Free Speech, But Only If You Agree With Me

Canada's universities are showing a disturbing trend of shutting out right-wing voices.

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant and the National Post’s David Frum are both disturbed at the apparent double standard Canadian universities are exercising when deciding who is allowed to speak on campus. George Galloway, hero to a faction of Canada’s left, visited York University on Tuesday, and university president Mamdouh Shoukri reportedly tried to stifle dissent by writing warning letters to a rabbi organizing anti-Galloway protests. Levant says Shoukri learned this letter-writing intimidation racket from University of Ottawa president Allan Rock, whose administration sent right-wing American commentator Anne Coulter a warning note before she spoke on campus. Levant accuses Canadian university presidents of "threatening to sic the police on their critics.”

Frum says York’s free speech rules only apply to left-wingers. While the school welcomed Galloway, it refused to pay for security at a planned visit by right-wing iconoclast Daniel Pipes, forcing its cancellation. “That’s how things operate at York,” writes Frum. “They have their formal rules. And then they have their real rules.”

Both Levant and Frum have a valid point, and there is evidence that the protection of free speech on campuses is eroding. But their arguments would be more convincing if the columnists weren’t doing double duty as free speech advocates as well as critics of Galloway et al. Levant has previously called for Galloway to be barred from the country. Meanwhile, Frum is incredulous that York students would object to Pipes’s visit because Pipes is a “distinguished professor” – as if that renders it impossible for him to say anything objectionable. In reality, many people have raised legitimate concerns about his efforts to "monitor" academic institutions for anti-Israel bias. The free speech argument only works if it's independent from any ideological opinion, and by mixing them together, Frum and Levant muddle their message.

The Montreal Gazette takes a more balanced approach, decrying not only the anti-right biases of Canada’s universities, but the harsh bail conditions recently imposed on a G20 protestor. Taken together with universities’ apparent crusade against the right, the Gazette says this is evidence of a “troubling growing problem with opinion-suppression, not to say censorship, in Canada.”