The Canadian Blacklists
In 2016 90+ Canadian writers stood up for due process. Here's what happened to them..
On April 19, 2022, the Canadian literary community suffered a devasting loss when the novelist, poet and musician Steven Heighton suddenly passed away at the age of 60 following a swift bout with cancer. The reaction on social media to his passing was a mixture of shock, sadness and genuine esteem, captured by one writer who tweeted:
“Almost a decade ago Steven Heighton taught a poetry class at McGill that changed my life. The sharpest, smartest, sweetest man this planet had to offer. Zero ego and cool as hell too.”
The writer Amanda Leduc published an equally touching tribute on Twitter:
“He was unfailingly kind and generous and sweet, always. So very kind to new writers especially. What grace. What wisdom. What a treasure.”
Heighton was one of our finest and most disciplined writers whose contagious love for writing and the writing life spilled into the lives of so many of us who were lucky enough to call him a friend. But there is another aspect of Heighton’s final years that has gone unmentioned.
Steven Heighton was a blacklisted writer.
Like most of the writers who signed the UBC Accountable Letter that defended the novelist Steven Galloway’s right to due process, Heighton barely knew Galloway and signed it as a matter of principle.
“It seemed clear to me from the start that UBC was railroading him,” he wrote to me back in 2017, “and that's why I signed a letter in support of someone I barely knew. What an unholy alliance--a bunch of MFA maoists and a multinational-affiliated corporation waging war on an employee.”
Through Galloway’s ongoing defamation lawsuit we now know that Heighton’s suspicions were correct and that the signatories’ call for an inquiry was valid. In her 2022 decision on a motion to dismiss Galloway’s case, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Elaine J. Adair found Galloway’s accuser to be a liar and found that there are grounds to believe that Galloway’s colleagues at UBC were motivated by malice and recklessness.
Heighton took the backlash against the letter hard. As pressure mounted on signatories to withdraw their names and disavow the letter, he wrote to me, “I fear that what's coming for me is a choice between following my conscience, which says stay, and obeying the pleas of my body and mind, which says walk away and find peace again, health.”
The attacks on signatories of the UBC Accountable letter included blacklisting, calls for burning books and in some isolated cases threats of violence. Female signatories took the brunt of the abuse. Perhaps it speaks to Heighton’s likeability that while many signatories were written off as persona non-grata, he still received some invitations to speak at universities and festivals.
In March of 2018 Heighton gave a talk in the Creative Writing department of his alma mater, Queen’s University. The event was a success and went off without a hitch until a few days later when the poet and Queens Creative Writing professor Carolyn Smart posted a brief note on the Department Facebook page describing the event and saying Heighton had spoken to a packed room.
Among the comments attached to the Facebook post, were some by Erin Flegg. Ms Flegg was Galloway’s former teaching assistant who brought a frivolous complaint against him that was dismissed in the private investigation held by retired BC Supreme Court justice Mary-Ellen Boyd. Ms. Flegg wrote, “Disappointing to see Queen's Creative Writing hosting a writer whose name is still on the UBC Accountable letter.”
Smart responded, “I addressed this with him, believe me!”
“I appreciate that,” Flegg replied, “but I would appreciate it more if the program decided it would not host anyone whose name is still on the letter. There are plenty of other talented writers to choose from. As both a Queen's creative writing alum and a UBC creative writing alum, it’s hurtful to see this.”
“Thank you, Erin,” Smart wrote, “I have heard this, appreciate your situation, and will act upon it… it's difficult. But I am trying. And I hope you know that despite my stumbles, you have my full support.”
In that brief Facebook exchange Erin Flegg successfully campaigned to have over 90 Canadian writers blacklisted from Creative Writing at Queen’s University.
I contacted Ms. Smart for comment in 2022 and she said that she could not provide comment on the blacklisting of Steven Heighton, in part because she was grieving Steven Heighton. Additionally, before he passed away, Heighton confirmed that Smart had not brought up the UBC Accountable letter with him at all as she had claimed in her response to Ms. Flegg.
