Ann Coulter: Canadian free speech hero
Canadian media to UOttawa--you suck
The reviews of Ann Coulter’s aborted talk at the University of Ottawa are in, and the message from Canada’s editorial and op/ed writers is, “Dear University of Ottawa, you suck.”
At the Globe and Mail, an editorial argued that “the forces of intimidation won out over public inquiry” and, as such, “It was a defeat of the university’s basic mission to educate and enlighten.” In a similar vein, the National Post editorialists remember the good old days, when “Universities used to fight vigorously for the free expression of ideas, all sorts of ideas, even discomforting and controversial ones.” When Coulter’s talk was canceled, “it was a triumph for thuggery over scholarship.” An Ottawa Citizen editorial, also invoking the word “thuggery,” goes even further and says the incident is just the latest example of “totalitarianism on Canadian campuses.” You can find similar arguments from editorial boards right across the country, from the Montreal Gazette, to the Calgary Herald, to the Vancouver Province. Curiously, the Toronto Star editorial board has so far ignored the issue.
I was beginning to worry at the fact that Ezra Levant’s blog has been silent on the cancellation of Coulter’s speech. Thankfully, he popped up in the Citizen this morning. Focusing his barbs on U of O provost Francois Houle, Levant said Houle’s “bizarre” email to Coulter, warning her she could be subject to criminal charges, was a “starter pistol for radical students.” For Levant, “it was the assessment of police, campus security and Coulter’s own bodyguard that there was too much physical danger to Coulter and the audience to proceed.” However, he stops short of calling the protesters rioters, and, instead uses the awkward phrase “student disrupters.” Levant also accused the U of O of indulging “in some of [the] most offensive conduct in the country on their campus.” Citing Israel Apartheid Week, Levant says “Never has Houle seen fit to issue a warning to his campus’s steady stream of Jew-baiters to govern their tongues.”
Paul Saurette, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Ottawa, sees the rancour over Coulter as an opportunity for a teachable moment. With a healthy dose of John Stuart Mill (an assuredly original source on free speech . . .), Saurette submits Globe readers to a yawning missive on the theoretical implications of free expression in Canada. Here’s a sample: “But we also need to remember that, even in theory, the principle of free speech is not a pure metaphysical law that says we are literally free to say anything we like.” Saurette is hopeful that the Coulter incident will “inspire” Canadians to spare “a few moments to think about the complex nature of free speech and its implications.” I get it, free speech is complicated. . . .
Lawrence Martin offers a somewhat different take. After making the obligatory sops to free expression, he, rightfully I would say, points to several greater threats to liberty that have failed to spark the level of outrage seen in the Coulter case. Stephen Harper has engaged in an “unprecedented” clamping down of freedom since he took office. From trying to censor “coverage of dead bodies returning from Afghanistan,” to putting “out a secret handbook instructing members how to muzzle parliamentary committees,” to thumbing a nose “at high court rulings on Omar Khadr,” the government has turned Ottawa into “Muzzletown.”
Maclean’s On Campus blogger Jeff Rybak has also argued that there are much greater things to worry about than the Coulter saga. After naming several news stories much more worthy of our attention, Rybak laments, “all I can bloody well hear about is this screwball American provocateur who has just about nothing relevant to say to Canadians and nothing informed to say to anyone. Someone please tell me why I’m supposed to care?”
And what has been the net result of the University of Ottawa protests, and Houle’s preemptive letter? The Post‘s Kevin Libin sums it up nicely: “Burnishing the image of Ann Coulter as a teller of dangerous truths may not have been quite the goal of Mr. Houle and the U of O mob, but they have unquestionably done it. In the U.S. media, their school, and this country, have become in the last 48 hours an object of scorn and ridicule, on all sides of the political spectrum, while Ms. Coulter has been cast a free-speech hero. No wonder she seems so cheerful.”
Congrats, Canadian newspapers and news magazines, for turning this into a “free speech” issue when Coulter herself was responsible for canceling the event. There was no attempt to silence Coulter, neither from the University of Ottawa or from the government. Some students showed up and reacted angrily, exercising their own rights to free speech.
Freedom of speech does not free you from the consequences of what you say. We have no responsibility to support Ann Coulter when she makes racist, hateful comments. I didn’t hear these arguments form the Canadian press when holocaust denier Ernst Zundel’s freedom of speech was being challenged. Coulter has stated that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed on planes, and should instead take magic carpets or camels. That is explicitly suggesting systematic discrimination against an identifiable group, while throwing in insults for good measure. Free speech does not mean I need to have your back when all the people you slandered and deliberately pissed off “just because” catch up with you. It means the cops show up if things get out of hand.
Maclean’s is at best playing into Coulter’s hands and at worst complicit in her efforts to profit from controversy.
There are elements within the Conservative party who want to run the next election on a human rights agenda. It wouldn’t suprise me if this was an opening shot on that front.
