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The University (of Ottawa) prizes and protects freedom of inquiry and all forms of freedom of expression

“All members of the University of Ottawa community — teaching and research faculty, staff, and students, including both individuals and groups — and all visitors to the campus have the right to express their views freely.

“The University recognizes that free debate and critique are essential to the pursuit of knowledge. As participants in collegial self-governance, all members of the community are expected to act in accordance with these values and applicable laws, which the university will safeguard by whatever steps it deems necessary. Visitors to the campus must also respect these values, relevant University policies, and applicable laws. Complaints in connection with this policy should be filed with the appropriate internal body as defined in University policies and regulations.”

Almost every other policy grandly states some version of the first sentence, but then weakens or negates it with conditions and qualifications. The University of Chicago statement, their supposed model, explicitly says that although the university greatly values civility, and although all members of the university community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some people in the community.

Photo by Elliot Ferguson/Postmedia News

And this is precisely where almost all the other policies fall short. Only U of T’s policy, adopted in 1992, expressly states that civility and respect are sometimes trumped (reluctantly) by the freedom of speech. As for the rest, some tie the freedom of speech explicitly to the purely social goals of respect, diversity, inclusion and equality (Carleton, Guelph, Laurentian, Queen’s, and Western). Others actually subordinate freedom of speech to these social goals and to considerations of imbalances of power, either explicitly (Brock, McMaster and York) or implicitly by subordinating the freedom of speech to other policies that assert these higher goals (Nipissing and Waterloo). Several universities also seem to have confused simple freedom of speech with academic freedom, by hedging freedom of speech with conditions appropriate only to academic freedom (Carleton again, McMaster again, and Trent). Lakehead, Queen’s and Windsor assert that the university has the duty to protect its members from any harm or risks to health and safety supposedly caused by the exercise of free speech. “Safety” was the cry of protesters trying to prevent Jordan Peterson, Ricardo Duchesne and others from speaking on their campuses.