The same month that Heighton passed away I sent out a survey to 82 of the signatories of the UBC Accountable Letter seeking information about their experiences as signatories. 32 signatories responded, with 9 of them willing to go on the record and the rest requesting anonymity in order to avoid further personal and professional backlash.
56.3% of respondents believe they have been blacklisted, cancelled or deplatformed by a university or literary organization with 18.8% being certain of it and 37.5% believing so but not having the ability to prove it. 64.5% report having received hateful or threatening emails, text messages, DM’s and/or mail. 61.3% experienced online abuse for having signed the letter, with a number of those claiming that they haven’t, but only because they do not use social media.
Carmen Aguirre is an award-winning playwright, non-fiction writer and Canadian refugee whose family escaped death and torture when they fled Chile for Canada in the wake of the 1973 Chilean coup. As a young woman, Aguirre also fought in the anti-Pinochet resistance, an experience that instilled in her an unshakeable commitment to due process.
“People were systematically imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and disappeared without charge or trial,” Aguirre wrote regarding this experience in an op-ed defending her position as a signatory. “Due process has been, and is, one of the most important principles of my life. And due process was what Galloway was denied when he was called a rapist.”
At the age of 13, Aguirre was also raped at gunpoint by the notorious serial rapist John Horace Oughton. By any measure of logic, free speech or identity politics, Aguirre is uniquely qualified to speak on matters of sexual assault. Yet she was painted as a rape apologist. In response to her op-ed, UBC’s Keith Maillard denounced Aguirre’s defense of due process as “a nasty bit of self-righteous agit-prop that would fit easily into an MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) site.”
After the publication of Aguirre’s op-ed, Room magazine told her that members of their board had requested that she be fired as an adjudicator of one of their writing contests. Aguirre travelled to Calgary to participate in a literary panel but when she arrived organizers told her that a poet on the panel had written a letter protesting her participation and saying that she never would have agreed to share a stage with someone as “unsafe” as Aguirre.
“Friends and colleagues regularly come to me with tales of what is being said about me at events and gatherings,” Aguirre says. “I have been called (behind my back) a rape apologist, crazy, bowing down to the white man, jumping to the other side, brainwashed, stupid, etc.”
Lorna Crozier is one of Canada’s most beloved poets and teachers of Creative Writing, appointed to the Order of Canada for “her poetry and for her mentorship of the next generation of Canadian poets.”
“A magazine celebrating a significant anniversary was pressured to ‘uninvite’ me from the event because of my signing of the letter,” Crozier says, “--social media postings suggesting my books be burned --social media postings threatening to attack me at a public reading.”
“It is the thing that will not go away,” says a woman I will call Ellen, who also signed the letter out of principle and without any strong personal ties to Galloway. “It is like the Scarlett letter. A brand burnt into me. When I enter a public space my stomach flip flops with anxiety and I do a quick scan of the room, for enemies and trolls.”
Thomas is a writer with an international reputation who experienced online abuse including calls to burn his books. He still gets invited to international festivals but since signing the letter he has only attended one Canadian literary festival which took a bad turn.
“I was confronted by a writer in the festival common room” Thomas says, “who admitted to not knowing any of the parties involved in the UBC affair yet told me in an angry and aggressive tone that she believed Galloway guilty and I was an effin liar for defending him. She then walked out leaving me somewhat gob-smacked in the crowded room.”
Tessa is an award-winning writer who has also been active in programming literary festivals. As a program consultant for an international festival she couldn’t book signatories. “The media attention this cause attracted made it difficult for me to invite some of the most deserving authors because they were seen to be too controversial. My arguments (in support of booking signatories) were not successful, and finally I had to end my affiliation with the festival.”
A prominent literary festival in Ontario cancelled a book launch for Alistair two weeks before it was scheduled. He was directly told that the cancellation was due to the fact that he had been “dismissive of victims” by signing the letter.
