements, of course, they probably some of them are written by AI, to be

00:04:59.740 honest, because I can kind of see the language in in their responses. But I had one student who came

00:05:06.020 to me in private and said, thank you for like writing your assignment that way. Like someone

00:05:10.280 needed to say that I agree with everything you said. And then I went and read their assignment.

00:05:14.440 And it was completely like a copy paste, like appraisal of landing documents in a positive way.

00:05:20.400 So behind the scenes, this person agrees with me, but is too fearful to say that in writing on their assignment.

00:05:26.620 And they're just pandering to what they think the professor will give good marks for.

00:05:30.300 So I think that kind of exposes the problem is this self-censorship going on in universities on contentious topics like this, where there's the sort of conformity expected of you.

00:05:43.600 Well, George, I think before I go any further, a lot of people who are watching this segment 0.90

00:05:47.860 would probably want me to pause and just congratulate you for having the balls to take it on

00:05:53.120 and just say what you really thought and not what you thought they wanted you to say.

00:05:57.960 So you've got your 100% honestly, and of course this was an essay that was accepted by C2C

00:06:05.460 and later by the Western Standard, and that's a measure of the quality of the work

00:06:11.500 as well as the courageous stance that you took.

00:06:17.220 So, on behalf of Western Standard viewers, generally, well done.

00:06:21.740 Now, you talk about indigenous land acknowledgments as having evolved

00:06:25.360 from optional gestures of respect into effectively mandatory rituals

00:06:31.340 that appear everywhere from school assemblies.

00:06:34.660 They do it in front of a National Hockey League game, corporate websites.

00:06:40.500 Now they primarily serve not just as a gesture of friendly respect, but to enforce racialized

00:06:49.540 identity politics and historical revisionism of the kind that you have just described,

00:06:56.020 rather than fostering genuine reconciliation. Most people shrug and move on, but

00:07:04.980 is everybody falling for it? Who else is fighting for this? Tell me about some of

00:07:09.300 of the people you are writing about sure so in my piece i wrote about um two cases from ontario

00:07:16.460 there was jeff horseman and katherine cronis and these are two parents and professionals

00:07:22.420 in ontario and they both um volunteer on school councils there um two separate unrelated school

00:07:30.080 councils but they had similar incidents so i'll start with um jeff horseman he was on a school

00:07:37.100 council and he was getting frustrated with some of the identity politics being imposed by the

00:07:42.520 school board and he noticed that at every meeting he would attend there was a land acknowledgement

00:07:47.120 taking place before the meeting and it could be from what he described it could be quite lengthy

00:07:51.060 and awkward and cumbersome and he just simply wanted to raise the issue of like do we really

00:07:55.200 need to do this every time is this helpful is it's beneficial it's kind of wasting our meeting

00:07:59.060 minutes like we already kind of get the point and he found there was immediate resistance to even

00:08:05.320 just talking about it. Like he didn't outright say, stop doing this. He just said, can we talk

00:08:09.260 about it? And after he had a series of private meetings with various administrators, they just

00:08:14.460 told him, no, we can't talk about this. We must do these because of something like human rights,

00:08:19.960 reconciliation. It's our duty to do land acknowledgements every single meeting. So

00:08:24.360 he's just frustrated by the school board imposing this on the school council, which is supposed to

00:08:29.760 be independent of the school board. And he eventually worked with the Justice Center for

00:08:35.200 constitutional freedoms to file for a judicial review to see if the school

00:08:39.700 board is actually allowed to make the school council do this and ban discussion

00:08:44.260 of the topic effectively. Catherine Cronus had a sort of similar situation.

