Freedom of speech under threat on university campuses in Canada

From the Fraser Institute

By Michael Zwaagstra and Matthew D. Mitchell

Obviously, when students feel that their grades are at risk, they will be far less likely to express their genuine opinions or even ask questions during class discussions. Not only does this make classes less interesting, it also undermines the entire purpose of a university education.

Universities should be places where all ideas are welcomed and explored. In many Canadian university classrooms, however, only the “correct” viewpoint is heard.

According to a new survey (conducted by Leger and published by the Fraser Institute) of 1,200 Canadian university students and recent graduates, politically left-of-centre students were far more likely than their right-of-centre classmates to report that their views were welcomed and encouraged in class.

For example, 83 per cent of right-leaning students believe that professors advocate a left-of-centre view—and 45 per cent of left-leaning students agree with them.

Forty-two per cent of right-leaning students say they experienced a university classroom environment that limited discussion and questions on controversial topics to only one side of the argument. In contrast, only 29 per cent of left-leaning students felt the same way.

To make matters worse, 50 per cent of right-leaning students said they sometimes felt uncomfortable expressing their opinions due to the views of the professors leading the class. Only 36 per cent of left-leaning students reported the same experience.

Interestingly, when asked whether there was a “safe” point of view on controversial topics in university classes, a majority from both groups answered “yes” with little difference between right-leaning students (58 per cent) and left-leaning students (51 per cent).

A significant number of right-leaning students (37 per cent) also said they feared formal consequences for expressing honest thoughts, opinions or even asking questions in their classes. Among right-leaning students who expressed this concern, 74 per cent feared their professors would lower their grades for expressing the “wrong” opinion in class.

Obviously, when students feel that their grades are at risk, they will be far less likely to express their genuine opinions or even ask questions during class discussions. Not only does this make classes less interesting, it also undermines the entire purpose of a university education.

Other studies also reveal the politically one-sided nature of university campuses. For example, a 2022 survey published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute found that 88 per cent of Canadian university professors vote for parties of the left and only 9 per cent support parties on the right. No wonder students feel their class discussions are consistently one-sided.

Similarly, a 2024 survey published by Heterodox Academy and College Plus found that more than half of students were reluctant to discuss certain issues such as the current Israel/Hamas conflict and transgender identity, and nearly half were reluctant to even broach the subject of politics. More alarmingly, a majority of students favoured limiting free expression on campus.

While many university professors are quick to describe themselves as strong supporters of diversity, this does not seem to include diversity of thought. A truly diverse campus would welcome a variety of intellectual perspectives in the spirit of open and scholarly debate. A campus where everyone looks different but thinks the same is not meaningfully diverse. As economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill argued many years ago, we are all impoverished when we silence one perspective.

It’s concerning that most students feel there’s a “safe” political view on controversial topics, particularly when students who hold a minority viewpoint feel the least safe expressing their views.

Of course, things won’t change overnight. But the first step to dealing with a problem is to admit that you have one. In that light, university administrators, professors and politicians should acknowledge that the current lack of viewpoint diversity on campus is a serious problem for all Canadians. Democracies function best when people freely express, and vigorously debate, competing ideas. As institutions of higher learning, universities should exemplify what free and open discussion looks like.

While there’s nothing wrong with professors holding political views and sharing those views with their students, they should not restrict free and open debate in their classrooms. This means ensuring that all students, including those whose opinions are in the minority, are guaranteed the right to share their views without fear of reprisal.

Michael Zwaagstra

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

Matthew D. Mitchell

Senior Fellow in the Centre for Human Freedom, Fraser Institute

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Mic Drop: The Thought Police Are Coming To Take You Away

Published on September 4, 2025

Bruce Dowbiggin

Graham Linehan, best known for co-creating genial British TV figure Father Ted, says he was arrested by five armed police officers the moment he landed at Heathrow Airport. The reason? Three tweets calling trans women “violent,” mocking a protest photo, and saying “I hate them.”

“I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to the hospital because the stress nearly killed me.”

Comic freedom? Welcome to modern Britain where the mic-drop moment is at His Majesty’s pleasure.