Greg had a longstanding relationship with a Canadian Literary festival. “After a long history of very successful hosting of events, I was abruptly no longer invited to host -- no explanation, no contact, not even the decency of a thank-you for past performance.”
Hal Wake was the Artistic Director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival and has 40 years of good standing in the literary community going back to his time as the book producer for CBC Radio’s Morningside with Peter Gzowski. Like Lorna Crozier, Wake was one of the signatories who was physically threatened on social media. When asked if he received backlash from signing the letter he said, “Does someone saying he wanted to punch me (amongst others) in the nose count?”
David is one of Canada’s most celebrated writers. He was informed by a reliable source that at a meeting for a prominent writers’ organization in his province, the chairperson attempted to pass a motion banning anyone who signed the UBC Accountable letter from teaching in their writing school since students “would not feel safe.” The motion was promptly shot down by other board members. Yet it’s impossible to gage the effect these conversations have had on hiring practices, festival bookings and the allotment of grant money.
The problem with blacklisting is that it is most often done in secret making it incredibly hard to prove. 37.5% of responding signatories feel like they have been blacklisted but can’t prove it.
Wake cites three lost job opportunities that he knows about. In one instance he was dismissed from a position at a major literary organization who assured him that their decision had nothing to do with his having signed the letter. Roughly two years later, Wake found himself at another literary event with a board member from the organization who told him that the board had lied to him and he was indeed dropped because the board had “objections” to his politics.
“I have not been able to get a poem published in a literary magazine since signing the letter,” Eric says. “Poetry publishers used to approach me looking for work, but my current manuscript has been quickly rejected by every house I have sent it to.”
Linda is another prominent writer with a major literary prize to her name. She was told that she was unlikely to receive a residency she applied for because she signed the letter.
“I was pretty anxious as a result,” Linda says, “It has made me reluctant to apply for writing jobs or even submit writing to places where the people involved were vocal in their opposition to the UBC Accountable letter.”
Ryan is an award-winning writer and long-time teacher of creative writing. He’s been a mentor to numerous successful Canadian writers and has long had the reputation of being a kind and approachable writer.
“Invitations to festivals have lessened by at least half, again with no evidence of any connection” Ryan says. “I used to get at least half, or two thirds of the Canada Council grants I applied for over time--I have applied for three since Accountable and have got none of them.”
While the uncertainty and nebulous nature of blacklisting has caused great stress to signatories, the loss of friendships has perhaps been the most devastating part of the conflict with 71.9% of respondants indicating that they lost friendships by signing the letter.
“I lost a university job,” an acclaimed fiction writer I will call Mary says, “I received anonymous emails accusing me of supporting rapists; been shunned at public events. I had old friends pretend they do not know me/will not speak to me. Lost close personal friends. Had strangers who know nothing about me make ridiculous, stupid and incorrect assumptions about my life."
“I was openly attacked on social media," says novelist Susan Swan. “During that time, I lost two friendships with women writers that I mentored, and another younger writer accused me of having blood on my hands.”
“I lost what I had previously thought was my closest friend because of this,” Linda says.
“An old female friend I hadn't seen in two decades emailed me accusing me of pulling a Roman Polanski,” Ryan says.
“I have had nightmares about being cancelled,” Ellen says. “It's like living an underground life now. I just serve my students, try to keep writing and keep my head low.”
The hardest part, Mary says, is the total loss of control. “I spent decades building my reputation as a writer. Then in an instant people who I have never even met suddenly took total control of my identity as if I no longer had any input into what I actually thought or even who I am as a person.”
While most of the signatories weren’t friends with Steven Galloway, the most notable exception to that was Joseph Boyden. Boyden stood accused of writing and spearheading the letter but in fact he had nothing to do with it aside from agreeing to put his name at the bottom when asked at the eleventh hour before its publication. Boyden would become the first to feel the backlash when Briarpatch magazine dropped him as a judge for one of their writing contests.
“In light of the open letter to the University of British Columbia initiated and signed by Joseph Boyden,” the Briarpatch statement reads, “the staff and board of Briarpatch Magazine have collectively decided that our partnership with Mr. Boyden as one of the Writing in the Margins contest judges cannot continue.”
