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Some Edmonton MyChoice members propose a picket-line style protest to be held in Edmonton on September 30 and October 1, 2007
Triple Whammy For Tobacco Control
October 7, 2007
It was billed as an opportunity to: "raise the level of importance of tobacco control among health professionals and the community", but it turned into a bad dream in which the cowardly, mean-spirited and clownish nature of the tobacco control cabal was laid bare for all to see.
The Canadian Council for Tobacco Control's 5th national conference on tobacco or health, held in Edmonton, Alberta from October 1-3, 2007 , must have been one of the most demoralizing events for anti-smoking fanatics to have taken place in recent history.
To begin with, before the conference had even begun, it became the focus of a national news story through which the cowardly nature of tobacco control's refusal to debate their critics, and their habit of running away when their scientific and professional integrity is challenged, was highlighted. Carl Phillips, a Harvard Phd doing research on smokeless tobacco as a "harm reduction" alternative to cigarettes, has been a target of harrassment by anti-tobacco crusaders since he accepted a post at the University of Alberta's School of Public Health. Phillips received a grant of over $1 million dollars from the smokeless tobacco industry to conduct his research, and although the university's ethics board declared themselves satisfied that the funds genuinely had "no strings attached", he was publicly vilified as a Big Tobacco stooge by local and national anti-smoking & tobacco activists.
"So, he and a handful of sympathetic colleagues arranged to air the issue of exactly how much freedom scientists have on campus these days. The conference would feature several professors who had faced similar problems. And it was planned for the Edmonton conference centre, at the same time and just down the hall from an international anti-tobacco conference "so that we could have sessions where we invited people from that conference over to make case for their attempts to suppress academic freedom," Prof. Phillips explains. But organizers of the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, he says, threatened to break their contract with the centre after they caught wind of his plan."
"The conference facility came to me and begged us to let them out of their contract because they were being put in the middle and they were convinced that this obviously much larger, much richer conference was going to pull out if they hosted us." Since not having the anti-tobacco attendees nearby defeated the purpose anyway, Prof. Phillips regretfully obliged."
This act of tobacco control cowardice was featured in a national news story: "Whither The Campus Radical" by Kevin Libin of The National Post (from which the above quotes were taken) that ran on the Thursday before the national anti-smokers conference in Edmonton. Whammy #1.
On Sunday, September 30th, delegates to this national conference were registering themselves at The Westin hotel in downtown Edmonton. Shortly after the reistrations began at 4pm, a small but highly spirited group of picketers appeared outside the hotel and began marching back & forth, chanting "tobacco control is out of control!" and waving placards bearing slogans such as; "No Nanny State", "Tobacco Control extorts funding thru fearmongering" and "Tobacco Control scapegoats the poor, elderly & disabled". These protestors, members of an informal group calling themselves "Nanny State Fighters", marched and chanted soliciting approving honks from passing motorists, while convention delegates watched through the hotel lobby windows, for over two hours before melting away into the night. Whammy #2.
On Monday, October 1st, the convention got underway at the Shaw Centre in downtown Edmonton. The day's schedule included a film highlighting tobacco control successes in Canada, in the morning, an address by the Provincial Health Minister (author of the most repressive tobacco legislation in Alberta history) Dave Hancock, over lunch, and various workshops throughout the day. The embarrasments and public humiliations the delegates had suffered so far would be forgotten as they settled into a long day of celebrating their own wonderfulness, in peace. But it was not to be...
Early on Monday morning, an oddly costumed street theatre protestor set up a home-made podium outside the front doors of the convention centre, positioned so that anyone going into or coming out of the building could not help but be confronted by the fact of his being there. "Dr Mephistopheles", a tobacco control snake-oil salesman, was dressed in black with a flowing cape and an oversized carnival barker's tophat. His podium was emblazoned, in enormous lettering, with: "get your TOBACCO CONTROL SNAKE-OIL here".
"Come on, come all - get your snake-oil right here!", he jeered at all the delegates and dignitaries as they passed in or out of the building throughout that day. For over six hours, ensuring that he would be seen - mocking & taunting tobacco control as a medical and scientific fraud - by every member of the national anti-smoking leadership at some point. Even the Minister of Health had to pass by Dr Mephistopheles on the way to his government bigwig reserved parking space - "Care for some snake-oil, Minister...or do you prefer your personal brand?" Oh, yes!
