“Cancel Culture”

The British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives does not have a rule requiring all of its nurses to support the idea that males can become females or anything in between. Nor is there any law or professional guideline that mandates nurses refrain from voicing their beliefs on gender ideology.

For the past decade, the political Right has lamented “cancel culture.” The idea was that the Left unfairly stoked race and gender hysteria to restrict the terms of debate and to cast anyone deemed in violation of the mandated terms into a state of social annihilation. Teenagers who sang along with rap songs have been denied entry into college. Political figures who failed to use the latest euphemisms found themselves cast into the void.

Now, with the second Trump administration, the rules of social annihilation are seemingly being rewritten in real time. The presidential appointments of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth might have been derailed, or not even attempted, in Trump’s first presidency. Yet, despite the salacious accusations against the two nominees, Senate Republicans held firm and confirmed both men.

The Netherlands’ Leiden University is one of the top-ranked in the world, so when one of its senior law professors takes the trouble to offer an international perspective to a science committee of the Canadian House of Commons, we should pay attention to his words.

Professor Yuan Yi Zhu’s advice to Canadian students who are not left wing is to keep their views to themselves until they secure funding: “[w]ithin Canadian academia there is a monoculture where, if you deviate even very slightly from what is fashionable and what is commonly accepted by your peers, not only will you be ostracized, but often you will not be able to have an academic career in the first place.”

Three in five Canadian university students say they fear expressing their honest views on contentious political issues due to potential backlash from peers and instructors, a campus free speech survey says.

Participants in a survey of 1,548 university and college students were asked if they felt comfortable discussing “controversial issues” in the classroom, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, transgender issues, and other politically charged subjects.

The forces of “decolonization” took one more historical victim last week in Oshawa, Ont. That’s where the city council moved to change the name of Bagot Street, which it believes — but isn’t even entirely sure — was named in honour of Charles Bagot, the governor general of the united Province of Canada from 1841 to 1843.

These rapists of history should be tossed headfirst down an outhouse.