National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • A8

nationalpost.com NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2020 A FORM OF APOSTASY THAT CRIES OUT FOR PUNISHMENT -BARBARA KAY Professor holds the line on free expression of A decision offends those on left and right CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES The Ward section of downtown Toronto, where Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square are now located, was an impoverished enclave for many years in the early part of the 20th century. It was home to many of the city's minorities who were subject to racism and feared by many members of the city's white majority. WHITE ANGLO PROTESTANTISM VIEWED OTHERS WITH A SENSE OF LOATHING A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADIAN BIGOTRY her in writing, but with only the non-reason: "it is not in the best interests of the students or the university" for Lowrey to continue sitting. (Cormack declined to comment for this column.) Online debates among associates show that opinions are divided. Lowrey was labelled "transphobic" by some, but a former student noted that Lowrey "was controversial but never rude, or problematic in expressing (her beliefs).

In fact she encouraged discussion and There were some points of hers I disagreed with, but she made some good points that left me thinking which is the whole point of university." Cormack's rationale was, according to Lowrey, that since the university is not interfering in her actual teaching and research, it has the authority to remove her from what is deemed an administrative function for whatever reason it likes. Technically, that may be the case. But Lowrey is not letting it go. As she told me in a telephone interview, "what happened to me is a the university has taken the position that "saying you don't think a person can change sex is a firing offence." So Lowrey wants them to make a case in writing that transcends their apparent capitulation to customer demand, a case based in principle, but believes they don't have one at least not one they feel confident would pass the smell test in a document. Lowrey is concerned about other university employees, whose jobs are not protected by academic freedom: those, for example, whose employment is fully administrative.

She is also concerned for her students, some of whom have confided to her their fear of voicing shared opinions "and they're not paranoid" "because this is not an abstruse problem, it's a live debate in our current society and for the university to take the position that if you're on the wrong side of this, we're going to fire you, is terrifying for students." Lowrey has been equally courageous in taking a stand against the University of Alberta's new equity, diversity and inclusion policy, passed in late May by their about 100-member general faculties council. Lowrey was the only member of the council to vote against it (there were four abstentions). What bothered her was the word "inclusivity" itself, which "sounds nice but it has been used in disciplinary ways to silence feminist women." She worries it will transmogrify into a kind of McCarthyite loyalty oath, "Are you or have you ever been exclusionary?" Are her fears misplaced? Not at all. With forced equity attestations springing up like weeds in various professions, we are virtually there already. Which is why it doesn't matter whether you are a radical Marxist feminist, or a Marxism-critical conservative.

All of us who hold dear the principle of freedom of speech are in the same boat; either we all grab an oar to beat together against the current in this still-gathering storm, or we'll all together go under. National Post kaybarb gmail. com Twitter.comBarbaraRKay H.S. Magee in a profile of the Ward published in the Christian Guardian in 1911. "The lanes, alleyways and backyards are strewn with refuse, houses behind houses and in the yards between unsightly piles of ramshackle outhouses that are supposed to provide sanitary conveniences." Worst were the "unassim-ilable" Chinese.

The "average Oriental is dangerous and injuriously inferior to the average Canadian," the Globe argued in an October 1907 editorial. Canadian "democracy is imperilled by the introduction of alien races devoid of the very capacity for democratic government." The prejudice was indeed palpable and constant; accusations were made that Chinese laundries spread disease. (Toronto's name until its incorporation as a city in 1834) and elsewhere, Loyalists who had brought slaves with them had no desire to lose or free them. Hence, a compromise was agreed to: any slaves residing in the colony in 1793 would remain so for the duration of their lives, but no new slaves would be allowed. And children born to slaves would be freed once they reached their 25th birthday.

In the decades that followed, Irish Catholics, many of whom were victims of the great famine that began in 1847, were disdained by Toronto's white Protestant population for their poverty and alleged drunkenness and corruption. "No Irish Need Apply" was a common sign in the city's shops and factories throughout the Barbara Kay Kathleen Lowrey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, ascribes much of her intellectual formation to Marxism and radical feminism. Not, I think my regular readers would agree, someone with whom I would normally have a great deal in common. And yet, in this strange cultural moment, Prof. Lowrey and I find ourselves amicably united in the service of a mutually revered ideal.

I write this column with ardent sympathy for her in her present predicament. Academics' time is generally split 404020 amongst, respectively, research, teaching and "service" to their community meaning committees, mainly. Until late March, Lowrey served as associate chair for undergraduate programs on behalf of the department of anthropology. Following anonymous complaints about her views from one or more students to the university's office of safe disclosure and human rights, as well as to the dean of students, Lowrey was asked to resign. She was not given a precise reason, only told that because she holds "gender critical" opinions, she was making the learning environment "unsafe" for the anonymous complainants who felt that her views caused them "harm." (It's not clear Lowrey believes it is doubtful that the complainants were even taking her courses.) "Gender critical" refers to what was shortly ago normative feminism doctrine in considering biological sex of primordial importance in fighting for women's rights.

