I Was Alberta’s First Gay Human Rights Chief, Then I Was Cancelled
Currents
In May of 2022, I was appointed Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in Canada, becoming the first openly LGBT person to head the province’s human rights watchdog. Given Alberta’s right-leaning electorate, and the fact that I was appointed by a United Conservative Party provincial government, my appointment was seen as a victory for the LGBT community. But what started as a progressive breakthrough ended in an identitarian disaster. On September 15, just months into the role, the government of Alberta publicly fired me. This is the story of my downfall — the story of how the radical left aligned with the Islamist right to destroy my career and reputation, but also a story of resilience, redemption, and the unexpected people who helped me.
Though I assumed the role of Chief in 2022, I was no stranger to the AHRC. Three years earlier, in August of 2019, the provincial Alberta government headed by Conservative premier Jason Kenney appointed me as a part-time commissioner of the human rights body. The AHRC’s mandate is to promote equality by adjudicating complaints from Albertans who believe they have suffered discrimination, usually arising in the workplace. As part-time Commissioner, I ran hearings, wrote decisions, and conducted mediations between complainants and respondents. In true overachieving gay style, I was one of the most productive members of the Commission. By the time I was turfed in 2022, I had written 54 published decisions and not one was appealed.
It would seem to most objective observers that I was qualified to take on the full-time job of Chief. But to understand where things went wrong, I need to give you a little personal backstory. I grew up on a farm in southern Alberta a few miles from the small town of Claresholm. But I knew early on that farming wasn’t in my future. I studied religion, political philosophy, and Arab philosophy, earning degrees from Harvard, the École des hautes études in Paris, and the University of Alberta. (I did tell you I am a quintessential gay overachiever.) From the late 1990s to early 2000s, I worked for the United Nations International Telecommunication Union and then the International Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland. During my time with the Red Cross, much of my work focused on conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim populations.
When I returned to Canada, I went to law school and started my own legal practice in 2009. During my time as a lawyer, I made something of a name for myself specializing in complaints related to professional regulators, including a case involving incompetence and medical negligence that led to my father’s death in a care facility in 2017. Through my dogged persistence, nine medical staffers and the care facility in question were investigated and cited for abuse and unprofessional conduct in my father’s care. As my partner says: “Don’t piss off the gays!”
This experience led to my involvement with the AHRC in 2019, and eventually my appointment as the first LGBT Chief in the organization’s history. Not bad for a gay man from small-town Alberta in Canada’s most socially conservative province. At least, until I found myself on the wrong side of a conspiracy between extreme leftists and the National Council of Canadian Muslims.
What led to this rather sad convergence of events goes back to those studies I did at Harvard and in Paris, as well as my time at the International Red Cross. While I never pursued a career in academia, I did write several academic book reviews as well as articles on topics in political philosophy, law, and international relations. One of these reviews would become infamous, leading to my public humiliation, the destruction of my career, and eventually, also my redemption.
The review itself considered the work of Professor Efraim Karsh, an expert on contemporary Middle Eastern history. The topic of his book was the history of Islamic imperialism; an appropriate subject for me to review given my past studies and employment. In reviewing his book, I presented Karsh’s arguments and explained his reasons for making them. I noted Karsh’s view that Islam is one of the most political and militaristic major religions. By comparison, Christianity has had its share of historic violence, but due to the bifurcation between what is owed to God and what is owed to Caesar, Christendom has had a very different relationship to politics than Islam, which many scholars argue ultimately paved the way for the rise of liberal secularism in the West.
It was this act of relaying a scholar’s arguments, from a 2009 book review on a topic so esoteric that it was misunderstood by almost everyone who bothered to read it, that dealt my career a blow from which it still hasn’t recovered. The fireworks came in early July when a far-left blogger found this book review and spun it to his own ends. He played up my description of Karsh’s views, took them out of context, and called for my firing in a hit piece written only days before I officially took office. In the days immediately after, I was bombarded by so many threatening messages and phone calls that my partner and I didn’t leave our condo for five days. This was when the far-left dogpiling began.
The New Democratic Party (NDP), the left-wing opposition party to the Conservative-led Alberta government, seized on this blog post and ginned up a crusade against me. I personally know many high-ranking members of the party, some of whom have spent time in my home. My partner worked directly under the NDP’s Rachel Notley during her one term as Alberta Premier (akin to a governor in the US). Nevertheless, Irfan Sabir, the NDP Justice Critic, joined in, calling my book review overtly racist, Islamophobic, and hate speech. The rest of the NDP caucus jumped on the bandwagon. That academics disagreed with the mischaracterizations of Karsh’s views as well as my own did nothing to temper the NDP’s campaign against me.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t only the NDP I had to deal with. The Conservative government that had appointed me, and whose leader, Jason Kenney, was himself facing his own political demise following a party review of his leadership, scrambled to do damage control by requiring me to meet with a supposedly representative Muslim group — the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM). I met with the group twice and agreed to meet with members of the Muslim community. However, the NCCM demanded an apology. Having done nothing wrong, I issued a statement but refused an apology.
Afterward, things blessedly seemed to quiet down, at least on the surface, as I took up my role as Chief at the AHRC. But just two months later, the NCCM hurled a new wave of accusations, alleging that I had threatened to sue my critics and had refused meetings with the Muslim community — both untrue — and demanded I be fired. And despite their claims to be opponents of “cancel culture” and “wokeism”, the Conservative government of Jason Kenney capitulated and sacked me.
