Muzzled but not gagged

By Neil Sharma | Published by The Epoch Times

TORONTO—From the trucker convoy protesting COVID-19 mandates to the ongoing debate surrounding biological sex, frontline activists shared their experiences during these culture-defining events with more than 125 Torontonians at a recent event venue in Little Italy.

Dubbed “Canada’s Free Speech Crisis,” the Dec. 4 event was hosted by Lighthouse Community Foundation and described as “a discussion, reflection, and debate on the pressing issue of free speech in Canada.” Moderated by Quillette online magazine editor Jonathan Kay, the event featured Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy and journalists Meghan Murphy and Trish Wood, who recounted their brushes with leftist authoritarianism.

What the panel saw as the failures of the media featured prominently in the discussion. Ms. Wood said Canadian society was ruptured over the question of COVID-19 inoculations and described the isolation and hopelessness she experienced—until February 2022. That was when a convoy of truckers descended upon Ottawa to protest government's COVID-19 mandates.

“When I’m in rooms like this, I feel something I like to call ‘trucker energy,’” Ms. Wood told the crowd. “I thought nobody thought the way I did until it happened," she added. “The censorship-industrial-complex is one of the biggest stories of our lifetime, and legacy media haven’t touched it. They’re resentful about it in some ways.”

Ms. Murphy was best known for her feminist writing before she ran afoul of trans activists by declaring that transgendered people who identify as women are, in fact, males.  Ms. Murphy’s views—which include opposition to COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates—have resulted in her being followed in her former Vancouver neighbourhood and protested by 700 people at a public library in Toronto, requiring the police to cordon off a city block to escort her out safely.

“I think this is the first event I’ve done in Canada where I haven’t been protested and needed a security detail,” she quipped.

Aside from teaching at Queen's, Mr. Pardy is the executive director of Rights Probe, a law and liberty think tank. He spoke at length about the never-ending cycle of grievance politics and how free speech doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have to be anything in particular, including reasonable.

“It does not mean speaking in the public good,” Mr. Pardy said. “It does not mean speaking politely.”

Each of the speakers sat down with The Epoch Times to discuss a range of topics.

Bruce Pardy

To some extent a classical liberal, Mr. Pardy laments the devolution of liberalism into an illiberal ideology of “wokeism,” which uses authoritative apparatuses to push anti-Western, anti-capitalist ideology upon the majority.

Mr. Pardy recalled inviting Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a conservative psychologist and author, to speak at Queen’s, which predictably rankled the student body enough that a contingent vainly attempted to scuttle the invitation.

“The classical liberal mantra is: Don’t tell me what to do,” Mr. Pardy said. “But the liberal in common parlance today is an illiberal, progressive, woke person who insists that you agree with certain premises or givens, and if you don’t, they’re out to get you.”

Identitarianism is another force that is working against true liberalism, which is based on individualism, Mr. Pardy said. The individual is being replaced by a collectivist rubric that looks at how oppressed, or oppressive, a person is to determine how the law should accordingly respond.

“Once you’re into that, you have left classical liberalism far behind, because the whole idea was that the law was supposed to be blind,” he said. “It was supposed to treat you as an individual, notwithstanding any of those characteristics you might or might not have.”

Meaghan Murphy

Ms. Murphy became a constitutional activist when in 2017 she vocally opposed Bill C-16, which added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act. She has also taken aim at the Canadian government’s COVID-19 restrictions and, as mandates were looming, left Canada for Mexico, where she still resides.

Ms. Murphy does not claim to identify with any specific political leanings in her fight for women’s rights, free speech, civil liberties, and constitutional rights, and she says she “ran afoul of pretty much everyone,” beginning with leftists and third-wave feminists after refusing to concede that trans women are female.

She takes particular umbrage with contemporary feminism’s selectiveness.

“There’s literal patriarchy that still exists in Saudi Arabia, and lots of places throughout the world, but, because it’s not the West, apparently we’re only allowed to criticize Canada, or America, or ourselves. We’re allowed to hate ourselves,” she said.

She also laments Canadians’ passive response to the COVID-19 regime.

“I was so disappointed in Canadians’ responses to the COVID lockdowns and the COVID mandates,” she said. “I saw almost everybody that I knew, all of my friends, almost all of my friends in Vancouver, go along with the vilification of people who were pushing back and questioning the mandates, and refusing to get vaccinated.”

Trish Wood

Ms. Wood, an award-winning investigative reporter, was the long-time host of CBC’s "The Fifth Estate." Her work helped free Clayton Johnson, who spent five years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of killing his wife. She is also producing an upcoming film about Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, both of whom have been criminally charged for their roles in last year’s trucker protest.

Ms. Wood, who also penned the non-fiction book "What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It," told The Epoch Times that the preface to war is always a big lie.

An example is the Ukraine war, where pointing out any inconvenient truths can result in accusations of being a “Putin apologist,” she said. “It’s like there’s never history and everything is a new kind of Groundhog Day moment with no context.”

The host of "Trish Wood is Critical," she has platformed those who, like her, have been critical of the war, such as political scientist John Mearsheimer and Col. Douglas Macgregor.

“I was slammed by some of my own listeners for not putting a Ukraine flag in the bio,” she said.

She stresses again that war is always preceded by a big lie. “There was a lie for Iraq, there was a lie for the Kuwait war. There’s always a lie.”

For the original version of this article, see the publisher’s website here.