Christie Blatchford
Two Fridays ago, I was driving in fog to give a talk about my new book, never dreaming I was about to join the list of those, most recently the American writer Ann Coulter and the former British MP George Galloway, who have been prevented from speaking at Canadian college campuses.
The difference, as Joe Brean wryly put it in a story in the National Post this week, is that where Ms. Coulter was shut down at the University of Ottawa by an unruly mob (which sufficiently alarmed authorities or her own security people that the event was cancelled), Mr. Galloway banned by the federal government (that decision overturned by a judge, with the result that Mr. Galloway was in Canada on a speaking tour this month), “Ms. Blatchford was shut down by three people and a couple of bike locks.”
I arrived late to the University of Waterloo to learn that the three, bike locks on their necks, were on the stage, behind the podium where I was to speak, chanting “Racist, racist, racist!”
We were all taken by surprise, I think – me, university spokesman Michael Strickland and a nice campus-police officer.
They asked what I’d like to do and I said I’d like to go on stage and give it a whirl, and that though I’d prefer the trio be removed first, I’d go on regardless. Nicola Makoway, the Doubleday/Random House publicist with me, asked if the police approved of that. The campus cop, who had called in a couple of cruisers from Waterloo Regional Police before I even got there, said no, because if things got rowdy, they wouldn’t be able to protect me.
Before I knew it, he had cancelled the event, and Nicola and I were back in the car, driving home to Toronto.
Now in the days since, I’ve been second-guessing myself all over the place: Should I have insisted on going on stage? Could I have? Should I have made a run through the curtains?
The reason, of course, is that there was something shameful about slinking away. To take liberties with a great line from the old movie Apocalypse Now, I hate the clank of bike lock in the evening; it sounds like defeat.
But I was an invited guest, not the boss of the university, and in those few minutes backstage, I deferred to those who worked for the school. It still feels like a mistake but I’m damned if I know what else I could have done.
The university brass appear to have felt the same way: President Feridun Hamdullahpur quickly phoned to apologize, I have been invited back and am going, and there it sits.
I think we were all mystified. I’m hardly a Coulter-esque stirrer of pots, but a reporter, and my book, which is about the ruination of the rule of law in Caledonia, Ont., during the native occupation there, is most sharply critical of the Ontario government and the senior ranks of the Ontario Provincial Police – that is, the state, which cheerfully threw the town under the bus.
I took pains in the book to explain what it is not about, and while I expected (and the university might have reasonably expected) there might be those who disagreed with that approach, it never occurred to me that anyone would try to stop me from speaking.
In fact, however, as I’ve only recently learned – publishers and their people tend to keep discouraging news from their authors, lest we crawl into the fetal position and stop typing – from the get-go, from the moment they began talking up Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy and How the Law Failed All of Us, they encountered what they call “pushback.”
Some bookstores were reluctant to host signings or events for fear of a native backlash; some news shows were less than keen to touch the subject for the same reason.
Their timidity seems to be all of a piece with what the U of W protesters said motivated them. As Dan Kellar, one of the three locked together on the stage, told Mr. Brean, I am a “settler” on native land who hasn’t come to term with settlers’ responsibilities and am therefore important to silence.
I take from that horse manure what I take from the booksellers’ reluctance: That if one doesn’t bow at the altar of aboriginal self-determination, however criminally it may be expressed, one should not be allowed to speak.
Mr. Kellar went on to tell Mr. Brean that “older members” of Kitchener-Waterloo Anti-Racist Action recalled me “glorifying” the neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel and went on to compare me to a Nazi propagandist.
Now, I knew damn well that I have never done anything of the sort, but before I said so, had Globe and Mail researcher Stephanie Chambers check the record.
She found that in more than 35 years of daily journalism, working for four different Toronto newspapers, I had mentioned Mr. Zundel’s name a total of five times, mostly peripherally.
In the one piece that was actually about him, this in 1994 when he had applied for Canadian citizenship, I defended his right to freedom of speech, but said, “There is no comparable right to citizenship” and concluded, “I am, in other words, wholeheartedly in favour of letting Ernst Zundel say anything in the whole world that he wants or believes – even that the Holocaust didn’t happen. The only four words, coming out of his mouth, that would make me cringe are these: ‘I’m a Canadian citizen.’”
I think I’ll bring my own bike lock when I’m back at Waterloo, with a suggestion where Mr. Kellar might put it.
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