Alberta’s Advanced Education Minister Tasked With Protecting Free Speech on Campus

Students walk on campus at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, in a file photo. (Omid Ghoreishi/The Epoch Times)

EDMONTON—Alberta’s Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides has been charged with improving free speech and academic freedom on the province’s campuses.

In a mandate letter released Nov. 16, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith instructed the minister to ensure the province’s post-secondary institutions “are adequately protecting the academic freedom and free speech of students and faculty.”

“Our institutions of higher learning must absolutely be places of open debate,” Nicolaides told The Epoch Times.

“It is critical for the mandate of an institution. If we can’t engage in rigorous and open debate on our university campuses, then when is that to occur?”

Nicolaides was promoted to the Advanced Education file under former Alberta premier Jason Kenney in 2019, and maintained the role when Smith announced her first cabinet on Oct 21.

Ministerial mandate letters, which outline a minister’s priorities for a given term, were not made public under Kenney. But Nicolaides says his previous letter was very comprehensive and much of the information was publicly available on the United Conservative Party’s 2019 election platform.

Demetrios Nicolaides, minister of advanced education, is sworn into office in Edmonton on April 30, 2019. (The Canadian Press/Jason Franson)

He says he’s excited to continue the work he began in 2019. In May of that year, he asked all publicly funded post-secondary institutions to develop policies to strengthen the right of students and faculty to exercise their free speech rights.

The UCP government said the policies must align with the American standard—referring to the University of Chicago’s Statement on Free Expression developed in 2014 to demonstrate the university’s commitment to free speech, which has been adopted by the administrations or faculty bodies of nearly 100 U.S. universities to date.

Nicolaides said all of Alberta’s institutions complied and had policies in place by December 2019 that made it clear that “if you disagree with someone, you can’t just shut them down and drown them out with shouting or protests.”

“Everybody has a right to express their view, and specifically on our campuses that has to be cultivated, and that has to be allowed to grow and foster,” he said.

In 2018, the Ontario government also directed the province’s publicly funded colleges and universities to adopt free speech policies aligned with the Chicago Principles by Jan. 1, 2019.

Nicolaides said it’s difficult to know how prevalent the issue of suppression of freedom of speech is on Alberta’s campuses, as no data is being collected. The available information is anecdotal, he said, adding that more could be done on data collection.

“I wonder if there’s more that we can do to be a little bit more rigorous in collecting data on instances of an individual, you know, not being permitted to express a view or a speech being cancelled or that kind of thing,” he said.

“So I think we need to be a little bit more rigorous in how we go about exploring this issue and monitoring it ... if it doesn’t happen currently.”

Asked if he would implement data collection as part of his mandate to protect free speech, the minister said he would have more to say at a later date. Nicolaides said he wants to consult with the province’s universities, colleges, and student leaders and with other jurisdictions to develop ideas on how to move forward.