The chilling 2024 U.S. movie Civil War shows a fictional documentary news team as it crosses a dystopian America in the aftermath of societal breakdown. The film makers take pains not to engage in contemporary political issues. The schism has happened, and all that remains is bloody, pitiless anarchy. It ends in the White House with a cowering president barely hanging onto his authority.

The scenes of murder and torture are unrelenting. (Viewers will be excused if they turn to Happy Gilmore II instead.) But what was conjecture about the future in the spring of 2024 has become too close for comfort as, around the Western world, ruling elites cling desperately to privilege in the face of populist movements fed up with unlimited immigration, gender bending, self dealing and, as Linehan discovered, draconian censorship to protect the above.

Large recent demonstrations against entrenched authority have grown larger as leftist governments try to entrench the noblesse oblige captured by British Labour MP Bridget Phillipson’s assertion that “Yes, asylum seekers’ rights come first.” Here is the pushback in Ireland. Here is Australia. This is Britain. Here’s New Zealand. Even in rules-bound Japan the pushback is happening They are not outliers.

The issues vary, but at this point the demonstrations all have one common theme. It is the one Donald Trump currently exploits. It is not immigration, foreign wars, Ukraine, troops in the streets etc. It is the growing chasm between the privileged and the ordinary citizen. Between young and old. He took that anger all the way to the White House. Twice.

Civil War hints broadly at this anger without citing specific issues. In the non-cinematic world, the simmering rage created by the handling of Covid lockdowns (in 2022 CNN declared the vaccine 100 percent effective in 18-24 year olds ) and vaccines between 2019-2023 was the flashpoint for many apolitical citizens in the U.S. and other nations where the virus was used to render traditional rights and freedoms obsolete.

It stunningly moved Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to partner with the demon Trump. The U.S. mainstream media tried to ignore them, propping up a demented Joe Biden and fostering the performative Jussie Smollett to Hunter Biden’s laptop. It further established them as tools of the privileged. The smear impact was similar in other nations. As Linehan has learned Britain may be the closest to a civil conflict as its permanently Woke Labour government is greasing the skids for Sharia law in the near future.

But they’re hardly unique. The two sides of the West are beyond speaking terms. Here, leftist members of the French Parliament do the snob turn, refusing to shake hands with a member of Marine Le Pen’s party. Hollywood doesn’t miss a day without demonizing MAGA. But with populist right-wing governments now running Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Finland, Poland and Hungary plus electoral breakthroughs in Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Britain, the populist wave in Europe is undeniable.

Strangely immune from this looming trend is Canada’s ruling minority Liberals. Here’s Trudeau groomsman and cabinet place holder Sean Fraser. issuing the all-clear. “This isn’t the Wild West. It’s Canada.” All Canada needs apparently is more tender ministrations from Carney’s army. Elbows mUp, dudes.

As we noted in the spring election campaign, the Liberals won by ignoring the under-50 demographic while placating white urban Boomers with the spectre of Orange Man Bad. Trump had made the mistake of telling Trudeau/ Carney that, after their efforts, the nation’s stock is so low internationally on multiple fronts that it would be better off as a U.S. state.

For Canadians still reading their 1980s copies of Macleans and watching Knowlton Nash this was a heresy. True, but a heresy. Led by vituperative cries of “fascism” from Andrew Coyne they’re still blaming POTUS 45/47 for the collapse of Canada under a tidal wave of immigration, money laundering and climate lunacy.

Reports Sam Cooper: “Trump and US law enforcement agencies know exactly what’s happening in Canada. So when the RCMP blocked the DEA from investigating fentanyl networks located here, it was just another nail in our coffin” Others have, like Trump, noticed that the Canada of hockey and equalization payments is not the Canada of the present. Here’s Joe Rogan saying he’s now changed his mind about ever moving to Canada.

Some, like noted Canadian Malcolm Gladwell, are finally waking up to the pressure of his nation’s sanctimony. Gladwell is now recanting his support for trans athletes in women’s sports. He says he was cowed into saying so. In fact, you can be arrested for hate speech in Trudeau/ Carney Canada if you follow Gladwell’s example. He now lives in NYC.