00:08:49.440 Just before you go on to Catherine Cronus, you say what did what did they

00:08:55.720 discover then? Was the school board obliged to do this or were they just

00:09:00.820 saying it and pretending that they were obliged i think i in my interpretation is they're the

00:09:07.380 school board essentially is deciding that they're obliged um i think nobody's told them so i'm not

00:09:13.940 aware that anyone above the school board has told them it's just sort of this nebulous net of kind

00:09:20.020 of like dei professionals within the school board has decided we must do these and they're good and

00:09:24.940 stop talking about it and toe the line all right fair enough i mean it would have been it'd be

00:09:32.260 interesting to know whether the provincial government in ontario was uh was pushing this

00:09:37.540 along as well or whether this is just do-gooders trying to do good anyway you were going on to

00:09:43.340 talk about another example can i get you to go back to that yeah sure so catherine cronus was

00:09:48.680 the other example from Ontario as well and she is on a separate school council and before the

00:09:56.540 meeting there was a land acknowledgement happening and during her introduction or opening remarks she

00:10:03.340 simply just said she just gave a like a critique for I think she only spoke for less than a minute

00:10:09.300 of I don't think these land acknowledgements are helpful I don't really agree with this being part

00:10:13.300 of the meeting and then she moved on so she just gave a sort of a polite disagreement with the

00:10:17.500 land acknowledgement taking place before all these meetings and the meeting went on and then

00:10:22.360 afterwards she got she received an email and she had been suspended from her position on the school

00:10:28.940 council and the school board they even claimed that her words had caused harm supposedly and

00:10:36.620 they didn't really give her any specific reason but she was suspended so she suspended like who

00:10:42.860 suspended her and uh i mean was she given any opportunity to talk about why she said what she

00:10:49.740 said no no so they just outright suspended her from her position with no notice um and very

00:10:58.620 little explanation and even accused her of causing harm just by speaking politely for a few seconds

00:11:04.700 she didn't take that lying down did she no so she was quite shocked by this and she also with help

00:11:11.900 from the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, had a lawyer contact them and explain

00:11:16.700 that you can't just suspend Mrs. Gronas for doing this. And she was reinstated back to her position. 0.57

00:11:24.060 However, then a few months later, the school board decided that at school councils,

00:11:28.860 we can no longer have any audio or video recording. Presumably, this was related to the fact that

00:11:36.460 she had um released this recording of her saying her um saying her piece at the beginning of the

00:11:43.180 meeting that led to her getting suspended and it kind of drew attention online and a lot of

00:11:48.380 sympathy for her position and made the school board look really bad so in the future they said

00:11:52.380 no more recordings and then the jccf followed up with another letter saying you can't just ban the

00:11:57.020 parents from recording their meetings it's another violation of their freedom of expression so the

00:12:02.060 school board seems very adamant to impose just their viewpoint and not have this discussed by

00:12:08.860 the public or not have any critics in their midst so now you you've interviewed these two individuals

00:12:16.060 and heard their stories you have your own personal experience to to draw upon at the university of

00:12:23.020 victoria and it seems that there is a real desire to do this now here's the thing the people who

00:12:34.700 are giving the land acknowledgements are canadian citizens living in canada a lot of them are

00:12:40.940 bought houses they own their own property they think and they're and every time they get into

00:12:48.300 a public setting they say something like well you know we're just squatters here really it's

00:12:53.180 actually yours and we acknowledge that but you know and then they kind of surprised as they were

00:12:58.460 in british columbia recently when a court says well yeah actually you are squatters and you need

00:13:03.420 to pay um what is the matter george i know you studied kinesiology not psychology or the

00:13:13.100 psychiatry of the bent mind but what do you make of it george i mean are these what are these people

00:13:19.720 not getting well i think in part of my criticism of land acknowledgement like i just like to think

00:13:25.640 of the fundamental premise like what are we actually saying when so we say someone else

00:13:30.880 owns the land like what does that mean to own the land and a problem i see with these land

00:13:35.420 acknowledgments is they not only imply there should be a legal ownership of the land but there's also

00:13:40.640 this like spiritual element and sort of guilt-based and solemn element of a different group inherently

00:13:47.640 owning the land and like something jeff horseman said in my interview is like i don't think there's

00:13:52.940 anything good that's going to come from uh tying one racial group as being the true inheritors of

00:13:59.140 all of nature in sort of the spiritual element and then everyone else as sort of uh this unworthy 0.98

00:14:05.760 group that shouldn't actually be here. And like you pointed out in British Columbia, there's

00:14:10.800 all this contention now with property rights and who actually owns the land in a legal sense beyond

00:14:17.120 the spiritual element. So I think with these land acknowledgments, there's actually a lot being said

00:14:22.460 in between the lines, and we should really slow down a minute and just unpack what we're actually

00:14:27.520 doing and what we want the outcome to be. Well, I think I agree with you, George,

00:14:34.460 But there is an even bigger picture. You connect land acknowledgements to other recent examples

00:14:40.460 of compelled speech in Canada, and it's the compelled speech that is the bigger picture.