For any delegates whom he could sucker into talking with him, and there were over a dozen of those, Dr Mephistopheles would offer a choice of snake-oil "flavors" - featuring "if you never smoke, you will never die" and "when there are no more smokers, health costs will plummet" among other fraudulent concepts and false hopes. He would tell the delegate that all he wanted in exchange for the snake-oil of their choice, was for them to give Tobacco Control their body, their mind and their soul. Then he would pull out a contract for them to sign and remove his hat revealing the devil horns on his head. The last paragraph of the contract, which was the real point of the whole document, read:
"You agree to give Tobacco Control your soul.
You agree to persecute and scapegoat whomever we instruct you to persecute or scapegoat - including poor, elderly, disabled or otherwise disadvantaged persons. You will burn in hell for doing this, of course, but then...that's inherent to any deal with the devil - isn't it?"
Whammy #3.
Edmonton Health Nanny excesses Protest -AB by Roy Some Edmonton MyChoice members propose a picket-line style protest to be held in Edmonton on September 30 and October 1, 2007, against: - anti-smoking & tobacco control excesses; including the Lloyd Carr theft of over $640,000 in public monies from AADAC's Tobacco Control program (still unresolved - no charges laid), 100% workplace smoking bans, attempts to ban smoking in your own home, attempts to criminalize smoking in private cars, persecution-level taxation of tobacco products, direspectful & inhumane treatment of elderly & disabled smokers, refusal to treat patients who smoke, refusing smokers employment, fear-mongering/witch-hunting/promotion of hatred against persons who smoke, pervasive "junk science" and fraudulent "research findings" used as social control propaganda, etc. - other manifestations of Health Promotion Nanny Statism; including the persecution of allegedly obese persons, irrational, useless and/or counterproductive substance prohibitions, siphoning monies from health treatment to pie-in-the-sky "prevention" programs, promotion of the idea that a person's value to society is a function of their state of health, promotion of obsessive concern about how much your neighbors might be "costing" you and other forms of quasi-eugenics, attempts to legislate useless or pointless "green" measures such as "idling bans", the use of junk science and fear-mongering campaigns to justify useless or pointless legislation, etc. The focus of this proposed protest event, is the "5th National Conference on Tobacco or Health" being held at the Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton from October 1-3, 2007. Agenda: http://www.ncth.ca/program.htmWe are proposing two dates on which interested protesters could come out and join us - the first, September 30, targets the registration for the conference (taking place at the Westin Hotel). This is a good way to be seen by (and have an impact on) large numbers of the conference participants themselves. The second date, October 1st, targets the conference venue (The Shaw Centre), passing street traffic and some of the conference participants as they come & go. Anyone interested in participating is asked to email Roy at fightnannystate@gmail.com before September 29th, so that the level of interest can be determined - however, every interested person is invited to come out and make themselves heard whether they choose to email us or not. The 'picketing' should take place outside the Westin Hotel on Sunday, September 30 between 4pm and 9pm - and/or outside the Shaw Conference Centre on Monday, October 1st between 2pm and 5pm. We are not asking people to come out for both dates, just the one that suits your availability best. This protest event should be politically non-partisan, i.e., neither for nor against any particular political party, but protests aimed at the laws and policies of specific governments at any level (municipal, provincial, federal or UN/international) would be welcomed. Bring a sign of your own devising if you wish, highlighting your personal areas of concern in all this mess. Some, more generic, signs should be available when you arrive...or just come out and walk around without one at all. We don't have a projection of the numbers of participants (if any) likely to show, at this time. Nevertheless, there will be some "street theatre" protest events staged at both locations on both days, regardless of the number of protest participants, so there will be someone there to welcome you if you decide to drop by. Information at a glance: What : Edmonton, AB picket the 5th National Conference on Tobacco or Health, Smoke Free: A World of Difference. Tell the anti-smoking & tobacco control excesses and other manifestations of Health Promotion Nanny Statism of more then 650 attendees that you don't agree with their agenda. http://www.ncth.ca/ When: Sept. 30 at 4- 9 PM at the Westin Hotel (10135 100th Street • Edmonton, AB) to walk along the street to show that there is opposition to further restrictions planned. October 1st 2- 5 PM at The Shaw Centre (9797 Jasper Ave., Edmonton, AB) Walk along the sidewalk at the main doors Who: Anyone who would like to show that the gov't departments and Non Government Organizations they don't belong and aren't wanted in our apartments, homes, cars, etc. telling us their lifestyle choices and control measures. Show you want to stop the future stricter prohibitions they are planning. Where: Westin Edmonton Hotel 10135 100th Street • Edmonton, AB 4-9PM Sept 30/07 Shaw Conference Centre 9797 Jasper Ave., Edmonton - Oct 1/07 2-5PMhttp://www.shawconferencecentre.com/ How: Bring your voice, Carry our sign or bring your own sign to the front of the building to show that people are against their next intrusion on your life that over 650 attendees are making on your lifestyle in the next year; without talking to the public. Contact: Please email Roy at fightnannystate@gmail.com hopefully before Sept 29th to let him know he has support and your voice attending .
