In the movie Fargo, the camera captures the horror on the blood-spattered face of one of the characters who, after seeing his psychopathic partner shoot a police officer right before his eyes, murmurs “Whoa Daddy.” Watching the complete breakdown of democracy at the...
In November 2022, Paul Viminitz, a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Lethbridge, invited me to give a talk on the threat “woke-ism” poses for academic freedom. After pressure mounted to cancel the talk, the president of the University of...
"Any presentation worth banning is a presentation worth attending.” So said Richard Mueller, an economics professor at the University of Lethbridge, on September 16 at the Lethbridge Public Library. Mueller was paraphrasing biochemist and writer Isaac Asimov who...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
When did wokeism begin capturing academic institutions? Find out from someone on the inside.
"Originally, the U of L announced it would allow Frances Widdowson’s talk to proceed under the principle of free expression, but university officials later changed their tone. U of L President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Mike Mahon issued a statement on the event, saying,...
Part Three of a Four Part Series In December 2008, Denis Rancourt was suspended from his tenured professorship in physics at the University of Ottawa—an action that resulted in his termination a few months later. This occurred after a five-year battle with university...
Part Two of a Four Part Series On November 5, 2022, I was fortunate to participate on “The Cost of Academic Dissent” panel with Joshua Katz, Amy Wax, and Elizabeth Weiss, at Stanford University’s Academic Freedom Conference. In my presentation, I discussed why I was...
Part One of a Four Part Series In the last part of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main character, Winston Smith, is arrested by the Thought Police and subjected to a long interrogation process by O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party. “There...
Rodney Clifton, Brian Giesbrecht and Frances Widdowson discuss the Kamloops Cemetery controversy. Moderated by Paul Viminitz. Saturday, July 10, 2021 Over the last few months, hundreds of unmarked graves of people connected to residential schools have been...
Since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings, administrators, faculty members and students have heard that universities should be “Indigenized.”
How Parallelist Ideology Conceals Indigenous Dependency
In September 2018, the Office of Academic Indigenization provided Mount Royal University (MRU) faculty with a document entitled “Indigenizing Mount Royal’s Curricula: A Call For Engagement.” This document affirmed MRU’s “commit[ment] to indigenizing its curricula to...