CBC reassigns editor amid controversy
Senior editor of The National apologized after posting tweet backing ‘appropriation prize’
The managing editor of CBC’s The National has become the third professional casualty amidst lingering fallout from a series of controversial remarks last week about cultural appropriation.
Steve Ladurantaye, who joined The National just last month, will be reassigned to CBC’s “content experience” division, effective immediately, over his “inappropriate, insensitive and frankly unacceptable tweet,” announced Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News, in an internal memo Wednesday.
“This incident raised questions about CBC’s commitment to being a more inclusive and representative workplace in staffing, in leadership and in content,” she wrote, adding that “in the fall, we will meet with Steve to reassess his connection to The National going forward.”
Ladurantaye was among several journalists who engaged in a latenight Twitter conversation last week sparked by a contentious op-ed piece by Hal Niedzviecki in the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine advocating for more cultural appropriation in Canadian literature.
In the piece, Niedzviecki suggested “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities” and ventured that there should be an “appropriation prize” in literature.
Backlash against the piece, which was published in an issue devoted to indigenous authors, was swift and merciless. Niedzviecki swiftly resigned from his position as the magazine’s editor and issued an apology.
Former National Post editor Ken Whyte, however, took up Niedzviecki’s cause on Twitter late last Thursday, posting that he would “donate $500 to the founding of the appropriation prize if someone else wants to organize.”
Ladurantaye replied that he would contribute $100. He later deleted the tweet and apologized, saying “what I did was hurtful, and my apology is without condition.”
“In short, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t stop to think,” he said in a string of tweets.
“That’s a problem. I need to address it. I didn’t stop to think about what it is like to not have my position or my power or my voice.”
The editor-in-chief of the Walrus, Jonathan Kay, stepped down from his position at the magazine Saturday following an opinion piece he wrote in the National Post defending the right to debate cultural appropriation. In an email to The Canadian Press, Kay said his interests as an editor no longer aligned with the priorities of the organization that produces the magazine.
Inuit musician Tanya Tagaq, who has not shied away from calling out “Canadian journalists apologizing for flaunting their privilege like a pair of DDD breast implants” online on her own Twitter account in recent days, took the news of Ladurantaye’s reassignment as just one small step in the right direction.
“Imagine systematic racism in Canada as a monolithic block of granite,” she said in an email to the Star, echoing a pair of tweets earlier in the day.
“Indigenous people are trying to carve the image of safety, equality and basic human rights out of that stone. We must chip away one bit at a time. Concepts like appropriation and racial slurs may seem small or petty to someone who has never had to look at that stone, let alone carry it. Every small chip is a step closer to equality.”
Ladurantaye could not be reached for comment Wednesday. In the CBC memo, McGuire said he has “made it his goal to better understand the appropriation issue from the perspective of Canada’s Indigenous people.”