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His departure from McGill was a terrible moment for the talented columnist and editor and a disgrace to one of Canada's oldest institutions of higher learning

TORONTO, Ont./Troy Media/ There was a time when Canadian universities defended academic freedom with passion, authority and gravitas.  Those days are over: hurt feelings and crocodile tears now trump free speech on our university campuses.

Here's a pertinent example.  Andrew Potter resigned last week as director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University, mere days after writing a critical column about Quebec in Maclean's magazine.  (He'll stay on as an associate professor for the duration of his three-year contract.)

His March 20 piece examined the recent snowstorm in Montreal, which caused a shutdown of a major route, Hwy 13, and left 300 cars temporarily stranded.  He depicted this "fiasco" as a "political scandal, marked by administrative laziness, weak leadership, and a failure of communication."

Potter said it was an example of "the essential malaise eating away at the foundations of Quebec society."  In his view, "Compared to the rest of the country, Quebec is an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society, deficient in many of the most basic forms of social capital that other Canadians take for granted."

For proof, he analyzed Statistics Canada's 2013 General Social Survey.  Quebecers ranked last, or near the bottom, in categories like civic engagement, trusting people and having close friendships.

"Quebec isn't just at the lower end of a relatively narrow spectrum," wrote Potter, but "rather, most of the country is bunched up, with Quebec as a significant outlier.  At some point, charm and uniqueness betrays itself as serious dysfunction and the famous joie de vivre starts to look like nihilism."

The reaction from la belle province was anything other than, well, belle.

Many were furious at Potter, a former Ottawa Citizen editor-in-chief and Maclean's columnist, for the less-than-cheery portrait he painted.  Several were angry at the magazine, which famously called Quebec "the most corrupt province" in its Oct. 4, 2010, issue.

McGill kept a relatively low public profile during this brouhaha, save for a March 21 tweet: "The views expressed by @JAndrewPotter in the @MacleansMag article do not represent those of #McGill."  In private, the scuttlebutt was different.  As Maclean's reporter Michael Friscolanti noted, "Sources say McGill endured such intense backlash over Potter's Maclean's piece that the university left him only two choices: resign or be fired."

On March 23, Potter officially resigned from, as he called it, "the dream job of a lifetime" due to "the ongoing negative reaction within the university community and the broader public to my column."

It was a terrible moment for the talented columnist and editor and a disgrace to one of Canada's oldest institutions of higher learning.

Columnists tend to have strong opinions and engaging ideas.  They write, speak, research and analyze particular areas of interest, and share their plethora of opinions in print, radio and TV.  You can agree or disagree with them, but they should have the freedom to discuss their positions and defend their views.

Potter has been doing this for years.  He's written thought-provoking columns and books on topics like political philosophy, pop culture and consumerism.  Like all columnists, he's not perfect: he apologized on his Facebook page for the Maclean's column (before his resignation) due to "some rhetorical flourishes that go beyond what is warranted by either the facts or my own beliefs."

It's not like McGill didn't know this about Potter.  They must have realized he would continue to express opinions and the free exchange of ideas at the institute, albeit in different ways than column writing.  As well, they should have defended his right to free speech, as an academic and as a human being.

Based on what happened, they either did nothing to help him or everything to bring him down.  Whatever the case, it's lodged a massive dagger in academic freedom at our universities that will be virtually impossible to remove.

Troy Media columnist and political commentator Michael Taube was a speechwriter for former prime minister Stephen Harper.

© 2017 Distributed by Troy Media

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


While the filibusters around whether or not to proceed with discussions around changing the Standing Orders continue to loom in the House of Commons and its Procedure and House Affairs committee, it behoves us to take a look back at where this desire to "streamline" and be more "predictable" and "efficient" comes from.

The desire for a government to get through their legislative agenda in the face of opposition is a time-honoured struggle in any system of government, and our Westminster-style parliaments are no exception.  Westminster itself has faced challenges dating back to 1832, around the advent of our modern system of Responsible Government, and has tried to use various procedural tools in order to deal with it, many of which we inherited in Canada.  But we've also picked up our own bad habits here in Canada, in part because of the way we've tried to "modernize" the way our own House of Commons operates.

