Friday 7am Guest: Anver Emon

This is the Toronto today podcast. I'm your host Greg Brady. All right. We mentioned earlier, University of Toronto. Again, we have ombudsman, maybe at your work or my work or wherever, and the concept is be independent about this, bring a report back to a some form of governing bodies. Happens with the city of Toronto. It could happen with the province. And it's meant to be purely objective. So a objective independent report, 300 pages worth, uh, from a working group at University of Toronto demonstrated a quote general pattern of over policing and under-protecting Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and U of T decided to take that report. And I don't, they didn't reject it outright, but they refused to adopt the recommendations as written. So I want to get into some of those core issues that were identified, why that ended up happening. And Vera Maun is a law professor chair of the MAP discrimination committee and joins us now on Toronto today. Thanks for letting us get ahold of you this morning. I appreciate the time. Good morning. Thank you very much for having me. Tell me your, uh, tell me about just the genesis of putting this independent report together. What did it stem from how long did it take? And again, the accomplishment is objectivity here. What ended up transpiring when, when you put it all together, Amber? Yeah, sure. So this was a working group that began in 2024. It had been part of a longer process of conversation as people really were demanding more, more interest in this as the university had already published reports on these issues related to indigenous issues, anti-Asian discrimination, anti-Semitism, and anti-Black racism. And so there was a call for this. And so when we spent all of 2025 doing consultations across all three campuses, 85 consultations, ran a survey, did a full survey analysis as well of responses. And what we found was a general pattern of overpolicing and underprotecting speech, research, advocacy by or on Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians across the board, this related to how the university applied policies on protesting or how deans exercise their duties under, under relevant policies on decanal authority. And we just, we consistently found this across a number of vectors, including how the university complies with federal regulations and how it applies provincial rules that it's subject to, like the occupational, safe, and healthy, and safety and health act here in Ontario. And so we spent the beginning of 2026 riding the report. It went to the university in March of 2026, after which we did a administrative review with senior staffers at the university from May to September of 2026. And there we, we were at Smith, lined by line, paragraph by paragraph, recommendation by recommendation. One after another, how do we, how do we make sure the university report is absolutely accurate? And how do we make sure the recommendations are feasible? So when we submitted it to the university after that, we figured we were done. And so we were all shocked and surprised when the university came out and rejected the report. Do you think they're taking what you put together? That's, that's pretty, you know, painstaking and time consuming. Did they take it seriously, but disagree? Or do you not think they took it seriously enough, the concerns of some of the affected students and faculty as well? I think if you look at their statement, if I'm to be absolutely blunt, their statement, this doesn't make a lot of sense, right? They talk about how, well, it doesn't look like the same as the other reports that we've done. I was like, that was never part of our terms of reference. Or it should, it should have been looking a little bit more of the same scope or scale as the other ones. And if I'm to be absolutely honest, I think, I think that, that they're just scared. The scope of what we found was alarming. And rather than taking it seriously and addressing it at the level that we did as, as objectively as we did, they just decided to, to bury their heads in the sand like an ostrich. How many of these issues were pre that you put in the 300 pages? How many were pre October 7th, 23? How many were post October 7th, 23? I think we'd agree, post October 7th, obviously, emotions get inflamed. There was a massive wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at so many universities. U of T was no different. I want to ask about the encampment in the spring in a minute. But how many were before even the 7th of October 7th, 23, Amber? Well, so there's two ways to answer your question. First, we found, we found issues that that were both before and after structural problems, limitations well before that, well before 2023. The bigger issue though, and here's what I think we need to think about for all of our universities, all of our universities strive to be international players. We bring students from abroad, we partner with institutions from abroad. We are all competing with US institutions right now. But here's the thing, if we want to be a global university, then we have to accept the corollary that the global takes effect. It has impact in our classroom. What happens elsewhere? Has an impact here? When you're tuning with a city like Toronto, a university like ours, with one of the largest and the most diverse student body likely in the country, we're going to have concerns that stem from abroad. And if we don't exercise a greater global awareness, all we're doing is we're simply extracting from the global north, the global south, so we can get our bottom line. That's one way to run a university, but that's not how members of the university are experiencing it. And instead, what the university says is, well, we write about global events. No, we're trying to provide context for what's happening on the ground. And if the university wants to be blind to what's happening globally, then I just don't think that they're the global university they think they are. That's a fair comment. I think people wonder, and you can imagine, I think everybody went through this at every single workplace that