Free-speech edict in Ontario could have been simple

There’s been a concern in Ontario that the Ford government’s new campus free-speech directive could lead to students feeling unsafe or hated.

This worry may be grounded in reality. Indeed, you could argue that part of the reason the directive is needed in the first place is because students have been so mollycoddled, and are so inexperienced with open discussion, that they’ve become trained to feel personally threatened when faced with a differing opinion.

Ontario’s mandate that colleges and universities introduce free-speech policies by the new year is a well-intentioned attempt to combat this problem, and to bring open inquiry and debate back to our institutions of higher learning.

If only the government had kept it simple.

There was no need to require schools to file yearly reports on their free-speech progress — as Ontario has decided to do.

The problem has been censorship on campus, which is not something you solve with mandated re-education campaigns. At least you shouldn’t.

The last thing Ontario taxpayers need is to pay bureaucrats to read more meaningless, jargon-laden reports.

The more detailed and involved a free-speech mandate gets, the more chance the government can, and will, use it to impose its own views and biases.

The better move for Ontario would have been to set out a few universal dictates.

The tenets of the University of Chicago’s Statement on Principles of Free Expression — which Ontario has distilled into four points and highlighted as forming a minimum standard of what schools must include in their new free-speech policies — are a smart choice.

But requiring every publicly assisted college and university in the province to incorporate the points into a written school-wide policy is a waste of time and effort that invites confusion. Each policy will presumably have to be reviewed by a bureaucrat to make sure it’s sufficient … in the bureaucrat’s subjective opinion.

Instead, Ontario should have simply taken the basic free-speech tenets it highlighted and made them the provincial rule. Schools that failed to follow them would lose provincial funding. Done.

Maybe the government could give the schools a couple of strikes before taking away the cash. Perhaps it would be helpful if the province offered schools some tips on how to handle security concerns when controversial speakers come to campus.

But the key point is that the schools wouldn’t be ordered to proactively do anything.

They’d simply have to avoid crushing free expression; or as the University of Chicago statement puts it, they would have to allow “all students, faculty and staff ‘to discuss any problem that presents itself,’ free of interference.”

This sort of minimalist, across-the-board rule would be far more likely to remain viewpoint neutral than will the government’s evaluation of dozens of different statements and yearly progress reports.

And it would create far fewer make-work projects, too.

Skeptics might wonder how we get from the status quo on campus to the energetic trading of differing (and sometimes aggravating) beliefs if the government doesn’t mandate progress on free-speech policy.

The answer is, there’s definitely much work to be done. But it’s not the sort of work anyone can effectively achieve by mandate, least of all the government.

How can we welcome free speech back to post-secondary schools?

For a start, we’re going to have to teach young kids why free inquiry matters and what gets lost in its absence. In theory, the government could make elementary school curriculum changes to do this, but the task would likely be more effectively handled by a non-profit with an explicit mission to teach young people the history and fundamentals of civil debate.

The whole plan would be to have kids reach high school with an understanding that the much-ballyhooed concept of “diversity” must include a diversity of ways of thinking for it to be of any use.

Instead of teaching children how to avoid triggers, the goal for educators, parents and psychologists would be to teach children how to view a respectful challenge of their beliefs as a helpful tool for clarifying their thinking, rather than an attack on their person.

Premier Doug Ford’s PC party is absolutely right to have made campus free speech a priority.

It has just gone about it in a heavy-handed, convoluted way when what is needed is a very light, straightforward government touch — with the real heavy lifting to come from individuals and advocates.

Where’s the laissez-faire premier when we need him?

HAVE TO TEACH YOUNG KIDS WHY FREE INQUIRY MATTERS. — MARNI SOUPCOFF