We ve got a man suing us who says he s a woman, but we keep calling him a man because he is, but he wants to compel us to say something we know just ain t true. We re all ready to jump up and defend free speech, but how are we doing in the fight against compelled speech?
00:00:00.000Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show
00:00:21.120of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, April 23rd. I think, I hope, we're all ready to jump
00:00:27.600up and defend free speech, but how are we doing in the fight against compelled speech? There's
00:00:34.160lots of people who demand you not only see things their way, but say it out loud. Here are the
00:00:39.600Western Standard. We've got a man suing us who says he's a woman, but we keep calling him a man
00:00:44.800because he is, but he wants to compel us to say something we know just ain't true. Feel free to
00:00:52.400donate to our legal defense fund by the way now another area of compelled speech is the good old
00:00:58.400indian land acknowledgement with me today is somebody who's hit this like a boat hits a rock
00:01:05.600with me today is victoria-based writer george ramsey we ran something he wrote about this a
00:01:11.920few weeks ago and there's more to be said george welcome to the show hi nigel happy to chat thanks
00:01:18.240for having me oh you're very welcome george you originally wrote this piece for c2c journal
00:01:24.400and what we ran was a bit shorter so can you just explain why you care about this you were a
00:01:31.600university student in victoria you're studying kinesiology can you explain what happened to you
00:01:39.920that made you very sensitive to land acknowledgements and why they make you cross yeah so
00:01:46.160i think going to university in a place like victoria in the current day i have become very
00:01:52.480sensitive to topics where i feel there's a groupthink element going on and a conformity being
00:02:00.640imposed and land acknowledgements were one of those things i would say i don't care as much
00:02:07.120specifically about the land acknowledgements it's just the fact that people lose their ability to
00:02:13.520think critically about these things. So I was taking a course called Outdoor Adventure Education
00:02:20.400and in this course we had to do an assignment based on land acknowledgements and we were asked
00:02:26.080to write a few different essays and writing assignments explaining the benefits of a land
00:02:31.600acknowledgement and the premise of the assignments were not that we could openly criticize or say
00:02:39.360why these things are not helpful or performative the rubric of the assignment kind of led you down
00:02:44.560a path of thinking um to have like one specific conclusion and within the classroom there's just
00:02:51.440this sort of atmosphere of fear of stepping out of out of the boundaries when we're having class
00:02:57.200discussions like everyone is silent and afraid to have a an opinion that might get you socially
00:03:04.160ostracized. So that's something that I noticed very strongly. And I felt frustrated that we had
00:03:10.820this one way of thinking be imposed upon us on ideas that are not really like a concrete right
00:03:18.460or wrong. It's more of a philosophical discussion. So I think in a university, it should be more of
00:03:23.440an open discussion rather than you must go down this line of thinking. George, you're talking
00:03:28.060like somebody who was born 50 years ago. Come on. Everybody knows that universities these days are
00:03:33.060places where you pay a lot of money to learn to be indoctrinated in a set of ideas and principles
00:03:40.380that will enable you to get a job with the federal government come on what were you expecting
00:03:44.760seriously may i ask how did this did you actually challenge this and what happened when you did
00:03:52.220yeah so for my writing assignment for that class um i i was a bit frustrated and i feel like for
00:04:00.460me I kind of I like to get my thoughts out there and sort of helps me kind of like cope with being
00:04:06.620in this environment so I ended up writing my assignment having a fairly critical perspective
00:04:11.700and my writing assignment for that class actually evolved into what I submitted to the C2C journal
00:04:16.460and luckily the professor wasn't actually a total ideologue he was reasonable and actually gave me
00:04:22.840100% mark on this assignment. But I wouldn't have known that going into it because the rubric of
00:04:31.380the assignment only gave you marks for a positive interpretation of land acknowledgements. So he had
00:04:36.700to actually break his own rubric and mark mine like very individually. So I was just willing to
00:04:42.200take that risk. And luckily, it worked out fine. But no other students in the class did that. And
00:04:49.280in fact, I actually saw some other of my classmates assignments in that course. And they
00:04:54.860were all praising land acknowledgements, of course, they probably some of them are written by AI, to be
00:04:59.740honest, because I can kind of see the language in in their responses. But I had one student who came
00:05:06.020to me in private and said, thank you for like writing your assignment that way. Like someone
00:05:10.280needed to say that I agree with everything you said. And then I went and read their assignment.
00:05:14.440And it was completely like a copy paste, like appraisal of landing documents in a positive way.
