Joseph Brean, National Post · Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
Chained by his neck to two female protesters, University of Waterloo doctoral student Dan Kellar was nevertheless in control of the situation at a campus lecture hall last week, as he sat on stage and chanted slogans to prevent journalist and author Christie Blatchford from speaking about her new book on the native protests at Caledonia, Ont.
Ms. Blatchford, the Governor-General’s literary award-winning writer of Fifteen Days, was slightly delayed by traffic on Friday, and as university spokesman Michael Strickland announced this to the small audience, he was shouted down with calls of “racist, racist, racist.”
By the time Ms. Blatchford arrived — “mortified,” she said, at her lateness — campus police had realized the protesters could not be safely removed, given the bike locks around their necks, and so cancelled the speech “due to safety concerns.” On Monday, the school apologized and promised to reschedule in the near future.
With recent cancellations of lectures by Ann Coulter and George Galloway, among others, Canada has been struggling with ever more prominent scandals of free speech, in which left-wingers are routinely accused of anti-Semitism and terrorism, and right-wingers of racism and warmongering. But Ms. Blatchford’s experience at Waterloo marks a new phenomenon, because unlike Ms. Coulter, who was shut down by an unruly mob, and Mr. Galloway, who was shut down by the government, Ms. Blatchford was shut down by three people and a couple of bike locks.
“I was expecting hecklers or something,” said Ms. Blatchford, a Globe and Mail columnist, whose book tour for Helpless has exposed her to many tough questions — even angry rants — but always from people who let her speak first. She said this protest happened so fast that she has been second guessing her agreement to cancel.
“I think they’re right to be gleeful,” she said of the protesters, from Kitchener Waterloo Anti-Racist Action. “They did win. If their whole goal is to shut down free speech, then absolutely, they were successful. And that’s why I’m kind of tortured about what I should have done. It seemed to me it happened very quickly and I didn’t have a chance to think it through. Yet I don’t know what else I could have done. It wasn’t my call. I was an invited guest.”
As she waited backstage, discussing what to do with the book publicist and police officer, several audience members heckled back at the protesters, chanting “Rent your own stage.” The protesters replied “No racists in KW.”
The irony is that there are plenty of racists in Kitchener-Waterloo, at least enough that Ms. Blatchford seems a minor trophy for the famously combative ARA. From the defunct Tri-City Skins and the Canadian Ethnic Cleansing Team, the area has given rise to many of the best known organized racist groups in Ontario, and several of its best known hate speech prosecutions, including Alex Kulbashian and James Scott Richardson.
But for Mr. Kellar, a PhD student in geography who teaches courses in climate change and environmental assessment, Ms. Blatchford was a worthy target for silencing in the name of racial tolerance.
“She won’t come to terms with being a settler, and the responsibilities we have to the agreements we made that allowed us to create a state on this land,” he said. “By ignoring settler responsibility to this land, to live up to the agreements we made on a nation to nation basis, she is creating a misunderstanding of history.”
He said older members of ARA recall her “glorifying” the neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel, and he compared her to Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist.
“He was hung for presenting information which led to misunderstanding and hatred,” Mr. Kellar said. “Those were the principles that were then set in Nuremberg, saying that is irresponsible conduct. So when we see the same sort of conduct, writing that ignores history and leads to misrepresentation and misunderstanding, which lead to hatred and racism, it’s our responsibility to stop those things, as was found in the Nuremberg principles.”
“It’s no longer a free speech issue,” he said. “When people are lying about the situation, it’s just not appropriate to have them speak.”
He said some of his ARA members wanted to hear her speak, and “were concerned with blocking her voice. But people have read her book. We have electronic versions of it which are freely available on the Internet. So people have read what she has to say.... There’s no need to give her more of a voice. There’s no reason to give her more of a space to spread what will lead to oppression of people.”
Ms. Blatchford does not claim to have written a “360-degree view” of Caledonia, but rather an account of one narrow slice of it — the failure of the rule of law.
“I care about the rule of law, I believe in it. To me it’s natural that is what I would have concentrated on,” she said.
She compared it to Fifteen Days, in that it was “not about Afghanistan, not about the plight of the Afghan people, not about the Taliban, but about the Canadian soldier.”
“I’m a f---ing newspaper reporter. I think in 1000 word pieces,” she said. “I’m just unnerved to be in the company of people who are more genuinely controversial than me, but I long ago gave up any hope that universities were the defenders of free expression.”
National Post