I find that unlikely, Barrett–it would raise a lot of uncomfortable questions about their treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan.
Heh. Yeah, they’re a little bit mired in that. But that’s overseas, and it touches on the honour of our troops. My impression is that they want to start out with the hate laws, and then move into the hot-button realms of gender, race and sexual orientation.
dkfghlfhjfla on 25 March 2010: wrote”..freedom of expression does not imply the freedom to not be drowned out by a crowd of people that are also expressing their freedom of expression..”
It does. It’s like in kindergarten. You must take turns. You can’t shout the other guy down without interfering with his free-speech rights. Freedom of expression imposes a duty on the audience to listen. If you attend you must let her speak her piece, or leave and protest outside.
The issue is not Ann Coulter or Ezra Levant or the U of O students. The issue here is: a VP of a Canadian university took it upon himself to censor a guest in our country and attempted to control the “message”. Motives notwithstanding, attempted thought control on a Canadian university campus is extraordinary dangerous.
Moreover it’s deeply offensive to all who have fought for and are currently fighting for a democratic country where a market place of free ideas can flourish.
Provost Houle, the decent thing for you to do is resign.
Comment by Kowboy Ken on 25 March 2010: “…You can’t shout the other guy down without interfering with his free-speech rights. Freedom of expression imposes a duty on the audience to listen.”
There is absolutely no case outside of dictatorships where this is true. There is no law or moral imperative requiring people to speak in turn. Free speech rights are imposed on the state, not the individual. It is not illegal for me to interrupt or tell someone to STFU.
What you might be implying is that it’s impolite to stand up during a speech and start shouting someone down. I can’t argue with that, and if the organizers felt the need to escort someone from the venue because of their behaviour, they can do so. It’s not a moral or legal issue though.
Gee, in the USA we hear all of it, and let people make up their minds. Apparently Canadians lack the ability to think for themselves and must be guided by their leftist betters. So the level of conformity at your Universities is not quite up to the levels desired? Given the ideological conformity of the canadian academic class I would think the students might want to hear an non traditional opinion, in Canada it may be the only chance they ever get.
Don’t get all sanctimonious there, GI Joe. You certainly don’t “hear all of it” in the USA–you hear significantly less than we do. I’ve seen people escorted off by American cops for wearing a T-shirt with a slogan on it. You have “free speech zones” at left-wing protests, as if everywhere in the US isn’t supposed to be a “free-speech zone”. Your citizens aren’t much better–ever heard of the Tea Baggers? They don’t really “hear all of it and let people make up their minds”, do they?
I have a suspicion you know a whole lot less about “the academic classes” than you think you do.
@ david
*No, they’re called radical “rapturist’ evangelicals and they are eager to shut down any educational institution which differs from their unscientific, creationist fairytales. Yet again, another import from the US – next it will be “jesus camps” such as they have in the States, to indoctrinate young minds into being unthinking Stepford slaves. Child abuse, really.*
And what fantasyworld is it, `David’, that your `rapturist’ evangelicals are threatening the freedom of speech of anyone on any university campus, in the u.s., Canada or anywhere?
Meanwhile, while you attend to your dreamland `rapturists’, the Islamists are shutting down freedom of speech on campus daily.
*There are elements within the Conservative party who want to run the next election on a human rights agenda. It wouldn’t suprise me if this was an opening shot on that front.*
Unfortunately, the CPC will not dare to do this – and they should.
If anything, Jen and all the rest of the `human rights’ racket need to be exposed for the charlatans and anti-liberal zealots that they are.
Who cares?
[...] An op-ed at Maclean’s on the fallout. Tagged with: angle inlet, ann coulter, buffalo point, canada, ezra levant, [...]
The big question is why any university would invite Coulter to speak to students on campus in the first place. What are they supposed to learn from her? That it’s acceptable and clever to make snide or hateful remarks about people because they belong to a particular religion, or other such reasons?
Once Ottawa U issued the invitation though, they should have just put up with the consequences and let her speak and let the students boo or cheer depending on whether they like that sort of thing. This way they’ve given her a chance to be a hero in the eyes of the ignorant and the hateful.
Andy, Canadians are well aware of Coulter’s opinions. She’d be welcome at sleazy comedy clubs, on right wing talk shows or at some kind of hate fest, with her stupid remarks about Muslims, etc. Some people think Universities are a place for intelligent debate.
Dumbo writes:
“vive Ann Coulter……..thanks to you thugs at the ottawa university that disrupted the speaking engagment”
So people who express their own freedom of speech with ideas contrary to yours are are thugs, and those who express freedom of speech wiht ideas similar to yours are heroes?
Fact is, Coulter and Levant cancelled themselves. They were too cowardly to face anything but a complacent head-nodding group of sycophants.
Anyone who has the power to make you belive adsurdities, has the power to make you commit injustices – Voltaire.
If you think her affinities are hateful, check out the short film Submission by Ayann Hirsi Ali.