Cast your mind back oh, about fifteen months, to the Dawn of a New Era on Ontario campuses.  One in which Speech Would Be Free.  The Ford Government was new and fresh and so was the ink on a proclamation requiring all Ontario institutions to adopt a policy on free speech, consistent with the University of Chicago Statement of Principles on Free Expression, by January 1, 2019. The government charged the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) with oversight of the policy. 

Why HEQCO, which has never had this kind of policy oversight as part of its remit?  Presumably the Tories felt it couldn’t be left in the hands of the ministry staff because they were in league with the pinko university types who allowed a free speech “crisis” to emerge in the first place, and HEQCO was the only outside agency available.  Or at least that’s as close an answer as I have been able to divine.

Ontario hasn’t been alone in pushing Freedom of Speech issues.  In fact, campus Freedom of Speech has become a favourite talking point on the global right over the past few years.  In Canada, Andrew Scheer popularized it during his 2017 leadership campaign.  The Albertan UCP adopted a similar policy in 2018 and made its adoption by institutions one of its first acts upon taking government, just like the Ford government.  In the UK, the Conservative government used a moral panic about free speech to issue “guidance” to institutions on the subject earlier this year (more here). 

It was never clear exactly what the “threat” to freedom of speech actually was.  But because of the way the terminology of the debate stole from left-wing iconography like the Berkeley Free Speech movement and Mario Savio, and since riling up the left seems to make up an increasing percentage of what passes for right-wing policy these days, these free speech policies have been enthusiastically adopted.

In 2018, the right-wing Australian Liberal government had its own free speech moment, by announcing an inquiry into free speech on campus in late 2018. The inquiry was headed by Robert French, a former Chief Justice of the High Court.  But because Australia’s policy process isn’t broken the way ours is, French proceeded to consult with the interested public (something almost inconceivable in Canada where all policy, no matter how inconsequential, must be made behind closed doors), accepted and published dozens of submissions, and came up with a very thoughtful final report of a couple of hundred pages. The report considered many legal issues and experiences from all over the globe, before concluding that there was no systemic free speech problem on campuses.  French nevertheless suggested a “model code” on free speech, which seems to be more specific and sensible than the Chicago principles, and which Australian universities are now gradually adopting.  Amazing what happens when you treat policy as something more than an opportunity to win another news cycle.

Anyways, long story short, on Monday HEQCO published its first “Annual Report” on Freedom of Speech on Campus.  And boy, is it hot!  Here are some of the highlights. 

• All public institutions adopted a speech code as requested (the 24 colleges adopted a common code)
• Twenty-one complaints using the policy were made across the system.  All were resolved internally (and as far as I can see from a quick Google scan, none were serious enough to ever reach the media) and there were no known referrals of free speech complaints to the Ombudsman of Ontario.
• Of the tens of thousands of on-campus events which occurred across Ontario last year, only one was cancelled for safety/security concerns (HEQCO does not identify the event, and while I love you guys, I am not searching through 40-odd institutional reports to figure out what it was).

Blistering, huh?  Obviously, the culture wars are consuming our campuses.

Presumably, the Ford government will claim this as a success since obviously it was its free speech policy which created such a felicitous outcome.  The likelier explanation, of course, is that free speech was never an issue in the first place, and we are going through all this rigamarole to satisfy a handful of right-wing trolls.

I do wonder, however, about the future of this kind of reporting.  I mean, if we get multiple years with literally nothing to report, at what point does requiring institutions to file paperwork on the subject simply become vexatious bureaucratic harassment, the kind of thing any good re-tape-cutting government should abhor?

I give it about five years.