The Canadian Freedom Convoy and the Fate of Our Universities
The Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT, Points Us Down the "Equity" Highway
The Truckers Freedom Convoy that converged on Ottawa and other sites along the Canada-US border in February of 2022 continues to be a flash point of strident disagreement in Canada. Even as the the Truckers’ parking protest in Ottawa was unfolding, there seemed to be a clear split developing. Working class people both formed and massively supported the process of applying significant democratic pressure to bring about a needed reality check in our nation’s complacent capital. The aim was to inject some common sense into the jab-obsessed Trudeau government.
As the peaceful protest continued, urban professionals like the many civil servants inhabiting Ottawa tended to sneer their disapproval at the Truckers and at their enthusiastic supporters. Rallying behind the Ottawa mayor, an avid World Economic Forum devotee, the comfortable people getting steady pay as they worked from their Ottawa homes, seemed to agree with Trudeau’s intolerance. They had no empathy towards the towards the salt-of-the-earth folks who expected their representatives to be listened to and heard by federal authorities.
The urbanites looked at the Truckers as if they were barbaric hordes swooping in from the vast Canadian hinterland to disrupt the comfy patterns of the local inhabitants’ day-to-day lives. How dare these uppity outsiders come to the represent themselves in their fellow suffering citizens in the nation’s capital! Apparently a dominant view was that the politicians, the bureaucrats and the bought-and-paid-for media were doing just fine. They refused to believe the Truckers who were messengers of correct news. “Ottawa” is becoming a very crude dirty word for millions of Canadians outside the pompous little capital that holds the King’s keys to the federal palaces reigning over Trudeau’s sabotage of the once-mighty Canada.
It didn’t seem to dawn on the urban professionals of Ottawa how onerous and disgraceful the federal handling of the manufactured COVID crisis had become. The epic scale of the federal ineptitude that was literally killing and injuring large numbers of people in our national version of a ghastly worldwide phenomenon that is still unfolding and is still being obsessively covered up.
The well-publicized campaign to defame, smear and bury the Truckers movement is becoming increasingly rabid as we build towards a show trial that will take place in Southern Alberta this summer or fall. Four Truckers face Kafkaesque charges that they conspired to kill RCMP officers. These four individuals have been held in jail now for more than a year without having been convicted of anything. Meanwhile Trudeau’s publicists right up to the New York Times have been beating the drum of a trial by media whose object is obviously to discredit and delegitimize the whole Truckers movement as some sort insurrectionist plot by armed and dangerous Christian fundamentalists.
From Truckers Savagery to Woke Civilization?
Prof. Peter McInnis is President of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT. CAUT recently heaped contempt on the Freedom Convoy as if all sane and worthy people must necessarily agree that the movement is composed of primitive baboons threatening the higher civilizational principles coalescing around the ideals of “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.” It remains unclear where the principle of academic meritocracy fits into the matrix of woke aspirations?
In its own publication, CAUT describes itself as “the national voice for academic staff representing 72,000 teachers, librarians, researchers, general staff and other academic professionals at some 125 universities and colleges across the country.” The statement continues, “CAUT is an outspoken defender of academic freedom and works actively in the public interest to improve the quality and accessibility of post-secondary education in Canada.
From his elevated professional podium, Prof. McInnes declared.
“Recalling the previous conference three years ago, few among the delegates would have imagined that we were on the cusp of a pandemic that would further complicate the equity objectives and extend the trajectories to realizing reforms.
It was also noted ruefully that in February 2022 the downtown core of Ottawa was embroiled in the weeks-long spectacle known loosely as the “freedom convoy.” Thousands of dissidents occupied public spaces, demanding redress for a long list of complaints ranging from COVID-19 vaccine polices to xenophobic intolerance for immigrants. The sentiments expressed by this ragtag assemblage was an anti-intellectual backlash against many of the principled demands of equity-deserving groups to substantive inclusion into both our society, and more specifically, progressive reforms in our universities and colleges.
The release of Justice Paul Rouleau’s report on the implementation of the Emergencies Act confirmed that the forces of intolerance and bigotry have not been cast aside in contemporary Canada. Conference delegates were adamant that the prospect of malcontents halting or backtracking on equity objectives would not discourage them from advancing our collective objectives.”
https://www.caut.ca/bulletin/2023/03/presidents-message-advancing-equity-collective-goal
Prof. McInnis is making a big stretch in characterizing the report of the Rouleau Commission as if its primary finding was “that the forces of intolerance and bigotry have not been cast aside in contemporary Canada.” Rather the report confirmed that PM Justin Trudeau had rigged a process he had set up to evaluate his own unjustified declaration of the Canadian equivalent of the war measures act. See, for instance this and this.
News of Prof. McInnis’ presidential address deeply offended faculty members, me included, in our association, Canadian Academics for COVID Ethics. In the CA4CE discussion entitled “No Hope for CAUT,” I wrote
“This "President's message" strays far from adherence to what we would expect of a fellow academic charged to represent professionally the diverse totality of the Canadian professoriate. The CAUT President appears to have unhinged himself from any sense of well-grounded understanding of the true nature of his job. With his brief commentary on the Canada's Freedom Convoy movement, the supercillious Peter McInnis has made himself an absurd caricature of a spoiled woke professor carelessly sabotaging our whole profession with his rude and ill-informed self-indulgences.”
Clearly Prof. McInnis believes he can defend academic freedom even as he sides with partisan forces well in line with the policies of the Trudeau and Biden governments as well as the corporatist vision dominating the World Economic Forum. Apparently he thinks nothing of downgrading and demeaning academic research, publication and teaching when it is not in line with his own opinions on the Freedom Convoy and, no doubt, on many other matters as well.