00:14:45.580 But we're talking about, for instance, Jordan Peterson's fight over pronouns

00:14:50.140 and Barry Neufeldt's Human Rights Tribunal case. This is the gentleman who sat on the

00:14:55.900 school board in the lower mainland and actually said, well, you know, boys are boys and girls

00:15:01.500 of girls, and why are we trying to, what is that, SOGI, is it, the sexual orientation,

00:15:07.380 gender instruction program that they have?

00:15:10.300 He was basically saying that he had a fundamental philosophical difference of opinion as a

00:15:16.440 representative of parents on a school board to what the government was pushing.

00:15:21.520 So you've got Jordan Peterson.

00:15:24.500 They wanted him to use pronouns.

00:15:27.080 You've got Barry Neufeld.

00:15:28.780 They wanted him to say something that he didn't believe.

00:15:31.500 And you've got the issue that we've just been talking about of these highly agenda-driven land acknowledgements.

00:15:40.500 Now, how do these phenomena collectively threaten charter-protected freedoms of thought, belief, and expression?

00:15:51.200 And what role have universities and public education played in normalizing this trend?

00:15:56.720 Yeah, so there's a lot of these different topics that are focused on different issues relating to various identity groups that have become super contentious in our culture and society, largely because of what's taking place at university.

00:16:13.720 and a big problem today is that we've equated words and thoughts with literal harm or even in

00:16:21.640 some cases violence so my disagreement with land acknowledgments like behind my back I know

00:16:28.540 in my personal life I've been called things like oh I might be racist right or like I might be

00:16:34.500 bigoted just because of my opinion which is just coming from a philosophical standpoint and from

00:16:39.820 my view, just like a basic premise of we should all just be equal and treated as equals. So within

00:16:46.100 academia, we're sort of all walking on eggshells right now on all these various topics. And the

00:16:53.680 problem with conflating words with being harmful is that if someone is saying words that we disagree

00:17:00.880 with, we need to shut them down because they're causing harm. And this is a very prominent mindset

00:17:05.280 within universities especially in certain cities like where I'm from in Victoria so you're only

00:17:11.820 getting one side of the debate is being supported and platformed by the institution in many cases

00:17:17.080 whether that's coming through like official policy or it's just like an unspoken social mandate that

00:17:23.300 is taking place and this is a problem way beyond land acknowledgements and like my my essay my

00:17:28.780 article was about specifically a land acknowledgements but the point like you said is much

00:17:33.000 deeper than that it's really about the compelled speech the group think and the reaction to even

00:17:38.360 having this conversation well you know you you have pushed back and through you have you

00:17:48.200 and you're talking about other people who have pushed back through groups like the justice center

00:17:52.680 for constitutional freedom which like c2c is a is a sort of a very freedom orientated organization

00:18:01.240 um and you're you seem to be somewhat confident that the overton window can shift the overton

00:18:11.000 window for those who are you know not techies in this area it's just a sort of an idea of a

00:18:17.640 space in which whatever you say is fine but if it's outside so but you can move the windows

00:18:23.480 so that now the forbidden speech can be safely said you think that that we can actually move

00:18:33.000 the overton window so that we can get back the freedom to say no to things that we don't want

00:18:42.280 to say yes to really i i hope so you're an optimist yeah i think i think in the long run it's it's

00:18:51.800 possible i mean even um some of your listeners might be not that many of your listeners are

00:18:56.520 avid cv cbc fans but the even the cbc released recently a documentary called speechless uh which

