Alberta Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides.
Don’t let the rhetoric fool you, Alberta Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides is no particular friend of free speech. Credit: Alberta Newsroom / Flickr Credit: Alberta Newsroom / Flickr

Notwithstanding the inevitable rhetoric about defending “free speech” on campus, it’s worth remembering that’s not the reason for Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’ planned homework assignment for Alberta’s post-secondary institutions. 

In a press release Friday allegedly about “strengthening free speech on campus,” Nicolaides claimed, incorrectly, “that it is abundantly clear that more needs to be done to ensure our institutions are adequately protecting free speech” and vowed therefore that “post-secondary institutions will have to report annually to government on their efforts to protect free speech on campus.”

You can’t do too much to protect free speech, I guess, although there’s precious little evidence that public Canadian universities and colleges are doing a particularly lousy job on that file, as Nicolaides’ press release implies. But either way, strangling post-secondary administrators in additional red tape isn’t likely to do much to help. 

It is unlikely, however, that Nicolaides has any intention of protecting free speech on Alberta campuses. Rather, the goal of this new front in the neoliberal internationale’s ongoing War on Wokeness is to impose controls on campuses that suit the ideology of the UCP and the censorious prejudices of its extremist base. 

The release, published in the midst of a controversy involving a planned lecture by an academic who denies established facts about Canada’s Indian Residential School system and interprets the goals of those dreadful institutions in a positive light, cites a study by a notorious right-wing think tank that purports to show significant numbers of university professors censor their true opinions on certain topics. 

The release quotes Grande Prairie MLA Tracy Allard, Premier Danielle Smith’s soon-to-retire Parliamentary Secretary for civil liberties, whose job assignment was clearly to deceptively portray COVID-19 vaccine refuseniks as victims of an assault on civil rights. 

It also quotes a couple of disgruntled right-wing professors who jointly authored a screed in the National Post about how mistreated conservatives are on campus nowadays. 

Dr. Nicolaides (PhD, University of Cyprus, 2013) ended his release by praising the successful effort by the Kenney Government, in which he served in the same portfolio, to force all Alberta publicly supported post-secondary institutions to endorse the “Chicago Principles.”

There was one exception, the release noted, almost as an afterthought: Burman University in Lacombe, which is operated by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. It was given a pass by Nicolaides owing to its “religious values”* – which is a telling detail about the minister’s motivation. 

As for the Chicago Statement on Free Expression, it is an ingenious manifesto that uses “free speech” as code for the right of the privileged and powerful to shout down everyone else.

The manifesto was adopted by the University of Chicago in 2014 under pressure from campus conservatives who wanted to push back against popular opposition to racist speakers on campus, university prohibitions of racist, sexist and homophobic attacks on students, and demands to change the names of buildings and remove statues celebrating historic figures known for their racism or cruelty.

To implement the policy, the university hired the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an organization that journalist and Yale political science lecturer Jim Sleeper says “purports to protect ‘free speech’ on college campuses, but expends more energy blaming — and chilling — ‘politically correct’ activists and administrators.”

The language of the Chicago Statement, calling for “free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation,” strives to be inspiring in the style of the United States Constitution. Like the U.S. Constitution, which was written to ensure human slavery would be an enduring institution, it is deceptive, intended to privilege certain ideas and groups and marginalize others.

The statement and its supporters make a straw man of safe spaces where marginalized student groups can gather free from harassment by people who dislike or disagree with them. But the goal is to create a safe space for only one set of ideas, the economic nostrums and social conservative rigidities of the increasingly radicalized North American right.

When students use their free speech rights to push back, naturally, they will be assailed as snowflakes and bullies – just as we saw happen last week in Lethbridge.

You can count on it as well that this “free speech” principle will also be extended by the UCP to allow anti-abortion radicals and anti-vaccine extremists to harass and threaten students on campus.

As for defending those who are attacked on campus for expressing thoughts unpopular in conservative circles – say, for example, defending the human rights of Palestinians or, God forbid, advocating the right to express one’s self in a drag show (especially at Burman University, presumably) no one should expect any help from the Chicago Principles or Nicolaides.

The same obviously applies to university administrators who dare to speak up freely in defiance of the orders of Nicolaides and the UCP, especially if they’re not around to defend themselves.

*This justification seems odd, since with the exception of the denomination’s insistence the Sabbath should be observed on Saturday and its preference for vegetarianism, Seventh Day Adventist doctrine is not all that different from that of most evangelical Protestant sects. It would be interesting to know just what “religious values” the exemption is intended to protect.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...