00:05:20.400So behind the scenes, this person agrees with me, but is too fearful to say that in writing on their assignment.
00:05:26.620And they're just pandering to what they think the professor will give good marks for.
00:05:30.300So 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.
00:05:43.600Well, George, I think before I go any further, a lot of people who are watching this segment0.90
00:05:47.860would probably want me to pause and just congratulate you for having the balls to take it on
00:05:53.120and just say what you really thought and not what you thought they wanted you to say.
00:05:57.960So you've got your 100% honestly, and of course this was an essay that was accepted by C2C
00:06:05.460and later by the Western Standard, and that's a measure of the quality of the work
00:06:11.500as well as the courageous stance that you took.
00:06:17.220So, on behalf of Western Standard viewers, generally, well done.
00:06:21.740Now, you talk about indigenous land acknowledgments as having evolved
00:06:25.360from optional gestures of respect into effectively mandatory rituals
00:06:31.340that appear everywhere from school assemblies.
00:06:34.660They do it in front of a National Hockey League game, corporate websites.
00:06:40.500Now they primarily serve not just as a gesture of friendly respect, but to enforce racialized
00:06:49.540identity politics and historical revisionism of the kind that you have just described,
00:06:56.020rather than fostering genuine reconciliation. Most people shrug and move on, but
00:07:04.980is everybody falling for it? Who else is fighting for this? Tell me about some of
00:07:09.300of the people you are writing about sure so in my piece i wrote about um two cases from ontario
00:07:16.460there was jeff horseman and katherine cronis and these are two parents and professionals
00:07:22.420in ontario and they both um volunteer on school councils there um two separate unrelated school
00:07:30.080councils but they had similar incidents so i'll start with um jeff horseman he was on a school
00:07:37.100council and he was getting frustrated with some of the identity politics being imposed by the
00:07:42.520school board and he noticed that at every meeting he would attend there was a land acknowledgement
00:07:47.120taking place before the meeting and it could be from what he described it could be quite lengthy
00:07:51.060and awkward and cumbersome and he just simply wanted to raise the issue of like do we really
00:07:55.200need to do this every time is this helpful is it's beneficial it's kind of wasting our meeting
00:07:59.060minutes like we already kind of get the point and he found there was immediate resistance to even
00:08:05.320just talking about it. Like he didn't outright say, stop doing this. He just said, can we talk
00:08:09.260about it? And after he had a series of private meetings with various administrators, they just
00:08:14.460told him, no, we can't talk about this. We must do these because of something like human rights,
00:08:19.960reconciliation. It's our duty to do land acknowledgements every single meeting. So
00:08:24.360he's just frustrated by the school board imposing this on the school council, which is supposed to
00:08:29.760be independent of the school board. And he eventually worked with the Justice Center for
00:08:35.200constitutional freedoms to file for a judicial review to see if the school
00:08:39.700board is actually allowed to make the school council do this and ban discussion
00:08:44.260of the topic effectively. Catherine Cronus had a sort of similar situation.
00:08:49.440Just before you go on to Catherine Cronus, you say what did what did they
00:08:55.720discover then? Was the school board obliged to do this or were they just
00:09:00.820saying it and pretending that they were obliged i think i in my interpretation is they're the
00:09:07.380school board essentially is deciding that they're obliged um i think nobody's told them so i'm not
00:09:13.940aware that anyone above the school board has told them it's just sort of this nebulous net of kind
00:09:20.020of like dei professionals within the school board has decided we must do these and they're good and
00:09:24.940stop talking about it and toe the line all right fair enough i mean it would have been it'd be
00:09:32.260interesting to know whether the provincial government in ontario was uh was pushing this
00:09:37.540along as well or whether this is just do-gooders trying to do good anyway you were going on to
00:09:43.340talk about another example can i get you to go back to that yeah sure so catherine cronus was
00:09:48.680the other example from Ontario as well and she is on a separate school council and before the
00:09:56.540meeting there was a land acknowledgement happening and during her introduction or opening remarks she
00:10:03.340simply just said she just gave a like a critique for I think she only spoke for less than a minute
00:10:09.300of I don't think these land acknowledgements are helpful I don't really agree with this being part
00:10:13.300of the meeting and then she moved on so she just gave a sort of a polite disagreement with the
00:10:17.500land acknowledgement taking place before all these meetings and the meeting went on and then
00:10:22.360afterwards she got she received an email and she had been suspended from her position on the school
00:10:28.940council and the school board they even claimed that her words had caused harm supposedly and
