Outspoken Sun News pundit Ezra Levant’s planned appearance at a national student newspaper conference is drawing criticism from members and forcing the event organizers to justify Levant’s appearance.
Levant is the host of The Source, a daily TV talk show on the Sun News Network. He has a tendency of running into trouble for allegedly incendiary comments made on the show and elsewhere.
Levant is scheduled to speak January 2014 at the annual conference of the Canadian University Press, a national wire service owned and run by member student newspapers across the country.
“These are young journalists, and it’s disheartening to me that someone who wants to work in an industry whose lifeblood is freedom of speech and debate and disagreement and criticism and the back-and-forth, that instead of saying, ‘I disagree with Ezra, I look forward to asking him some tough questions,’ that they would instead say, ‘I don’t want him to be able to speak,” Levant said.
Levant was referring in part to an opinion piece in The Link, Concordia University’s student paper. Erin Sparks, the paper’s managing editor, wrote that Levant “shouldn’t be given yet another venue to preach his intolerance or validate his method of journalism.”
In response, conference organizer Alex Migdal posted a statement justifying Levant’s appearance, and said Levant would devote half an hour to responding to audience questions.
“Levant exemplifies a brand of journalism that is proving more relevant than ever. Politics and ideology are seeping into contemporary journalism and consumers are eating it up,” Migdal wrote. “Levant is one of Canada’s most recognizable partisan commentators and people are familiar with his work. We feel he’s highly suited to tackle these questions.”
Sparks said that a speaker with a less controversial reputation than Levant may have been a better choice.
“He’s a well-known person so he would fill a room,” Sparks said of Levant. “But I think you could choose someone, someone like Andrew Coyne or something, who is also fairly controversial for something, but is a bit more tactful and doesn’t have the kind of history Ezra Levant has.”
Levant’s purported past sins include statements made on his show, where he referred to the Roma people of Europe as gypsies, called them “a culture synonymous with swindlers” and warned that those coming to Canada as false refugees “come here to gyp us again, to rob us blind as they have done in Europe for centuries.”
Levant issued an on-air apology for the comments later.
Levant also once called Carleton University a “politically correct swamp of a university” after controversy erupted on campus over a free speech wall in the atrium.
“There will come a point in all of our lives where we write something that offends someone, that upsets someone, that someone wants us to have not written, and we’ve got to learn that it’s okay to be a dissident, it’s okay to be a rebel,” Levant said.
“So it’s such a bad instinct to say everyone’s got to think the same way, that’s terrible,” he said. “Progress depends on speech that sometimes is offensive.”
Levant also has experience with student newspapers, having once been a junior editor at The Gauntlet at the University of Calgary.
“Student newspapers have always been overwritten, they’ve always been liberal, they’ve always been petty, but that’s the fun of them. It’s a student newspaper, it’s not the New York Times,” Levant said.
“[W]hat I’m saying is that this handful of fascist censor wannabes are not in keeping with the spirit of student newspapers,” he said. “Student newspapers publish every radical idea people can think of.”