Whither the campus radical?
Kevin Libin, National Post
September 27, 2007
If you planned to attend the Conference on Academic Freedom and Research Integrity on Monday at Edmonton's Shaw Convention Centre, take note: It has been cancelled. The reason? Several academics, apparently, did not approve of the subject matter.
The forum was organized by Carl Phillips, a University of Alberta professor with a deeply personal interest in the issue. That's because he studies something many of his colleagues hate: tobacco - specifically, the health benefits of smokers switching to smokeless tobacco. And he's suffering for it.
In June, his faculty voted to cut off his industry research funding, though the university long ago cleared the funding as ethically clean. Shortly after, Prof. Phillips says he received a letter. Since he no longer had funding, his department said, he was being terminated.
"Despite the fact there was no actual evidence the money was running out," he says, noting that the vote was unofficial and probably non-binding without administration's consent. "Not to mention there are all kinds of other sources I could have gotten money from."
Since then, the Harvard PhD says he's been subject to repeated and intrusive audits, been charged by colleagues with ethical violations and has had research projects cancelled for what he says are the flimsiest of excuses. "Even with Holocaust deniers, or when someone says the Taliban are wonderful, even in those cases, they get the sufficient respect that somebody stands up and points out that these people don't know what they're talking about. But nobody's ever said I'm wrong. Nobody has actually challenged the premise of my research. They basically just tried to shut the whole thing down without having to address the substance of it."
So, he and a handful of sympathetic colleagues arranged to air the issue of exactly how much freedom scientists have on campus these days. The conference would feature several professors who had faced similar problems. And it was planned for the Edmonton conference centre, at the same time and just down the hall from an international anti-tobacco conference "so that we could have sessions where we invited people from that conference over to make case for their attempts to suppress academic freedom," Prof. Phillips explains. But organizers of the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, he says, threatened to break their contract with the centre after they caught wind of his plan.
"The conference facility came to me and begged us to let them out of their contract because they were being put in the middle and they were convinced that this obviously much larger, much richer conference was going to pull out if they hosted us." Since not having the anti-tobacco attendees nearby defeated the purpose anyway, Prof. Phillips regretfully obliged.
Stifling tobacco research may not be something that most Canadians would get worked up about. But it is of a piece with a broader suffocation of university research or discussion of things considered politically incorrect, argues Peter Suedfeld, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia.
"There's a kind of atmosphere that there are some things you shouldn't say, there are certain things your research shouldn't show and certain topics you shouldn't be doing research on anyway," he says.
Thirty-nine years ago after, sixties "yippie" Jerry Rubin, told students at that same B.C. campus "We have to destroy this university system . . . take it over," academic freedom supporters say that is just what happened: rather than being the bastions of open debate and inquiry once intended, universities have become places where only narrow varieties of debate and inquiry are tolerated.
It's strange, then, that evidence suggests ugly, public battles such as Mr. Phillips' are increasingly rare. That may be because entrenched at Canadian universities today are far more subtle forms of suppression, says John Furedy, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto's psychology department and a co-founder of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.
You won't read much these days about incidents like that at UBC in 1995, when the president suspended admissions to the graduate programme in political science after disgruntled students accused the department, dominated by white men, of racism and sexism for failing to give appropriate credence to modish post-colonial political theories. Or like that of Allan McKinnon, of B.C.'s University College of the Cariboo, where administrators a year earlier suspended the psychology professor, without pay, ordering him barred from campus, when feminists complained that his discussions about gender differences in cognitive abilities made them "uncomfortable."
The absence of such brouhahas today is not an encouraging sign for Prof. Furedy, however, but rather, a symptom of conformity.
"The velvet totalitarian regime that has been imposed on Canadian campuses," he says, "maintains a culture of comfort rather than one of free inquiry, where conflicting ideas are argued about, rather than being censored."
Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, a group that frequently defends academic freedom, sees things differently. "I would argue that academic freedom is alive and well in Canada," he says. Cases like Prof. Phillips' sometimes do occur, he admits, and are troubling. But often, Mr. Turk says, CAUT's freedom cases - he estimates he's handling roughly 100 today - usually concern academics hassled over interpersonal conflicts, such as one current case, that of Dr. Gabrielle Horne, a top Dalhousie University cardiologist who had research privileges curtailed after declining to work with a colleague with friends in higher places.
It is the academic's nature - generally low-key, shunning the spotlight - to avoid at great cost such destructive faculty spats, says J. Philippe Rushton, the University of Western Ontario psychologist, and the man at the centre of one of Canada's most famous academic freedom cases. "Unfortunately in academia, when you're doing research, sometimes you will tend to pursue some lines of inquiry that are a little less popular," says Prof. Rushton. "And if you know that ... your colleagues will line up against you, you start training yourself not to go that way."
Not many professors would willingly experience what Prof. Rushton did. His statistical analysis of IQ differences between blacks, whites and Asians had the premier of Ontario at the time, David Peterson, demanding Western fire him. Several faculty members added push for his dismissal. Dozens of students (only a handful actually in Mr. Rushton's class) hired a lawyer to bring the teacher before a human rights tribunal. Mr. Turk points out that in the end, the researcher's rights prevailed. "Academic freedom protected Rushton's job and his career, and a decade-and-a-half later he's still doing the same research," he says. To simply survive, though, Mr. Rushton was forced to spend many thousands of dollars and roughly five years of fighting for his career.
And persecution alone can smother open-mindedness on campus with as much efficacy as firings, says Evan Coyne Maloney, the New York-based director of a new documentary aimed at examining free speech on campus, Indoctrinate U. "At the point in which you make it so expensive for someone to engage in speech that they have to decide, 'Am I going to say what I want to say and run the risks of spending months in a judiciary process at my school?', that has a chilling effect," he says. "People are simply not going to say things that they want to say, because they don't want to deal with what the school is going to do to them."
Earlier this year the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship was alarmed when Vivek Goel, vice president and provost at University of Toronto, wrote in a memo to staff "some forms of expression fall short of the legal limits of hate speech, but nonetheless are harmful to identifiable members of our community. The university recognizes that harmful speech is a destructive force on our campuses and, though not prohibited by law, is repugnant to the administration."
Questionable speech, he added, would be "monitored closely." Even without explicit threat of consequence, the result, Prof. Suedfeld says, is that professors feel an implicit chill over any scholarly work that might rub one of any number of on-campus identity groups the wrong way. "They avoid doing anything that risks getting them in trouble," he says.
And that's often how many members of the public prefer it, too. Take Shiraz Dossa, the St. Francis Xavier political science professor who attended Iran's infamous Holocaust-denial conference last December. He complained that his academic freedom had been violated when his university president, following a firestorm of media and public outrage, called Prof. Dossa's participation in the anti-Semitic conference "deeply abhorrent." Though he reportedly faced no formal disciplinary action, few researchers would readily endure what Prof. Dossa did by gracing any such conference again - presumably just the way many of us would like it.
After Prof. Phillips' experience, not many epidemiologists see a future in studying tobacco. Given the minefield that is today's university campus, Mr. Maloney believes many bright graduates steer clear of academia altogether, creating a teaching environment where those who think the same way predominate. "We're a generation into this now," he says. "It's the kind of thing that's not going to regain balance anytime soon.
It is unclear how many university administrators even see a situation that needs righting at all. Most claim to defend academic freedom, but few seem prepared to go what is often a difficult distance. Concordia University's submissiveness in the face of protest was highlighted by the cancellation on two separate occasions of speeches by Israeli politicians. A few years ago, the University of Quebec at Montreal showed its disloyalty to the spirit of open-mindedness when its board declared the school's staunch opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Dalhousie this year cancelled a speech by American white nationalist, Jared Taylor, in the face of public pressure. Meanwhile, UBC, Capilano College, and Carleton University all have policies that deny official club status to anti-abortion groups.
Prof. Rushton refers to his student days, where he recalls attending regular, boisterous on-campus forums, thrashing out the thorniest of issues. "We had debates about South Africa, the ending of Apartheid, the Vietnam War, the genetics of language ... and there were speakers from different points of view. But the university made a point of insisting there should be decorum," he says. "There were protestors, but there was still debate. Much more than today."
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