Laurier free speech advocate Lindsay Shepherd honoured in Ottawa

When graduate student Lindsay Shepherd stood up to her professors at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University last fall, she didn’t know she would become the focus of the fiery debate over free speech on campus.

She never expected she would end up being ostracized by her peers or that when she travelled to another university for a conference, the student union there would feel compelled to open a “healing space” for those upset by her presence.

“On the one hand, you had the general public who were completely supportive of my position and its implications, and then there were my fellow grad students … who all of a sudden thought I was a transphobic, white supremacist Nazi and completely flipped,” Shepherd told a gathering in Ottawa on Saturday as she accepted the 2018 Harry Weldon Canadian Values Award from the public policy group POGG Canada.

Shepherd was hauled before a discipline committee at Laurier last October after she chose for a seminar on grammar to use a video of controversial University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson being interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Shepherd, who recorded the discipline hearing and later shared it with the media, won an apology from the university for her treatment.

Since then, Shepherd has been targeted by leftist activists and Antifa protesters. Downtown Waterloo was plastered with stickers urging the university to “(expletive) expel Lindsay Shepherd already.”

The experience has hardened Shepherd, who said she used to lean to the left politically but is now frightened by the left and “political correctness.”

“This is the culture and times that we’re living in,” she said. “It’s a culture of victimhood. It’s a culture, really, of losers.”

The remark drew cheers from the audience, which was overwhelmingly white and older. One man sported a red “Trump is my President” T-shirt and a “Make Canada Great Again” cap.

The talk also featured University of Ottawa professor Janice Fiamengo, whose planned lecture in March at the Ottawa Public Library was met by protesters who blocked access to the library and eventually scuttled the talk by pulling the fire alarm.

There were no protests at Saturday’s gathering, which was held in a meeting room at the Best Western Hotel on Carling Avenue.

Edgar Simpson, president of POGG Canada (It stands from Peace, Order and Good Government), said it’s important that free speech advocates like Shepherd be heard.

“We bring up the issues that are not being talked about,” Simpson said. “Unfortunately, today, as soon as the  politically correct side is stated, that’s the end of the discussion.

“Well, we beg to differ.”

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