Free Speech and Canada

Over the past seven days, other than reassuming the guise of rufty-tough biker and serenading the neighbourhoods through which I have traveled with the rattling and thundering of an American air-cooled V-twin of not insubstantial displacement, I have found my attention distracted and held by events on the far side of the Atlantic ocean, both north and south of the border between Canada and the supposedly United States.

Having previously considered Canada, rightly or wrongly, as a more softly spoken and anecdotally less brash adjacent nation to the US, I was surprised when, through a much valued FB friend and correspondent, the ongoing and heated anti-debate between the University of Toronto and Prof. Jordan Peterson relating to free speech and the use of pronouns came to my attention. I term it an anti-debate due to the lack of willingness of the U of T to put forward anything noticeably more developed than "Just because." in their argument against the professor's position.

Those who know me personally will recognise the professor and I share certain traits and I acknowledge these, though such similarities would not be enough on their own to have me lend him my general support. It is the argument he holds fast to in favour of free speech and against the imposition of invented terminology, the compulsory addition of previously non-existent pronouns to his professional vocabulary to be used entirely at the whim of the person to whom he would be speaking, that finds me in his metaphorical corner.

If you are, as I admit I was until this week, entirely unaware of this particular free speech issue I strongly recommend you Google it (other search engines are available) and introduce yourself to it. It is not exclusively a Canadian issue by any means and is of great concern to have been sparked into wider awareness from the tinderbox of a respected university, the very place in which I would have expected people to learn how to think for themselves and to handle maturely the kinds of difference in opinion that exist in the wider world rather than for them to be shielded from them by the suppression of peaceful discourse around potentially sensitive issues.
______

South of the Canadian / US border it is fast approaching the Presidential Election and a great deal of muck-flinging is going on. I have followed a few of these elections in the past and this one appears to me to be more spectacularly spattered in unpleasantness than is the norm. Grateful to have a few American friends whose political leanings between them span the Democrat and the Republican positions, I have been able to keep a quiet eye on a large number of diverse threads on FB and to learn from first-hand discussion going on within the US between its citizens as opposed just to the discussion going on among those outside of it who have only third-party reports to inform their positions.

I shall be commenting on my observations arising from these threads and from researches inspired by them in a separate post that will appear later. For the moment I must ride out to the local supermarket and the bakery in order to buy a few essential food items. Currently, I can only buy a few at a time due to the limited carrying capacity of my motorcycle but I remain conscious both of the good fortune that has me with a vehicle in reserve for such times as these when my car is poorly and that I am lucky to be in a position to buy food at all.