00:10:36.620they didn't really give her any specific reason but she was suspended so she suspended like who
00:10:42.860suspended her and uh i mean was she given any opportunity to talk about why she said what she
00:10:49.740said no no so they just outright suspended her from her position with no notice um and very
00:10:58.620little explanation and even accused her of causing harm just by speaking politely for a few seconds
00:11:04.700she didn't take that lying down did she no so she was quite shocked by this and she also with help
00:11:11.900from the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, had a lawyer contact them and explain
00:11:16.700that you can't just suspend Mrs. Gronas for doing this. And she was reinstated back to her position.0.57
00:11:24.060However, then a few months later, the school board decided that at school councils,
00:11:28.860we can no longer have any audio or video recording. Presumably, this was related to the fact that
00:11:36.460she had um released this recording of her saying her um saying her piece at the beginning of the
00:11:43.180meeting that led to her getting suspended and it kind of drew attention online and a lot of
00:11:48.380sympathy for her position and made the school board look really bad so in the future they said
00:11:52.380no more recordings and then the jccf followed up with another letter saying you can't just ban the
00:11:57.020parents from recording their meetings it's another violation of their freedom of expression so the
00:12:02.060school board seems very adamant to impose just their viewpoint and not have this discussed by
00:12:08.860the public or not have any critics in their midst so now you you've interviewed these two individuals
00:12:16.060and heard their stories you have your own personal experience to to draw upon at the university of
00:12:23.020victoria and it seems that there is a real desire to do this now here's the thing the people who
00:12:34.700are giving the land acknowledgements are canadian citizens living in canada a lot of them are
00:12:40.940bought houses they own their own property they think and they're and every time they get into
00:12:48.300a public setting they say something like well you know we're just squatters here really it's
00:12:53.180actually yours and we acknowledge that but you know and then they kind of surprised as they were
00:12:58.460in british columbia recently when a court says well yeah actually you are squatters and you need
00:13:03.420to pay um what is the matter george i know you studied kinesiology not psychology or the
00:13:13.100psychiatry of the bent mind but what do you make of it george i mean are these what are these people
00:13:19.720not getting well i think in part of my criticism of land acknowledgement like i just like to think
00:13:25.640of the fundamental premise like what are we actually saying when so we say someone else
00:13:30.880owns the land like what does that mean to own the land and a problem i see with these land
00:13:35.420acknowledgments is they not only imply there should be a legal ownership of the land but there's also
00:13:40.640this like spiritual element and sort of guilt-based and solemn element of a different group inherently
00:13:47.640owning the land and like something jeff horseman said in my interview is like i don't think there's
00:13:52.940anything good that's going to come from uh tying one racial group as being the true inheritors of
00:13:59.140all of nature in sort of the spiritual element and then everyone else as sort of uh this unworthy0.98
00:14:05.760group that shouldn't actually be here. And like you pointed out in British Columbia, there's
00:14:10.800all this contention now with property rights and who actually owns the land in a legal sense beyond
00:14:17.120the spiritual element. So I think with these land acknowledgments, there's actually a lot being said
00:14:22.460in between the lines, and we should really slow down a minute and just unpack what we're actually
00:14:27.520doing and what we want the outcome to be. Well, I think I agree with you, George,
00:14:34.460But there is an even bigger picture. You connect land acknowledgements to other recent examples
00:14:40.460of compelled speech in Canada, and it's the compelled speech that is the bigger picture.
00:14:45.580But we're talking about, for instance, Jordan Peterson's fight over pronouns
00:14:50.140and Barry Neufeldt's Human Rights Tribunal case. This is the gentleman who sat on the
00:14:55.900school board in the lower mainland and actually said, well, you know, boys are boys and girls
00:15:01.500of girls, and why are we trying to, what is that, SOGI, is it, the sexual orientation,
00:15:07.380gender instruction program that they have?
00:15:10.300He was basically saying that he had a fundamental philosophical difference of opinion as a
00:15:16.440representative of parents on a school board to what the government was pushing.
00:15:28.780They wanted him to say something that he didn't believe.
00:15:31.500And you've got the issue that we've just been talking about of these highly agenda-driven land acknowledgements.
00:15:40.500Now, how do these phenomena collectively threaten charter-protected freedoms of thought, belief, and expression?
00:15:51.200And what role have universities and public education played in normalizing this trend?
00:15:56.720Yeah, 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.