00:19:03.320 was an investigation into um universities and this sort of like cult-like thinking and free

00:19:09.000 speech issues and people that have been cancelled and i watched and i was actually quite surprised

00:19:12.760 that this was coming from the cbc was actually quite well done um and it clearly was taking the

00:19:18.120 the position that we need to get back to um free discourse and um like not canceling people and

00:19:24.660 having civil conversations so i think i do think the overton window is um moving and we're moving

00:19:30.560 for to a more like relaxed uh society hopefully i think it will take time canada especially on

00:19:37.120 certain issues like the whole um gender identity versus sex debate it's canada is far quite far

00:19:42.260 behind some other nations like the united kingdom and the united states that are moving a little

00:19:46.860 forward but i think we'll get there eventually well i hope i hope you're right what what is your

00:19:52.240 vision for a canada that genuinely protects both the right to speak what one believes

00:19:57.920 and the right to remain silent how how realistic is that and i'm asking you as to answer this

00:20:08.140 question with in mind the the people you've been at university with who have bought the program

00:20:16.840 because the program was there to be bought.

00:20:20.160 And, you know, they come from houses where mom and dad put a little plaque on it.

00:20:25.040 This was unbelievable.

00:20:26.100 This is one of the things you said in your essay there.

00:20:28.640 They actually have a little sign on the front lawn with a perpetual land acknowledgement.

00:20:35.680 Well, I mean, if kids are growing up in that environment

00:20:37.940 and told to be very sensitive and very careful what they say,

00:20:41.920 are we talking about a last man standing in the last generation?

00:20:46.840 It could definitely feel like that sometimes. Yeah, a lot of like my peers on these issues, they don't necessarily know very much about it, but they just know what position is safe for them to take. Like on the whole in Indigenous and land acknowledgments issues, you know, I don't claim to really know an awful lot about like the history of Indigenous relations and all that, but neither do my peers and my peers probably even know less about history than I do.

00:21:11.100 and yet they're adamant that I'm wrong and I'm the bigot and they're right for just going along 0.92

00:21:16.160 with it. So I do think it will take more people to kind of step out of line. And like one thing

00:21:23.180 I mentioned in the article is the reference to the Ash conformity experiments. And it basically

00:21:28.960 in those experiments, the more people who step out of line and say the true thing, it encourages

00:21:36.060 others to follow. So if there's only one person, it's very unlikely that other people are going

00:21:41.080 step out of line but if there's two or three it's much more probable that other people will

00:21:46.040 break free from from their conformity so but i also think it's going to take some changes from

00:21:54.740 the top down like all these institutions all these administrators all these bureaucrats that

00:21:59.880 are pushing these policies onto institutions like universities and in municipal provincial

00:22:05.460 governments i think we're going to need to see a bit of a change of the leadership well that's

00:22:10.800 That's where you have to follow the money, because when people get into those jobs, they

00:22:15.180 hold them on condition that they don't step out of line.

00:22:21.080 Because any administrator who actually came out of the closet and supported the point

00:22:27.280 of view that you were saying would find himself capped at that position, and they probably

00:22:32.600 worked to get him out of the way.

00:22:33.960 We have a person in Calgary here, Francis Whittowson, who is quite outspoken on the

00:22:39.860 issue. Even though she was a tenured professor, they found a way to fire her with cases before

00:22:48.020 the courts. Now, look, we're out of time, which is a great shame. I'd like to talk to you for a

00:22:53.220 while, but I'm very encouraged by what you wrote about what you did with the experience that you

00:23:01.540 had. I know you want to develop a career in another area, but I hope that you hang on to

00:23:07.780 this interest and that you become a strong spokesman for this point of view it's not just

00:23:14.100 the land claims it is the whole idea that we can be told what to say and then must repeat it back

00:23:21.540 like a parrot so bless your heart thank you for this great job on the essay

00:23:26.500 and ladies and gentlemen

00:23:29.240 for the Western Standard

00:23:30.340 I'm Nigel Hannaford

Western Standard - April 24, 2026

Compelled speech, the new threat to free expression in Canada

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