Academic freedom under threat

A tenured political science professor, Dr. Frances Widdowson was fired from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, in December 2021. So much for it being impossible to fire tenured university professors in Canada. Why was she fired? Was it for incompetence? Clearly not. A recently released arbitrator’s report found that while her behaviour warranted discipline it was disproportionate to fire her. The 300-page report by David Phillip Jones said:

She has controversial views on a number of topics. However, there has never been a complaint about the quality or ethics of her scholarship; she has never received performance management counselling for either her teaching or scholarship; and the university has supported and recognized her scholarly activities.

So, no complaints were received by the university about her teaching or her scholarship, yet she was fired. Clearly, the reason is given in the first sentence of the above quote: “She has controversial views on a number of topics.” This appears to be why she was fired, and it is the one reason why no professor should ever be fired. A political science professor should be free to express controversial views and should be lauded for exposing students to both sides of controversial issues while taking a principled stand herself on those issues. This is at the heart of what a university is supposed to do and be. The mission of the university is to debate controversial views with civility and passion, and this is what Dr. Widdowson did.

So, what views does she espouse that are so controversial that she must be expelled from the university? A look at the date of December 2021 raises suspicions that it might have had something to do with the hysteria surrounding the Black Lives Matters movement, and that would be correct. “I was generally criticizing Woke ideas,” Widdowson is quoted as saying.

She has also dared to question the hyperbolic and extreme accusations made against Canada’s residential school system as “genocidal” and “murderous.” She has questioned the claim that 215 children are buried in the yard of the Kamloops Residential School, as have a growing number of other voices of sanity, such as Barbara Kay writing in The National Post and retired Oxford Professor and Life Peer Nigel Biggar in his The Canadian Atrocity Myth. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the site in May 2022 and acted as if the claims that 215 children’s graves had been discovered and the story was true. But even four years later not a single shovel has been put in the ground and no bones have been exhumed.

Tens of millions of federal dollars have flowed to the Kamloops Indian Band, but no proof has ever been discovered to confirm the accusations. Nigel Biggar writes:

On Kamloops, Brodie [a Member of the Provincial Legislature in British Columbia ]was quite correct: No graves of missing children have been discovered, because no disinterment has been attempted almost four years after the claim was first made. What we do know is that the alleged ‘mass grave’ is the site of a century-old septic system, whose trenches lined with clay tiles match the direction and depth of the suspect “sub-surface anomalies” identified by ground-penetrating radar in 2021. Apart from indigenous say-so, there is no evidence of hidden graves—either in Kamloops or anywhere else in Canada.

The woke narrative of European settlers committing genocide against peaceful natives and stealing land is a dangerous myth that distorts the truth in the interest of arousing passions and shaming the Canadian government and churches for a whole series of false accusations.

An NDP member of parliament has put forward proposed legislation (which is by no means dead yet) to make “residential school denialism” a crime. The NDP press release describes the legislation:

If passed, this bill would add to the Criminal Code the offence of willfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, justifying or downplaying the harm caused by the residential school system in Canada.

Obviously “downplaying” is pretty broad language. This blatant attempt to link the supposed atrocity at residential schools to the Holocaust is an insult to the memory of Jewish and other victims of that period in history. It is Orwellian in its scope and if passed would inhibit free debate over the facts of the case. Scholarly assessment would be impossible.

In such a climate of authoritarianism, the firing of a tenured professor signals the depth of the crisis in contemporary Canada. We are in grave danger of losing our basic freedom to debate the facts and challenge narratives.