Amid the media coverage of the whole affair, people held forth on my status as a gay man. Picking up on a tweet in which my lawyer passingly mentioned that I was the first openly LGBT person to serve as Chief of the AHRC, academics such as gender studies professor Lise Gotell and political scientist Duane Bratt immediately derided the mention of my sexual orientation. They were happy to report that “It is possible to be gay and Islamophobic.” In reality, I harbor no such bigotries. I chose to study medieval Islam out of intellectual fascination. I have personally assisted an HIV-positive Arab man escape death threats in the Middle East and gain asylum in Canada not out of a crusade against Islam, but a concern for human rights. And I reviewed Efraim Karsh’s book not because I hate Muslims, but in order to understand it and share another perspective on history. Especially distasteful was Gotell’s comment: “You can be gay and intemperate and not suited for an adjudicative role.” Playing on the trope of the unserious and flighty gay or bi man, this good “progressive” let her partisan instincts get the better of her.
A few weeks after I was fired, I filed a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal, which is still ongoing today under Kenney’s successor, Danielle Smith. Like Kenney, Smith claims to be a defender of free speech against cancellation, yet has done nothing to encourage the Alberta government to settle my two-year-old lawsuit. Don’t let the name fool you — as this case illustrates, capital-C Conservatives in Canada often use small-l liberal values such as free speech as marketing slogans, nothing more.
The motivations of those involved in the efforts to remove me from office fall under a number of headings. One factor is the knee-jerk desire to signal to one’s in-group that they’re a member in good standing by signing off on some collective action, even if it’s unjust or they don’t actually know the details. As studies have explored, and as I saw firsthand, this is a typical component in cancellation campaigns. But there was a degree of homophobia involved as well. As my legal team discovered, Mustafa Farooq, the CEO of the NCCM, made statements in the past comparing homosexuality to adultery, usury, and the production of alcohol — all forbidden or haram in Islam. His solution was to love the sinner but condemn the sin, a familiar refrain from religious conservatives of any stripe.
More insidiously, I learned that female employees at the Alberta Human Rights Commission had been subjected to sexual harassment. Their complaints were investigated and my predecessor as Chief, Michael Gottheil, appointed to the role by the previous NDP government, was directed to conduct workplace reviews at the AHRC to deal with widespread employee discontent. The directions went unanswered — until I took office and got the ball rolling on those workplace investigations. That suggests, to me at least, that the NDP may have been motivated to bury any problems at the AHRC under their administration, especially given that, with my termination, the investigations all came to an end.
Since my quite public firing, a few things have happened. For one, the pernicious nature of the far-left/Islamist alliance that attacked me has become clearer. Duncan Kinney, the blogger who first “broke” the story about my book review has himself been charged with a hate crime in Edmonton, Alberta for allegedly spray-painting swastikas on the statue of a World War II veteran at a local Ukrainian cemetery. The NCCM, following on their success in ousting me, went on to advocate for and celebrate the firing of the only Jewish member of the British Columbia cabinet, as well as a female Iranian politician in Ontario who opposed the Iranian regime.
The ordeal has also led to some unexpected friendships. Since my termination, I’ve gotten to know a few of the women who had been victims of sexual harassment at the AHRC under the prior administration. Knowing that in my short time in office, I’d attempted to sort out the investigations into their cases, several of them expressed interest in meeting up, and we have since become friends, seeing and supporting each other regularly. NDP staffers and former members of the NDP government who found themselves the victims of bullying and sexual harassment also reached out to my partner and me, expressing their support.
It has been two years since I filed my wrongful dismissal suit against the Alberta government which colluded in my cancellation. When I say that my career was destroyed, that’s no exaggeration. I have yet to return to a full-time job, and my partner and I lost our home. We’re getting by, but it’s obviously been tough. What I have been able to do is to write more — and more defiantly. I’ve penned articles and essays on everything from the psychology and social theory of cancel culture to the legalities behind the removal of encampments on university campuses following October 7, 2023. Rather than give in to the cancelers — far-leftists and rightists alike — and be silenced, I’ve spoken even louder. The gay community has never been known for keeping its mouth shut, a tradition I very much identify with.
Looking back on this experience, there are several things I’ve learned. I’ve learned that cancel culture is very much real, that it’s not necessarily always an honest attempt to “hold the powerful accountable”, but rather a toxic expression of tribalism, in-group signaling, and radical ideologies. I’ve learned that cancel culture is the enemy of both free speech and academic freedom and that it should be challenged wherever and whenever it raises its ugly head — regardless of the political camp from which it emanates. More personally, I’ve learned that the emotional, physical, and financial toll of being on the wrong side of a cancellation is extremely high. As a gay man, I’ve learned that there are still contingents within Western society, even in supposedly “progressive” circles, who are willing to side with homophobes against LGBT people if they see it as politically expedient.
But there’s a silver lining as well. I’ve learned that there are many decent people who will support you as you push back. I’ve also seen that cancellations follow a highly predictable pattern enacted by specific types of organizations and individuals. This pattern can and should be studied, analyzed, and explained. Much of the scholarship on cancel culture has been dismissive, however in the last couple of years, academics have finally begun seriously studying it — and there is power in knowing the psychology behind how this phenomenon works in order to resist it. More than anything, my experience over the past couple of years has taught me that we must protect our free expression and our academic freedom by speaking, writing, and thinking freely, not by running away from the difficult questions. Speech culture is eroding in many Western societies. Fighting back against this worrying trend is one of the most vital fights of our time.
Published Dec 3, 2024