Many of these bad habits come down to the way we structure debates which is to say that for the most part, we're no longer actually debating legislation or issues.  Instead, thanks to the advent of speaking lists and doing away with the rules forbidding prepared speeches, we're no longer actually engaging in a process of debate, but rather, we're simply tasking MPs to stand up in the House of Commons to read speeches into the record.  The poor wretches condemned to House duty get up, read their script, and then half the time pack up and leave immediately after as the next person gets up to read their own prepared speech.  The rest of the MPs who have to be there to maintain quorum are more likely than not doing paperwork or are working on their laptops, some of them with conspicuous headphones on, not paying attention.  Sometimes MPs will ask something in the few minutes allotted to questions and comments after a speech, but half the time, it's their own bench standing up to reinforce their points.

What this has in turn led to is an inability to let debate collapse.  What is supposed to happen is that each party gets their say about the issues before them, and for the majority of bills which should be fairly uncontentious, it should allow things to proceed after a few hours and the bill can be either sent to committee, or if it has returned from committee, it can debate what amendments were proposed.  The bulk of work should be done by the committees, but you wouldn't know it based on the pattern we've devolved to here, where second and third reading debates have become these grotesque monstrosities instead of what they are intended to be.

For those of you who don't know the intricacies of parliamentary procedure (for which I don't blame you), second reading debate is supposed to be about the general principle of a bill.  It's not supposed to be the specifics, which is what committee study is for.  For any given bill, one generally only needs a few hours of second reading debate for that very reason, but that's not what's been happening.  Instead, we're seeing interminable speechifying at second reading because opposition parties (and the NDP have been particular culprits in this regard) often refuse to let debate collapse at this stage.  It's often where time allocation motions have been brought in so that it can move along to committee and report stage, the most important aspects of debate where the substantive issues can be examined and any amendments recommended can be decided upon.

Where this speechifying tendency met with obstinacy was over the Harper years, when a government bent on pushing the rules to the limit and abusing the parliamentary process with a number of omnibus bills that threatened Parliament's ability to properly study those bills.  Add to that, Stephen Harper's Government House Leaders were keen to ram these through with little consensus as to timing from the other House leaders.  By the 41st Parliament, with the NDP as Official Opposition, debate management largely disintegrated as Peter Van Loan was inept at working with the other House leaders, and the NDP refused to let any debate collapse, and hence, we had time allocation the "guillotine" of debate being invoked over 100 times.

When they formed government, the Liberals made the foolish promise not to use procedural tactics like time allocation, but as the inability to let debate particularly at second reading collapse continued apace with undaunted speechifying into the void, they too succumbed to the temptation, albeit far more infrequently.  When they did try to get creative with how to schedule debate around the assisted dying bill which they were trying to do under a Supreme Court of Canada-imposed deadline they tried bringing in Motion 6 last May to keep any delays to the bill at a minimum while still trying to maximize debate times. The opposition cried foul, lit their hair on fire and mischaracterized it as this draconian breach of their rights and privileges as Members of Parliament (which it was not, for as heavy-handed a move as it was), and the tensions exploded in The Elbowing, and we wound up with a completely unnecessary and repetitive 84 speeches at Second Reading on that bill.

With Bardish Chagger now proposing programming motions like we see in the UK as an alternative to time allocation, we're seeing more of this hyperbole and insistence that the Liberals are trying to "kill democracy."  It won't kill democracy (the UK being proof of that), but what Chagger seems to be missing is the fact that even with programming motions, they still rely largely on consensus with other House Leaders to implement successfully, and does little about the length of second reading debate, which is where our problems in Canada lie..

If anything, what ails our system of debate management is not the rules around it it's the fact that our House Leaders apparently don't understand what each stage of debate is for, and the fact that we should be actually debating as opposed to reading prepared speeches into the record for the sake of it.  Programming motions won't make our House Leaders more competent, nor will the Liberal's ham-fistedness around this.  Getting back to the basics is where we need to start, and that means eliminating speaking lists and scripts.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.