Western Standard - HANNAFORD： 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

00:00:27.680 up and defend free speech. But how are we doing in the fight against compelled speech?

00:00:33.920 There's lots of people who demand you not only see things their way, but say it out loud.

00:00:39.200 Here are the Western Standard. We've got a man suing us who says he's a woman, 0.86

00:00:43.360 but we keep calling him a man because he is. But he wants to compel us to say something we know

00:00:50.160 just ain't true. Feel free to donate to our legal defense fund, by the way.

00:00:55.360 Now, another area of compelled speech is the good old Indian land acknowledgement.

00:01:00.480 With me today is somebody who's hit this like a boat hits a rock. With me today is Victoria-based

00:01:07.760 writer George Ramsey. We ran something he wrote about this a few weeks ago and there's more to be

00:01:13.520 said. George, welcome to the show. Hi, Nigel. Happy to chat. Thanks for having me. Oh, you're very

00:01:19.680 welcome. George, you originally wrote this piece for C2C Journal and what we ran was a bit shorter.

00:01:26.880 So can you just explain why you care about this? You were a university

00:01:33.120 student in Victoria. You were studying kinesiology.

00:01:37.680 Can you explain what happened to you that made you very sensitive to land acknowledgements and

00:01:42.960 why they make you cross yeah so i think going to university in a place like victoria in the

00:01:50.640 current day i have become very sensitive to topics where i feel there's a groupthink element going on

00:01:58.000 and a conformity being imposed and land acknowledgements were one of those things

00:02:04.960 um i would say i don't care as much specifically about the land acknowledgements it's just the fact

00:02:09.840 that people lose their ability to think critically about these things so i was taking a course

00:02:18.080 called outdoor adventure education and in this course we had to do an assignment based on land

00:02:24.720 acknowledgements and we were asked to write a few different essays and writing assignments

00:02:29.840 explaining the benefits of a land acknowledgement and the premise of the assignments were not that

00:02:36.480 we could openly criticize or say why these things are not helpful or performative. The rubric of the

00:02:43.300 assignment kind of led you down a path of thinking to have like one specific conclusion. And within

00:02:50.120 the classroom, there's just this sort of atmosphere of fear of stepping out of the boundaries when

00:02:56.600 we're having class discussions, like everyone is silent and afraid to have an opinion that might

00:03:03.040 get you socially ostracized. So that's something that I noticed very strongly. And I felt frustrated

00:03:09.260 that we had this one way of thinking be imposed upon us on ideas that are not really like a

00:03:17.580 concrete right or wrong. It's more of a philosophical discussion. So I think in a university, it should

00:03:23.020 be more of an open discussion rather than you must go down this line of thinking. George, you're

00:03:27.800 talking like somebody who was born 50 years ago. Come on. Everybody knows that universities these

00:03:32.560 days are places where you pay a lot of money to learn to be indoctrinated and a set of ideas and

00:03:40.000 principles that will enable you to get a job with the federal government come on what were you

00:03:44.320 expecting seriously may i ask how did this did you actually challenge this and what happened when you

00:03:51.920 did yeah so for my writing assignment for that class um i i was a bit frustrated and i feel like

00:04:00.300 for me, I kind of, I like to get my thoughts out there and sort of helps me kind of like cope with

00:04:06.420 being in this environment. So I ended up writing my assignment, having a fairly critical perspective,

00:04:11.720 and my writing assignment for that class actually evolved into what I submitted to the C2C journal.

00:04:17.200 And luckily, the professor wasn't actually a total ideologue. He was reasonable and actually gave me

00:04:22.860 100% mark on this assignment. But I wouldn't have known that going into it because the rubric of

00:04:31.400 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

00:04:42.040 to 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 were all

00:04:55.120 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 land acknowledgements 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.

00:05:30.320 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.

00:05:43.620 Well, George, I think before I go any further, a lot of people who are watching this segment would probably want me to pause and just congratulate you for having the balls to take it on and just say what you really thought and not what you thought they wanted you to say.

00:05:57.980 So you've got your 100% honestly, and of course this was an essay that was accepted by C2C and later by the Western Standard, and that's a measure of the quality of the work 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 from optional gestures of respect

00:06:27.460 into effectively mandatory rituals that appear everywhere from school assemblies.

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

00:06:40.360 and now they primarily serve not just as a gesture of friendly respect, but to enforce

00:06:48.680 racialized identity politics and historical revisionism of the kind that you have just

00:06:54.760 described rather than fostering genuine reconciliation. Most people shrug and move on, but

00:07:02.120 But is everybody falling for it?