00:16:13.720and a big problem today is that we've equated words and thoughts with literal harm or even in
00:16:21.640some cases violence so my disagreement with land acknowledgments like behind my back I know
00:16:28.540in my personal life I've been called things like oh I might be racist right or like I might be
00:16:34.500bigoted just because of my opinion which is just coming from a philosophical standpoint and from
00:16:39.820my view, just like a basic premise of we should all just be equal and treated as equals. So within
00:16:46.100academia, we're sort of all walking on eggshells right now on all these various topics. And the
00:16:53.680problem with conflating words with being harmful is that if someone is saying words that we disagree
00:17:00.880with, we need to shut them down because they're causing harm. And this is a very prominent mindset
00:17:05.280within universities especially in certain cities like where I'm from in Victoria so you're only
00:17:11.820getting one side of the debate is being supported and platformed by the institution in many cases
00:17:17.080whether that's coming through like official policy or it's just like an unspoken social mandate that
00:17:23.300is taking place and this is a problem way beyond land acknowledgements and like my my essay my
00:17:28.780article was about specifically a land acknowledgements but the point like you said is much
00:17:33.000deeper than that it's really about the compelled speech the group think and the reaction to even
00:17:38.360having this conversation well you know you you have pushed back and through you have you
00:17:48.200and you're talking about other people who have pushed back through groups like the justice center
00:17:52.680for constitutional freedom which like c2c is a is a sort of a very freedom orientated organization
00:18:01.240um and you're you seem to be somewhat confident that the overton window can shift the overton
00:18:11.000window for those who are you know not techies in this area it's just a sort of an idea of a
00:18:17.640space in which whatever you say is fine but if it's outside so but you can move the windows
00:18:23.480so that now the forbidden speech can be safely said you think that that we can actually move
00:18:33.000the overton window so that we can get back the freedom to say no to things that we don't want
00:18:42.280to 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
00:18:51.800possible i mean even um some of your listeners might be not that many of your listeners are
00:18:56.520avid cv cbc fans but the even the cbc released recently a documentary called speechless uh which
00:19:03.320was an investigation into um universities and this sort of like cult-like thinking and free
00:19:09.000speech issues and people that have been cancelled and i watched and i was actually quite surprised
00:19:12.760that this was coming from the cbc was actually quite well done um and it clearly was taking the
00:19:18.120the position that we need to get back to um free discourse and um like not canceling people and
00:19:24.660having civil conversations so i think i do think the overton window is um moving and we're moving
00:19:30.560for to a more like relaxed uh society hopefully i think it will take time canada especially on
00:19:37.120certain issues like the whole um gender identity versus sex debate it's canada is far quite far
00:19:42.260behind some other nations like the united kingdom and the united states that are moving a little
00:19:46.860forward but i think we'll get there eventually well i hope i hope you're right what what is your
00:19:52.240vision for a canada that genuinely protects both the right to speak what one believes
00:19:57.920and the right to remain silent how how realistic is that and i'm asking you as to answer this
00:20:08.140question with in mind the the people you've been at university with who have bought the program
00:20:16.840because the program was there to be bought.
00:20:20.160And, you know, they come from houses where mom and dad put a little plaque on it.
00:20:26.100This is one of the things you said in your essay there.
00:20:28.640They actually have a little sign on the front lawn with a perpetual land acknowledgement.
00:20:35.680Well, I mean, if kids are growing up in that environment
00:20:37.940and told to be very sensitive and very careful what they say,
00:20:41.920are we talking about a last man standing in the last generation?
00:20:46.840It 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.
00:21:11.100and yet they're adamant that I'm wrong and I'm the bigot and they're right for just going along0.92
00:21:16.160with it. So I do think it will take more people to kind of step out of line. And like one thing
00:21:23.180I mentioned in the article is the reference to the Ash conformity experiments. And it basically
00:21:28.960in those experiments, the more people who step out of line and say the true thing, it encourages
00:21:36.060others to follow. So if there's only one person, it's very unlikely that other people are going
00:21:41.080step out of line but if there's two or three it's much more probable that other people will
00:21:46.040break free from from their conformity so but i also think it's going to take some changes from
00:21:54.740the top down like all these institutions all these administrators all these bureaucrats that
00:21:59.880are pushing these policies onto institutions like universities and in municipal provincial
00:22:05.460governments i think we're going to need to see a bit of a change of the leadership well that's
00:22:10.800That's where you have to follow the money, because when people get into those jobs, they
00:22:15.180hold them on condition that they don't step out of line.
00:22:21.080Because any administrator who actually came out of the closet and supported the point
00:22:27.280of view that you were saying would find himself capped at that position, and they probably