The University of Ottawa Liberty Society erected a free speech wall on campus Feb. 5-6 after the university received an F grade on a free expression index in September 2013.
Omar Benmegdoul, a volunteer for the club, said the group was inspired by other campus free speech walls and wanted to see how their student population would react.
“We really didn’t know what to expect but students reacted well overall,” he said.
Some unknown students expressed their disagreement with the presence of the wall and wrote “hate speech is not freedom of speech” several times, taking up a large amount of the wall’s writing space.
“Free speech is not always going to be good . . . but that shouldn’t forbid things from being said,” Benmegdoul said.
He said the definition of hate speech is “complicated” and “very broad and subjective under the Criminal Code,” with no concrete definition. “Someone wrote on our wall, ‘Who do you nominate to tell you what hate speech is?’” Benmegdoul said.
In January 2013, a similar wall was erected at Carleton University after the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) ranked the school, along with U of O, as the worst universities in Canada for free expression.
The JCCF is a registered Canadian charity which strives to ensure the fundamental freedoms awarded to Canadians by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are upheld across the nation, focusing on campuses.
Ian CoKehyeng of Carleton Students for Liberty, one of the wall’s organizers, said it intended to “raise awareness” and “to protest the Carleton University Students’ Association’s safe space policy.”
Carleton’s wall featured comments such as “abortion is murder” and “traditional marriage is awesome.” It gained national attention when it was subsequently torn down by Carleton student Arun Smith, before a second wall was put up.
The JCCF has sponsored free speech walls at Canadian universities, including the walls at Carleton and U of O.
JCCF spokesperson Michael Kennedy said the walls are intended to “raise awareness about free speech.”
“Students begin to vote once they enter university,” Kennedy said. “Universities should promote the importance of free speech.”
There are three requirements for the JCCF’s index, including the university’s mandate and policies, according to Kennedy.
“We first look to see if the university’s mandate mentions the importance of the free expression of ideas,” he said. “Then we see if the university has anti-discrimination policies that would censor speech, and if the administration can enforce any level of security at an event at the organizer’s expense.”
Carleton student Arun Smith said these requirements and the walls are problematic.
“A free speech wall is intended to be a political response to social justice initiatives and to policies intended to include individuals in marginalized groups,” Smith said. “It is no different than advocating for straight pride, so-called men’s rights advocacy, or white supremacism. The purpose is to maintain a hegemony predicated on the foolhardiness and duplicity of liberalism.”
Smith said campuses are not safe when “oppressive speech and actions are tolerated.”
“The efforts of the groups who erect these walls, and of . . . the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, would be better spent trying to eradicate social heirarchies, rather than maintaining them,” Smith said.