00:07:07.040 Who else is fighting for this?

00:07:08.640 Tell me about some of the people you are writing about.

00:07:11.620 Sure.

00:07:12.240 So in my piece, I wrote about two cases from Ontario.

00:07:16.440 There was Jeff Horseman and Catherine Cronus.

00:07:19.820 And these are two parents and professionals in Ontario.

00:07:23.820 And they both volunteer on school councils there, two separate unrelated school councils.

00:07:30.540 But they had similar incidents.

00:07:32.120 And so I'll start with Jeff Horstman. He was on a school council and he was getting frustrated with some of the identity politics being imposed by the school board. And he noticed that at every meeting he would attend, there was a land acknowledgement taking place before the meeting. And it could be from what he described, it could be quite lengthy and awkward and cumbersome. And he just simply wanted to raise the issue of like, do we really need to do this every time? Is this helpful? Is this beneficial? It's kind of wasting our meeting minutes. Like we already kind of get the point.

00:08:01.900 And he found there was immediate resistance to even just talking about it.

00:08:06.480 Like he didn't outright say, stop doing this.

00:08:08.440 He just said, can we talk about it?

00:08:10.060 And after he had a series of private meetings with various administrators, they just told

00:08:14.680 him, no, we can't talk about this.

00:08:16.380 We must do these because of something like human rights, reconciliation.

00:08:20.380 It's our duty to do land acknowledgements every single meeting.

00:08:23.940 So he's just frustrated by the school board imposing this on the school council, which

00:08:29.220 is supposed to be independent of the school board.

00:08:31.200 And he eventually worked with the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms to file for a judicial review to see if the school board is actually allowed to make the school council do this and ban discussion of the topic effectively. 0.66

00:08:46.840 Catherine Cronus had a sort of similar situation.

00:08:49.420 Just before you go on to Catherine Cronus, you say, what did they discover then?

00:08:56.600 Was the school board obliged to do this, or were they just saying it and pretending that they were obliged?

00:09:04.400 I think, my interpretation is the school board essentially is deciding that they're obliged.

00:09:11.660 But nobody's told them so.

00:09:13.220 I'm not aware that anyone above the school board has told them.

00:09:16.300 It's just sort of this nebulous net of kind of like DEI professionals within the school board has decided we must do these and they're good and stop talking about it and toe the line.

00:09:29.200 All right. Fair enough.

00:09:31.100 I mean, it would have been interesting to know whether the provincial government in Ontario was pushing this along as well or whether this is just do-gooders trying to do good.

00:09:42.240 Anyway, you were going on to talk about another example.

00:09:44.960 Can I get you to go back to that?

00:09:46.100 Yeah, sure. So Catherine Cronus was the other example from Ontario as well. And she is on a separate school council. And before the meeting, there was a land acknowledgement happening. And during her introduction or opening remarks, she simply just said, she just gave a like a critique for I think she only spoke for less than a minute of I don't think these land acknowledgements are helpful. I don't really agree with this being part of the meeting. And then she moved on. 0.85

00:10:14.800 And so she just gave a sort of a polite disagreement with the land acknowledgement taking place before all these meetings.

00:10:20.640 And the meeting went on.

00:10:21.860 And then afterwards, she got she received an email and she had been suspended from her position on the school council.

00:10:29.880 And the school board, they even claimed that her words had caused harm, supposedly, and they didn't really give her any specific reason, but she was suspended.

00:10:39.340 so she suspended like who suspended her and uh i mean was she given any opportunity to

00:10:47.580 talk about why she said what she said no no so they just outright suspended her from her position

00:10:56.020 with no notice um and very little explanation and even accused her of causing harm just by

00:11:02.520 speaking politely for a few seconds no she didn't take that lying down did she no so she was quite

00:11:08.560 shocked by this and she also with help from the justice center for constitutional freedoms um had

00:11:15.040 a lawyer contact them and explain that you can't just suspend mrs gronis for doing this and she

00:11:20.320 was reinstated back to her position um however then a few months later the school board decided

00:11:27.520 that at school councils we can no longer have any audio or video recording presumably this was

00:11:34.480 related to the fact that she had released this recording of her saying her saying her piece at

00:11:42.700 the beginning of the meeting that led to her getting suspended and kind of drew attention

00:11:46.900 online and a lot of sympathy for her position and made the school board look really bad. So in the

00:11:52.000 future, they said no more recordings. And then the JCCF followed up with another letter saying you

00:11:56.260 can't just ban the parents from recording their meetings. It's another violation of their freedom

