Intellectual Freedom

In 2019, we seem to have crossed a professional threshold where discourse is still possible and ongoing but, like many other instances in our everyday lives, it is becoming politicized and polarized around rigid presumptions of someone’s opinion being right and the opposing viewpoint being wrong. There is no place for a middle ground discussion.

Once again, the Toronto Public Library is under attack for upholding intellectual freedom. Some who find Feminist Current’s founder Meghan Murphy’s views offensive are demanding that the TPL abandon its principled commitment to intellectual freedom by withdrawing the space at a branch library it has rented to sponsors of Murphy’s upcoming talk on "Gender Identity: What does It Mean for Society, the Law and Women?"

An unprecedented number of public disputes have erupted across Canada in recent years about meeting room bookings and speaker’s events in the country’s public libraries. Most disturbingly, critics have ignored, disparaged, and frequently rebuffed the time-honoured commitments of Canadian public libraries to freedom of expression and unfettered access to library services.

The No Platforming blog post calls on the Library Board to reconsider its revised room booking policy. The blog refers to TPL as “detouring from its mandate” and the revised policy as “a misguided endeavor”, suggesting TPL’s commitment to intellectual freedom has been undermined.

The Toronto Public Library (TPL) Board kicked-off 2018 by bringing in a new policy on community and event space rental.  While the new policy is meant to address discrimination and promote inclusion, it is infinitely more likely to quash debates on controversial topics, exclude minority voices and in doing so, distort the mission of the library to promote the free exchange of ideas. 

Should we expect our public institutions to protect our freedom of expression?  The Toronto Public Library made a controversial decision in July 2017 to permit a memorial to the late Barbara Kulaszka to be held in a rental space in one of the library’s branches. Ms Kulaszka, a former librarian, was a lawyer best known for her legal defence of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. Many people registered their objection to the event, both before and after it took place.