The opinions of the CAUT president seem to be well in line with the official orthodoxy of Critical Race Theory as well as the machinations of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. It seems that Freeland was the key decider in developing the Canadian government’s strategy concerning how to eject the Truckers. As demonstrated in Freeland’s own notes that were entered into the public domain in the course of the proceedings of the Rouleau Commission, her plan was developed in consultation with a top banker. That plan, which basically happened, was “to designate the [Truckers’] group as a terrorist group and seize their assets and impair them.”
See especially 2 hours, 28 minutes to 2 hours, 31 Minutes
Prof McInnis provides no documented proof to back up his decidedly unflattering characterization of the Truckers and their supporters. He characterizes them as “anti-immigrant” without dealing with the fact that many of them are immigrants. Quite likely Prof. McInnis’ stereotypical impressions were shaped by the reprehensible Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and other legacy media. The propagandistic quality of the CBC’s COVID-related output has been meticulous chronicled and assessed by journalist, Rodney Palmer, in his presentation to the National Citizens Inquiry now holding televised hearings in its a cross-Canada tour.
Video here
While Prof. McInnis doesn’t back up his commentary with any proof other than by a misleading reference to the report of Liberal Party Judge, Paul Rouleau, the film produced by Global Research.ca is based on providing visual evidence that counters the characterizations of PM Trudeau. The now-notorious commentary of Trudeau seems well in line with that of the CAUT President.
Mandated Interpretations of Issues Like Israel-Palestine Relations?
As current CAUT President, Prof. McInnis stands in a line of prior CAUT presidents, many of them quite distinguished. The CAUT found its calling after United College teacher and administrator, Harry S. Crowe was fired in 1958 for criticizing his employers at an institution known today as the University of Winnipeg. In the time of the Harry Crowe episode, Canada was about to go into a period of high-speed development and expansion of many universities. New policies and regulations were needed to set out the rules including those to create some sort of viable structures for “academic tenure.” How are faculty members to do their job if they can be sent packing whenever they try to speak truth to power?
Bora Laskin, a young Law Professor at the University of Toronto, joined with University of Saskatchewan Economic Professor, Veron Fowke, to investigate the Harry Crowe case on behalf of CAUT. In 1959 they came up with a report about "an unjust and unwarranted invasion of the security of academic tenure." They made their assessment by addressing concepts like natural justice, due process and academic freedom.”
Bora Laskin continued to make himself indispensable to the construction of the juridical framework for university education in Canada. He became CAUT President in 1964. Later he went on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1973 to 1984.
In an interview with Kirk Niergarth in 2021, Prof. McInnis, then Chair of the History Department at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, sets himself in the context CAUT’s heritage.
It is entirely appropriate for him to have done so as a long-serving member of CAUT’s Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee. In the interview the current CAUT President discusses a number of significant cases. He did not, however, touch on the academic freedom case of this tenured senior professor who was suddenly suspended without pay and without any due process in October of 2016. University of Lethbridge Dr. Mike Mahon went so far as to declare me a trespasser if I set foot on the campus where I had taught for 26 years.
in fact Prof. McInnis did not report on any of the cases instigated by the very active Israel lobby in Canada. This formidable lobby frequently targets faculty members and academic activities that call attention to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. One such example took place in 2009, when B’nai Brith Canada and several other Jewish organization tried to shut down a planned conference at Glendon College, part of York University in Toronto. The conference began with a plan by several law professors to hold a conference to look at a one-state federal solution to Israel-Palestinian relations.
There is a great deal of primary and secondary material on this controversy including the book by Susan G. Drummond entitled, Unthinkable Thoughts: Academic Freedom and the One-State Model for Israel and Palestine.
A very concise synthesis of my case took the form of a communication to former CAUT President, James Compton. The report came from Prof. Owen Holmes, one of the primary founders of the University of Lethbridge who helped me to understand the procedural manoeuvres and smear tactics when they were hitting me hard and fast. In his report Prof. Holmes wrote on 20 August, 2018
“As I see it, only the CAUT has the resources and capability to investigate and report this case [of Anthony James Hall] that unfolded over a two year period involving egregious behavior by both a board of trustees and a provincial government. Failure of the CAUT to attend to this unseemly episode would be a grievous blow to academic freedom in Canada setting an horrendous precedent. In my opinion, it would mark the beginning of the end of the hard earned reputation and credibility of the CAUT. The stakes are high.”
Here is the twelve-page report by Prof. Holmes. In my opinion the issues and facts the report raises remain as timely and crucial as ever, maybe even moreso now that cancel culture has become such a frequently used device to stifle and silence awkward truths supporting established sites of wealth and power.
Has CAUT lost its hard earned reputation and credibility as Prof. Holmes predicted? Does Prof. Innis’ condemnation in Trudeauesque terms of the Freedom Convoy movement suggest that a deeper malaise has taken hold of CAUT, a once-august organization? What are the implications of the top priority given by many woke organizations, CAUT prominent among them, to the ideals of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, DIE. As I look out from Canada at the world, I wonder about the future of higher education now that the precedent of mandated ideas and interpretations has followed in the wake of mandated injections.
Hek Carol and John Day. Do you two know each other?It seems that Substack is quite the place for meeting new folks and renewing old friendships and associations. There is major league stuff happening here as your presence attests.
Excellent article, here, south of the border, in the United States, the Teacher's Unions are also thoroughly compromised by "woke culture" in service to the would be planetary rulers. John Adam Klyczek has chronicled it well in his articles, as well as in his book- School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education. Unfortunately, your insights and Klyczek's work have yet to penetrate the bamboozled academics who have blindly gone along with this crazy agenda, so threatening to our species and planet! Thank-you for your strong voice and courage!