00:12:00.620 of expression. So the school board seems very adamant to impose just their viewpoint and not

00:12:07.440 have this discussed by the public or not have any critics in their midst. So now you've interviewed

00:12:13.960 these two individuals and heard their stories. You have your own personal experience to draw upon

00:12:22.120 at the university of victoria and it seems that there is a real desire to do this now here's the

00:12:32.680 thing the people who are giving the land acknowledgements are canadian citizens living

00:12:39.000 in canada a lot of them are bought houses they own their own property they think and they're

00:12:46.680 and every time they get into a public setting they say something like well you know we're just

00:12:51.880 squatters here really. It's actually yours, and we acknowledge that." And then they kind of

00:12:56.680 surprised, as they were in British Columbia recently, when a court says, well, yeah, actually

00:13:01.480 you are squatters, and you need to pay. What is the matter, George? I know you studied kinesiology,

00:13:10.840 not psychology or the psychiatry of the bent mind, but what do you make of it, George?

00:13:17.480 are these what are these people not getting well i think in part of my criticism of land

00:13:24.320 acknowledgement like i just like to think of the fundamental premise so like what are we actually

00:13:28.520 saying when so we say someone else owns the land like what does that mean to own the land and a

00:13:34.340 problem i see with these land acknowledgements is they not only imply there should be a legal

00:13:38.960 ownership of the land but there's also this like spiritual element and sort of guilt-based and

00:13:44.020 solemn element of a different group inherently owning the land and like something jeff horseman

00:13:51.140 said in my interview is like i don't think there's anything good that's going to come from

00:13:54.740 uh tying one racial group as being the true inheritors of all of nature in sort of the

00:14:00.760 spiritual element and then everyone else as sort of uh this unworthy group that shouldn't actually

00:14:07.160 be here um and like you pointed out in british columbia there's all this contention now with

00:14:13.140 property rights and who actually owns the land in a legal sense beyond the spiritual element

00:14:18.160 so i think with these land acknowledgements there's actually a lot being said in between

00:14:23.040 the lines and we should really slow down a minute and just like unpack like 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 but there is an even

00:14:35.440 bigger picture you connect land acknowledgements to other recent examples of compelled speech in

00:14:41.800 Canada, and it's the compelled speech that is the bigger picture. But we're talking about,

00:14:46.680 for instance, Jordan Peterson's fight over pronouns and Barry Neufeldt's Human Rights

00:14:52.040 Tribunal case. This is the gentleman who sat on the school board in the lower mainland and

00:14:58.680 actually said, well, you know, boys are boys and girls are girls, and why are we trying to,

00:15:04.040 what is that, SOGI, is it, that sexual orientation, gender instruction program that they have? He was

00:15:10.520 basically saying that he had a fundamental philosophical difference of opinion as a

00:15:16.360 representative of parents on a school board to what the government was pushing. So you've got

00:15:23.080 Jordan Peterson. They wanted him to use pronouns. You've got Barry Neufeld. They wanted him to say

00:15:29.880 something that he didn't believe. And you've got the issue that we've just been talking about of

00:15:34.920 these highly agenda-driven land acknowledgements. Now, how do these phenomena collectively

00:15:45.800 threaten charter-protected freedoms of thought, belief, and expression? And what role have

00:15:52.200 universities and public education played in normalizing this trend?

00:15:58.280 Yeah, so there's a lot of these different topics that are focused on different issues relating to

00:16:03.960 various identity groups that have become super contentious in our culture and society largely

00:16:11.480 because of what's taking place at university and a big problem today is that we've equated words

00:16:18.040 and thoughts with literal harm or even in some cases violence so my disagreement with land

00:16:26.040 acknowledgements like behind my back i know in my personal life i've been called things like oh

00:16:31.320 I might be racist, right? I might be bigoted just because of my opinion, which is just coming from

00:16:37.800 a philosophical standpoint. And from my view, just like a basic premise of we should all just be

00:16:43.220 equal and treated as equals. So within academia, we're sort of all walking on eggshells right now

00:16:51.460 on all these various topics. And the problem with conflating words with being harmful is that

00:16:58.660 if someone is saying words that we disagree with, we need to shut them down because they're causing

00:17:02.860 harm. And this is a very prominent mindset within universities, especially in certain cities like

00:17:09.120 where I'm from in Victoria. So you're only getting one side of the debate is being supported and

00:17:14.600 platformed by the institution in many cases, whether that's coming through like official

00:17:19.620 policy or it's just like an unspoken social mandate that is taking place. And this is a

00:17:25.620 problem way beyond land acknowledgements and like my my essay my article was about specifically a

00:17:30.860 land acknowledgements but the point like you said is much deeper than that it's really about

00:17:34.400 the compelled speech the group think and the reaction to even having this conversation

00:17:39.480 well you know you you have pushed back and through you have you and you're talking about

00:17:49.240 other people who have pushed back through groups like the justice center for constitutional freedom

00:17:53.980 which, like C2C, is a sort of a very freedom-orientated organization.

