I’ll be watching this weekend to see whether an event hosted by the Men’s Educational Support Association gets harassed by protestors opposed to the men’s rights movement.

Cassie Jaye, documentary filmmaker for the supposedly controversial movie “The Red Pill,” and Dr. Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, are teaming up for a full day seminar at the University of Calgary Downtown Campus to discuss important issues facing men and boys.

Jaye – a lifelong registered Democrat – was shocked to see a recent column in GQ UK magazine that denounced her “frequently banned film” as part of the extreme cultural right, alongside Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer and Breitbart magazine.

Why, oh why don’t people watch the film before spouting such nonsense?

LISTEN: Danielle Smith speaks with Cassie Jaye about her film “The Red Pill.”

In fact, Jaye explores much of the same ground in her film as Dr. Farrell explores in his book: asking questions about why boys have higher rates of school dropout, lower rates of university education, higher incidences of drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and suicide.

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These are questions worth asking and policymakers should be giving serious attention to finding solutions.

Take the issue of alcoholism. I came across this interesting chart on ZeroHedge.com under the heading “Visualizing the Other Gender Gap No One is Talking About.” It shows the number of alcohol-related deaths in different countries broken down by gender. The gap is shocking. In China, there are 650,000 men who die from alcohol-related causes each year compared to 59,000 women – an 11 fold difference. Closer to home, in the United States, 71,000 men die from alcohol compared to 19,000 women.

LISTEN: Danielle Smith with Dr. Warren Farrell on his book “The Boy Crisis in Canada.”

The chart didn’t show any information for Canada, so I looked up a recent report done by the Canadian Institute for Health Information to see what our data looks like. CIHI’s press release doesn’t talk about this crisis for men, in fact, it highlighted the fact that in one cohort – the 10-19 age group – there were more girls hospitalized than boys, and that the death rate for women overall rose 26 percent compared to 2001.

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Is Canada bucking the trend? Is alcohol abuse really a bigger issue for women than men?

You have to go deep into the report before you find this graph showing the incidence of hospitalization due to alcohol is dramatically higher for men in nearly every age group. In my business, that’s called burying your lead.

By all means, let’s point out that young girls are developing a worrying relationship with alcohol. But let’s also point out that alcohol abuse is an even more serious problem for men.

If we aren’t prepared to acknowledge that men have a disproportionately large problem with alcohol abuse, we are never going to ask the harder questions about why, and the even harder questions about what we can do about it.

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Cassie Jaye and Dr. Warren Farrell challenge us to start asking these questions. We should.

Danielle Smith can be reached at danielle@770chqr.com