they are at. What will my employer let me say that is within line, which could be a genuine global concern like and racism and famine. And when will they let me weigh in on a global conflict where there's a lot of opinions, even something that it seems one sided Russia and Ukraine, for example, but what have I decided? I'm Russian. I'm hearing I'm a Russian heritage. And all the pro-Ukrainian stuff has made me feel terribly uncomfortable as a student or a professor on campus. We'd have to listen to that Russian student or professor, wouldn't we about that? >> Yeah, no, what's amazing to me, and we have a whole section in the report, section number five, really on how speech has been trampled upon in the case of certainly, we were focusing on speech related to Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. And the number of double standards at the university in the name of occupational health or safety, with no procedural protections. But I have no, I understand employers have to deal with trying to ensure a safe and secure workplace. What I don't understand is how employers can do so with no procedural protections, with no procedural guidelines to their administrators. We spoke to administrators, we have a chair of a department who refused to speak with us because having to deal with all these speech issues made her so uncomfortable and so mad at the university for any lack of guidance that she wouldn't even speak to us. So clearly, it's not just individualism. >> What was her role again? Isn't that exactly defines her role, right? She should be speaking to you. That's the job. >> She should be, that's the job she should have been speaking to us, but she was so angry at the university. And it's inability to guide its own administrators to address these speech issues. She refused to meet with us. She says it's too much of a minefield. We quote her email in the report. Our own administrators are scared of managing these issues. And they know that they are doing it badly. Our position is simply exercise some restraint. Exercise some fairness. None of these administrators are specialists in whatever's happening on the globe. Look, they might be great biologists or they might be great psychiatrists, but they don't know anything about actually what's happening globally. They don't know the history. So before they can sit as judged jury and executioner, they need to maybe learn a little bit more about this situation and not how they need jerk reactions, which is what we found consistently. >> Yeah, I think that's fair, but I also saw a lot of students, maybe on both sides of the conflict, and you see those viral clips all the time and you're like, they're really in on this conflict, one way or the other. And they can't find like gas on a map or they don't know the history of the Middle East very well. And they get an opinion. They're allowed to attend a meeting or a protest or wear a kefir like that can roll both ways. Can it for students? >> I think that the issue with students is we understand that universities have long been places to protest. >> Sure. But that's part of our democratic culture. If we don't protect the space for protest, and I understand that there's limits, but rather the encampment for instance, it was really litigated along the lines of property. But what was alarming to me was how there was really little discussion either in the litigation or thereafter around how do we actually facilitate an environment at Canadian University in highly polarized environments? How do we nonetheless have a conversation? And the universities have done nothing. If anything, it's shown us that when then faced with a report that has incredibly detailed, detailed incidents. It would rather reject it and bury its head in sand. Before you go, how do you view the encampment two and a half years later? It went on a long time. It was deemed by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice trespass and maybe it went too far under the guise of its political protest and legal protest and it became something else. It hasn't happened since. How do you view it in retrospect, Amber? Well, we write about the encampment. We write about it as a tale of two encampments. There were those who hated it. There were those who found it incredibly important for them in their own sense of their own experience of the university. What we write about is the university used trespass to litigate the issue, but it also used the tort of inner, it also tried to say that they were intimidating, the tort of intimidation. And what we're concerned about is how the university used really bad evidence based on stereotypes of Muslim Zerbs and Palestinians to make an otherwise legal argument, which the court itself found was embarrassing and spanked them for. So my view is that we have a long way to go to even help our institutions understand that Muslim Zerbs and Palestinian Canadians are part of our society. Their histories are part of our society and we need to do better to integrate that within our democratic culture. And Vera, I'll leave it there. Thanks very much for the chat today. You're right around the corner from us. Come in sometime and we'll talk about it further. I appreciate you being on and have a good weekend. You too. Take care, bye bye. All right. There's Amber, Iman, Professor of Law, U of T. Thanks for listening to the Toronto today podcast. We drop the highlights of the Daily Show every weekday morning. Don't forget you can hear the entire show on the radio at home on your smart speaker, ask Alexa or say, hey, Google play 640 Toronto or Toronto today. You can hear us on between 530 and nine weekdays on 640 Toronto. Have a great day. The day started like any other. You woke up, slammed down a coffee and headed for the door. But then the unthinkable happens and nothing will ever be the same again. I'm Mike Brown. Join me for my new series Day of Disaster on the Dark Poutine podcast as we unpack every terrifying minute from Fukushima to the Columbia Shuttle Disaster and more. Search for Dark Poutine to listen to the first story from Day of Disaster one month early only on Amazon Music.