It would be understandable if no one had warned that their infatuation with Woke would catch up. But Canadian writer Mark Steyn foretold today’s insanity. “It was “a decade this summer since I mused on the ill-advised masses eschewing the well-advised Jeb and Hillary for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The response of the ‘lunatic mainstream’ has been, in France, Germany, the United States and elsewhere, to attempt to criminalise its opposition…

“… the history of our time is that the mainstream is lunatic, which is why, in any recognizable sense, both North America and western Europe are on the brink of the abyss.”

An abyss that the West’s elites— particularly in Canada— refuse to acknowledge, preferring the dewey dawn of the Clinton or Obama presidencies. They toss around terms like tyrant to distract from the cliff they’ve built. They pose. They primp. As security expert Mike Benz notes, “The vast majority of stock leftists are not true believers, they have strong beliefs, loosely held.”

So batten the hatches. Sharia reality is at the door and it’s got a search warrant for your culture.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

Censorship Industrial Complex

Canadian gov’t claims privacy provision in online censorship bill was “accidentally” removed

Published on September 3, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The government apparently ‘deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted,’ a law professor said.

The Liberal government of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney confirmed that a privacy provision in the Trudeau-era Online Streaming Act law, which aims to censor legal internet content in Canada, may have been accidentally removed.

According to reports, the federal government is now “looking into” what happened to the privacy provision for Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, that became law in 2023.

Last week, Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor who has long been critical of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s numerous internet censorship laws, noted that the privacy provision was removed two months after Bill C-11 became law. This was accomplished through an amendment to another bill.

According to Geist, in his August 25 blog, due to what is “likely a legislative error,” the federal government “deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted.”

“As a result, a provision stating that the Broadcasting Act ‘shall be construed and applied in a manner that is consistent with the right to privacy of individuals’ was removed from the bill, leaving in its place two nearly identical provisions related to official languages.”

Geist noted that the Broadcasting Act has, for the past two years, “included an interpretation clause that makes no sense, and efforts to include privacy within it are gone.”

Canada’s Department of Heritage says it knows about the privacy omission, as it has been “recently been made aware of what appears to be an inadvertent oversight in a coordinating amendment and is looking into it,” a spokesperson noted in a statement to media.

Bill C-11 mandates that Big Tech companies pay to publish Canadian content on their platforms. As a result, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, blocked all access to news content in Canada. Google has promised to do the same rather than pay the fees laid out in the new legislation.

The bill was already supposed to have been implemented by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the country’s broadcast regulator that is tasked with putting in place the law.

Senator not happy with mistake

Digging deeper, it appears that during Bill C-11’s legislative process, Canadian Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne put forth an amendment, based on advice from Canada’s federal privacy commissioner, that the bill contain privacy protections. This then became part of Bill C-11, or the Online Streaming Act, which stated that it would be made so that it respects a person’s privacy.

Miville-Dechêne was not happy with the mistake, noting, “I’m a bit surprised, because I thought there were many levels of verification … But, you know, mistakes happen. I think now the question is that it has to be corrected quickly.”

Trudeau’s Online Streaming Act became law in April 2023, with the privacy protections included. However, this only lasted for two months, as the federal government went ahead with Bill C-13, which, as noted by Geist, had “buried at the end of the bill” a change to the “Broadcasting Act that few seemed to notice.”

A part of Bill C-13 amended the Online Streaming Act to alter language in a provision about official languages for so-called minority communities. This meant that, in effect, Bill C-13 replaced the privacy protections.

“Somehow, no one noticed the change or worked through the implications of the provision (unless, more troublingly, this was the government’s attempt to undo the privacy change). As a result, when both bills received royal assent, the privacy provision in the Broadcasting Act was replaced by a second provision on official languages,” Geist said.

“The Broadcasting Act’s interpretation clause now includes two very similar provisions on official language minorities and no provision on protecting privacy. One would hope that this was not the intent, but the government was always too focused on the political side of Bill C-11 and did not pay enough attention to the specific implications of the legislation.”

The government has claimed that despite the apparent mistake the public and private-sector privacy laws still apply.