Head Tale

There have been a couple major media storms recently – Toronto Public Library faced a huge outcry for allowing a controversial speaker to proceed with a presentation in one of their branch meeting rooms and Sportsnet faced a huge outcry after longtime hockey icon, Don Cherry, made controversial remarks where he accused recent immigrants of being not sufficiently supportive of the Canadian military.

It got me thinking about the similarities and differences between these two situations.

SIMILARITIES

1. Both situations revolved around questions of free speech and the (potential) consequences for controversial speech.
2. Both involved attacks on marginalized groups – transgender people in the TPL case and recent immigrants in the Don Cherry situation.
3. Both resulted in widespread protests, especially online.
4. Although Ontario-based, both drew national attention
5. Both situations felt like proxies for our increasingly partisan times with people lining up with others on their “team” to defend/attack as expected.

DIFFERENCES

1. I’d say that the most obvious difference is that the public library, as an institution with free speech as part of its core values (and it’s a separate post about how libraries struggle to reconcile their core value of free speech with their core value of inclusion and diversity) allowed the presentation to go ahead in light of the outcry whereas Rogers Sportsnet, as a privately held, for-profit corporation made a decision that Don Cherry’s comments didn’t match their corporate values (and honestly, probably more accurately that cutting him loose would be better for their bottom line than keeping him.)
2. As a librarian with a keen interest in freedom of expression issues, I was obviously paying close attention to the TPL situation.  But the the Don Cherry situation was a lot more high-profile with someone who was once voted the 7th greatest Canadian of all-time (*between* two former Prime Ministers) as the focus of the controversy.
3. The battle for trans rights has been going on for a long time but it feels like it’s come to the forefront of public consciousness only within the last few years (one trans person I know observed that “right now, trans people are probably where gay people were in the early 1980’s in terms of fighting for their rights”.)  On the other hand, Don Cherry has been making controversial, xenophobic statements for decades.
4. TPL’s situation was mostly political at the municipal level but the Don Cherry comments got embroiled with bigger political issues, mainly with people wondering how Justin Trudeau could do blackface multiple times and still be elected while Don Cherry makes a comment not out of line with many of his previous pronouncements and he’s out of a job.  (Hint: Trudeau did his 20+ years ago and has done a lot to show he’s not racist since then so people chose to vote for him.  Don Cherry refused to apologise even as its widely speculated he was given the opportunity and was therefore cut loose.)
5. It’s interesting to see how public libraries are being attacked as old-fashioned and out-of-date and conservative for their decision to allow the person to speak on free speech grounds whereas the hockey world, widely seen as white, middle-class, traditional and conservative, is actually coming across as fairly progressive in their response to this by excommunicating Cherry.  I’ve heard interviews with a variety of hockey players, coaches and others who repeat the tag line “Hockey is for everyone.”

Those are some quick thoughts – what’d I miss?