00:18:03.320 And you seem to be somewhat confident that the Overton window can shift.

00:18:10.540 The Overton window, for those who are not techies in this area,

00:18:14.880 is just a sort of an idea of a space in which whatever you say is fine,

00:18:20.420 but if it's outside, but you can move the windows

00:18:23.300 so that now the forbidden speech can be safely said.

00:18:29.940 Do you think that we can actually move the Overton window

00:18:34.060 so that we can get back the freedom to say no

00:18:40.220 to things that we don't want to say yes to?

00:18:43.840 Really?

00:18:45.320 I hope so.

00:18:47.200 You're an optimist.

00:18:47.920 yeah i think i think in the long run it's it's possible i mean even um some of your listeners

00:18:53.980 might be not that maybe listeners are uh avid cv cbc fans but the even the cbc released recently

00:19:00.680 a documentary called speechless uh which was an investigation into um universities and this sort

00:19:07.620 of like cult-like thinking and free speech issues and people that have been canceled

00:19:10.820 and i watched and i was actually quite surprised that this was coming from the cbc was actually

00:19:14.780 quite well done um and it clearly was taking the position that we need to get back to um free

00:19:20.620 discourse and um like not canceling people and having civil conversations so i think i do think

00:19:27.540 the overton window is um moving and we're moving for to a more like relaxed uh society hopefully

00:19:34.440 i think it will take time canada especially on certain issues like the whole um gender identity

00:19:39.360 versus sex debate it's canada is far quite far behind some other nations like the united kingdom

00:19:44.280 and the United States that are moving a little forward,

00:19:47.360 but I think we'll get there eventually.

00:19:49.820 Well, I hope you're right.

00:19:51.380 What is your vision for a Canada that genuinely protects

00:19:55.800 both the right to speak what one believes

00:19:57.920 and the right to remain silent?

00:20:02.220 How realistic is that?

00:20:05.360 And I'm asking you to answer this question with in mind

00:20:10.580 the people you've been at university with

00:20:13.480 who have bought the program because the program was there to be bought.

00:20:20.680 They come from houses where mom and dad put a little plaque on it.

00:20:25.060 This was unbelievable.

00:20:26.120 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,

00:20:41.340 Are we talking about, are you the last man standing in the last generation?

00:20:47.160 It could definitely feel like that sometimes.

00:20:49.620 Yeah, a lot of my peers on these issues, they don't necessarily know very much about it,

00:20:55.180 but they just know what position is safe for them to take.

00:20:58.900 Like on the whole in Indigenous and land acknowledgements issues,

00:21:02.000 I don't claim to really know an awful lot about the history of Indigenous relations and all that,

00:21:07.000 but neither do my peers, and my peers probably even know less about history than I do. 0.96

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

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

00:21:41.040 to step out of line but if there's two or three it's much more probable that other people will

00:21:46.080 break free from from their conformity so but I also think it's going to take some changes from

00:21:54.760 the top down like all these institutions all these administrators all these bureaucrats that

00:21:59.900 are pushing these policies onto institutions like universities and in municipal provincial

00:22:05.480 governments I think we're going to need to see a bit of a change of the leadership well that's

00:22:10.820 That's where you have to follow the money, because when people get into those jobs, they

00:22:15.200 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

00:22:32.620 worked to get him out of the way.

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

00:22:39.880 issue. Even though she was a tenured professor, they found a way to fire her with cases before

00:22:48.040 the courts. Now, look, we're out of time, which is a great shame. I'd like to talk to you for a

00:22:53.240 while, but I'm very encouraged by what you wrote about what you did with the experience that you

00:23:01.560 had. I know you want to develop a career in another area, but I hope that you hang on to

00:23:07.800 this interest and that you become a strong spokesman for this point of view. It's not just

00:23:14.120 the land claims. It is the whole idea that we can be told what to say and then must repeat it back

00:23:21.560 like a parrot. So bless your heart. Thank you for this. Great job on the essay.

00:23:26.520 And, ladies and gentlemen, for the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - April 27, 2026

HANNAFORD： Compelled speech, the new threat to free expression in Canada

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