Where the traditional rights of biological women collide with asserted rights of trans women sport, intimate spaces, rape crisis centres, prisons gender-critical feminists join with conservatives like me in insisting that biological women's rights must prevail: for the sake of their safety, privacy and right to a level playing field. Until what seems like a few minutes ago, there was nothing controversial about this opinion. But now there is. The only "correct" opinion to hold is that gender expression trumps biology in any rights-based claims. And in academic circles, Lowrey's views, which she is at no pains to hide on campus and off, are a form of apostasy that cries out for punishment.

To her immense credit, Lowrey refused to resign from the committee, insisting that the onus was on the university to dismiss her, explaining its reasons in writing. Dean of arts Lesley Cormack then dismissed ACCUSATIONS WERE MADE THAT CHINESE LAUNDRIES SPREAD DISEASE Allan Levine The tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a police officer's knee to his throat and the subsequent protests across both the United States and Canada against racism and police brutality have prompted Canadians once again to reflect on the prejudice and discrimination that have permeated Canada's history. We may not have had here the Ku Klux Klan marches or the more than 4,700 lynch-ings that took place in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968 of which nearly 3,450 were African-Americans who were murdered, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People yet from the time of European settlement in the territory of present day Canada, white Anglo Protestant values and domination were the essence of much of Canadian history. From the Indigenous who predated that settlement to the millions of immigrants who came later, assimilation to a homogeneous WASP culture was not only expected, but often demanded for more than 250 years.

Since 1998, for example, Toronto's motto has been "Diversity Our Strength," a phrase that signifies "equity, respect, harmony and prosperity," in the words of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. However, the road to embracing this tolerance, acceptance of individual and group differences, and the spirit of multiculturalism that many Canadians believe sets us apart from U.S. has been bumpy. And that's putting it mildly. John Graves Sim-coe, the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada from 1791 to 1796, and the visionary who conceived Toronto, publicly opposed slavery, which was not officially abolished in the British Empire until 1833.

But given the shortage of labour in York the Factory, Shop and Office Building Act prohibiting Chinese businesses from employing white women. Until well after the Second World War, most Blacks were not permitted to stay at Toronto hotels. Jobs were hard to come by, even when there was a "Help Wanted" ad for displayed in the window of a shop. "No, we have no job for coloured people," Harry Gairey, a Jamaican immigrant, was told by one store owner when he inquired about employment as a young man in the 20s. By the early 1950s, enlightened Ontario political leaders had chipped away at legalized discrimination like property covenants that prevented Jews and African-Americans from buying homes and cottages.

Prejudice, anti-Semitism and racism remained, however, and still does. This had long been evident in the frequently harsh police treatment of minorities in Toronto; throughout the 20th century and beyond, the catalogue of harassment is extensive. Just standing on a street corner was enough to provoke a confrontation, as veteran Toronto city Coun. Michael Thompson, a Jamaican immigrant who grew up in Scarborough, in the early '70s, recalls. As a teenager, he and his friends, most from relatively well-off families who stayed out of trouble, still attracted the unwanted attention of the police.

Once, he was with his friends on Yonge Street minding his own business and was attacked by a plainclothes police officer. "He just picked me," recalls Thompson. "He started swearing at me, F-this and that. I had done nothing." National Post Allan Levine is a historian and the author of 15 books including "Toronto: Biography of a City," from which this article is adapted. His next book, "Details are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Cafe Society Murder" will be published in August.

19th century. Similarly, African-Americans, "coloureds," who had managed to escape to Toronto via the Underground Railway in the 1850s were met with bigotry and injustice. By 1911, "the Ward," Toronto's downtown impoverished enclave, was home to thousands of eastern European Jews, Italians, Germans, Chinese and an assortment of Poles, Macedonians and Ukrainians. Though the city's population remained more than 85 per cent white Anglo-Saxon, either British or Canadian born, and overwhelmingly Protestant, for the members of the city's elite the arrival of so many "strange" foreigners was disconcerting, even frightening. In an era when eugenics was popular, the slums of the Ward were deemed "a cancer of the modern civic organism," by University of Toronto biology Prof.

Ramsay Wright. "Here is the festery sore of our city life," bemoaned Rev. Feeding the hysteria was the widely held belief that Chinese men used opium to exploit and sexually assault white women and the Methodist Church officially deemed Chinese restaurants as "dangerous places" for Canadian women. In one case in 1913, Horace Wing, a Chinese merchant, was arrested and charged with "procuring a white woman for immoral purposes" after he answered a young Minnie Wyatt's newspaper advertisement seeking employment as a stenographer. Her parents gave Wing's letter offering her a job to the police.

On scant evidence, Wing was convicted and his appeal upheld by the Ontario Supreme Court, which declared that "interracial relationships not be condoned." Wing, however, was given a suspended sentence. Such cases, no matter true or not, led the Ontario provincial government of Conservative Premier James Whitney in the spring of 1914 to amend.