BY HANK REICHMAN

Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford has warned the province’s public universities and colleges they will face funding cuts if they fail to adopt free-speech policies that defend controversial speakers on campus. The government announced yesterday that it will give schools four months to design, implement and enforce wide-ranging free-speech policies.  Ford had promised during the spring election campaign that he would tie funding to free speech on campus.

“Colleges and universities should be places where students exchange different ideas and opinions in open and respectful debate,” Ford said in a statement.  “Our government made a commitment to the people of Ontario to protect free speech on campuses.”  The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario will be tasked with monitoring compliance starting in September, 2019.  Schools that fail to maintain the policies will face “reductions to their operating grant funding, proportional to the severity of non-compliance,” according to a government release.

Current policies required by Ontario’s government mandate that schools remain open to discussion and free inquiry, should not shield students from ideas or opinions they find offensive, and bar students or teachers from obstructing others from expressing their views.  However, “hate speech” is not, as under the U.S. First Amendment, protected in Canada, although Canadian courts have defined such speech quite narrowly.

The Ford plan marks an unprecedented interference with institutional autonomy, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) warned. “CAUT has long advocated that campuses must be sites where there is a free and open exchange of ideas,” said executive director David Robinson. “But universities and colleges should set their own policies, not politicians.  Institutional autonomy – including the freedom from government diktat – is itself necessary to protect free expression and academic freedom.”

Robinson added that the government’s requirements are “a solution in search of a problem.”

“The belief that free expression is being squelched on campuses across the province and across the country is grossly exaggerated and masks a thinly veiled political agenda,” said Robinson. “The difficult conversations about free speech on campus today are about reconciling unhindered debate with the need to ensure that all voices can be heard without facing discrimination and harassment. This can be a very difficult terrain to navigate, but punitive measures such as those proposed by the Ford government will create a more litigious and polarizing environment, making it more difficult to find solutions.”

“Ironically, the requirements may have the effect of actually curtailing free expression on campus,” Robinson suggested, owing to their vague guidelines as to what might constitute interference with free speech.  “The real problems around free speech and academic freedom on campus today are linked to issues such as government defunding, and the increasing precariousness of academic work,” added Robinson.  “The Ford government could better serve the people by focusing on these real problems, and not chasing after distractions.”

Jim Turk, director of Ryerson University’s Centre for Free Expression and Robinson’s predecessor, called the Ford policy an “unprecedented abuse of university autonomy.”  Universities, along with the media, are the foremost bastions of freedom of expression in the country, he said, adding it was “ironic” a government that set up a sex-ed “snitch line” and promised to prevent rallies critical of Israel would present itself as a protector of free speech.  “There’s an irony of the government trying to give the impression that they’re the ones defending free speech when they’ve been the critics of the exercise of free speech,” he said.

Turk said it was also troubling that the statement bans universities from recognizing or funding student organizations that refuse to follow the policy.  “That would seem to me to be a direct violation of the notions of free expression,” he said.  “What if there’s a student group that was highly critical of the policy?  Should they not have the right to exist and voice their criticism of it?”

The Ford proposal is similar to legislation proposed in the U.S. by the Goldwater Institute and adopted so far in several states.  Those proposals were analyzed critically in an April report by the AAUP’s Committee on Government Relations.  That report concluded, “Freedom of speech obtains when institutions and procedures exist that afford people a reasonable opportunity to exercise this right.  The existence or nonexistence of free speech cannot be gauged by the specific content of the views that people choose to express. The aim of the campus free-speech movement is, to the contrary, not process but outcome: its intention, as the Goldwater report makes clear, is to bring about a new “balance of forces” on college campuses.”

The Ford move may foreshadow similar actions on a national level.  Federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said last year while running for his party’s leadership that schools should lose all federal funding if they fail to protect freedom of speech on campus.

Ford rose to national prominence in part due to his late brother Rob Ford. Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto from 2010 to 2014, made international headlines in 2013 when a cell phone video surfaced in which he smoked crack cocaine and commented, while high, on political issues.

Earlier this month I was privileged to attend a meeting of CAUT’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, where this and other issues facing our Canadian colleagues — many of them quite familiar to those of us here in the U.S. — were discussed.  I plan to post a fuller report on that meeting soon.