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Atwood has been rounded upon as a turncoat for having the temerity to ask for due process

The fever of political correctness has assaulted much more challenging targets than Lynn Beyak. The great and redoubtable Margaret Atwood, who has few rivals as the greatest novelist in Canadian history, and has been an impeccable but reasonable feminist all her career, entirely consistent and often courageous, has been rounded upon as a turncoat for having the temerity to ask for due process before the University of British Columbia condemned and fired professor Steven Galloway for misbehaviour with publicly unspecified women, including a student of Galloway’s. The whole process was secretive and gave Galloway very curtailed rights to make his case and the verdict was initially opposed by distinguished native novelist Joseph Boyden, who recruited other writers, including Atwood. The more militant feminist community, forgetting or ignoring the fact that Margaret Atwood had carried water on both shoulders for their cause for nearly 50 years, attacked her as if she was a fellow traveller of male chauvinism, and a critic of no distinction.

Though it does not involve a result that is seriously unjust or such eminent personalities, the controversy over Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, illustrates the condition of freedom of expression. As has been amply publicized, Shepherd played a video of a debate between the formidable and politically incorrect academic Jordan Peterson with Professor Nicholas Matte over the obligatory use of gender neutral pronouns at the University of Toronto. She introduced the video, which had been played on TV Ontario, carefully, and was summoned to a meeting where she was told that there had been complaints that she had created a “toxic atmosphere” through an act equivalent to playing a speech of Hitler’s without giving context. Shepherd recorded the meeting without advising her interrogators of that, and released the recording and roused the interest of a number of commentators, including me. It soon emerged that there had been no complaints, that Shepherd’s conduct was exemplary, and the university and her professor publicly apologized. It ended well and Shepherd became an international personality; there were no apparent sanctions on the conveners of the Star Chamber which she recorded, but the enemies of rigid political correctness don’t want vengeance, they want a tolerant community where spontaneity and individualism are encouraged.