Thank you, Madam Chair.
Members of the committee, thank you for your invitation.
My name is Arnaud Bernadet, and I'm a professor in the French literature department at McGill University. I'm also a member of the Observatoire sur la liberté d'expression. In recent years, my work, books and articles have focused on freedom of expression and academic freedom, the state of democratic conversation in the face of cultural wars, and the cancel culture.
My remarks will focus on expressive freedoms in academia. On the one hand, it's because of its specificity, since it involves two types of public freedoms—academic freedom and freedom of expression—which are distinct, of course, but also have certain areas of intersection. On the other hand, it's because, over the past 10 years, the university has been a breeding ground for experimenting with what is going on in the rest of society, that is to say a renewal or even a radicalization of cultural wars, from taking down statues to social media to the tragedy at the University of Waterloo, where a stabbing took place in June 2023 during a gender theories class.
I understand how important it is for members of Parliament to consider possible legislative safeguards to protect freedom of expression. Based on my work, it seems to me that what is weakened is a culture of contradiction on which the dynamics of debate are based, in favour of a culture of division. Often demonized, cancelling practices may be less the cause than the symptom. It is important to remember what the action of cancelling represents, particularly for minority groups, who, by definition, have few means of reversing or rebalancing the balance of power in society, often in a symbolic way.
What we're seeing is that, increasingly, scenes of cancelling are based on a triangle between the target who is the subject of the cancelling, the claimant who applies pressure by holding the dominant parties to account, and a third force that comes between the two and that actually carries out the act of cancelling.
In the case of universities, the main culprits are the administrators themselves, who, for reasons of reputation or customer calculations, will give in under pressure, without supporting the faculty. I could give many examples. Think of the Frances Widdowson lectures at the University of Lethbridge that were cancelled or disrupted or the one given by gay lawyer Robert Wintemute at McGill University.
Institutions are increasingly relaying some damaging confusion around freedom of expression to meet the demand of their audiences. This was revealed by the controversy over the “n” word at the University of Ottawa in 2020. In this specific case, there was a failure to distinguish between a word in usage and mention: reflecting on the history of a word or quoting a book title containing a racist term, as we have learned from formal logic and linguistics, is not using that word in the true sense.
However, an even more serious conflation has developed between hate speech, which is a firm limit on freedom of expression, and hurtful or offensive speech. If there was something of a legal nature to be done, it would perhaps be to reaffirm this dividing line between the two types of discourse.
In summary, both in the university and the public space, what is known as cancel culture takes various forms that do not necessarily translate into censorship, which implies the exercise of power. However, it creates, alongside state censorship, which still exists, forms of horizontal, reticular censorship, microaggression mechanisms and even micropowers that rely on non-state authorities, such as university administrators, business executives and social media moderators. This is where the culture of contradiction has perhaps regressed the most.
It would obviously be naive to think that there is no link between vertical and horizontal censorship. As for the “n” word, for example, the continuum is clear between the pressure exerted by the CRTC on Radio-Canada and the pressure exerted by the University of Ottawa administration on a single member of its faculty, precisely in the name of the same confusions and arguments.
Thank you. I am ready to listen and take your questions.