Boyden would then be thrown into his own maelstrom where his attempts at dialogue on the issues of his identity and place in CanLit led to the unjust and disproportionate punishment of wiping out his career. “There is room in our circle for Joseph Boyden,” Wab Kinew wrote in a 2017 op-ed, and it is unequivocally true that as one of our finest novelists Boyden deserves, and therefore should be entitled to, a lasting place in CanLit.
“I don’t think there is a literary culture in this country anymore,” says signatory Patrick Warner. “There is a media culture as a political culture in its place.”
Attacks on free speech hurt all writers. A community wide acceptance of blacklisting threatens to put the entire body of Canadian writers in disrepute. Recently a number of writers signed a letter in support of the protesters who disrupted the Giller Prize to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. They are free to express themselves. They are free to protest. For better or worse they are also free to offend others as their letter has done.
But 100 of the signatories who signed the Giller letter had also signed the UBC Accountable “Counter Letter” which called for signatories to renounce their defense of due process and delete the UBC Accountable Letter because it had caused offense. What standard now applies to these 100 writers? Since their own letter has caused offence, do they believe they ought, morally, to delete their Giller letter or remove their names from it?
The damage caused by blacklisting is incalculable. Of the 90+ signatories to the UBC Accountable Letter, 17 have been awarded the Order of Canada for their contributions to Canadian Culture, many of whom specifically received the honor for their work in teaching, mentorship and inspiring the next generation of writers. 70% of signatories state that negative treatment they experienced has caused them to reduce their involvement in the writing community with 36.7% indicating that they did so in a profound way.
With her late husband Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier published two anthologies called Breathing Fire and Breathing Fire 2 that are widely credited with launching the careers of two generations of poets. She says she wouldn’t do them today.
“I remember the delight of the launches when those who could attend were so excited to meet each other. It felt like the start of something,” she says. “I don’t feel that way anymore. If I or he (Lane) were editors, they may choose not to submit and there’s such anger out there, that there might be a backlash rather than an aura of excitement.”
Universities have been particularly hostile to signatories.
“I had the ugly experience of a female university student publicly proclaiming that from here on in she would not dare to be alone in a room with me,” Ryan says.
The most bizarre academic backlash came from Dr. Lorraine York, a “leading scholar of Margaret Atwood” who disowned the subject of her professional career in an essay called, “How Do We Get Out of Here? An Atwood Scholar, Signing Off.”
In her essay Dr. York apologizes for having engaged with the subject of her life’s work, as if scholarly essays on the literature of Margaret Atwood are now a deep embarrassment akin to trading in blood diamonds. “I continued to reap the benefits of having made Atwood a distinct part of my academic career,” Dr. York wrote. “This essay is my seeking of an equilibrium of fairness, balance, and justice.”
In her bio on the McMaster website, Dr. York no longer presents herself as a “leading scholar of Margaret Atwood” but instead defines herself as a specialist in literary celebrity who has “become increasingly concerned with the way in which various relations of power have formed, and continue to animate, the institution of ‘CanLit.’”
Ms. Atwood says that she was attacked “very publicly” for signing the letter and for writing two essays. The first was a defense of her position on due process and the second was an essay called “Am I a bad feminist?” which she included in her 2022 book Burning Questions.
“Interviewing journos ask about it (“Bad feminist”) regularly, in a positive manner,” Atwood said in the survey. “In 2022, due process is in fashion again.”
In March of that year, Atwood was also awarded The Christopher Hitchens Prize which is annually bestowed on “an author or journalist whose work reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence.”
Ms. Atwood says that she believes she received the Hitchens award at least in part for the two essays and her role as a signatory. So her defence of due process that garnered her attacks in the halls of Canadian academia brought her praise abroad. Despite being the signatory who was most frequently (and most harshly) attacked, Ms. Atwood’s growing international stature combined with the continued and dependable loyalty of her domestic readership makes her impossible to “cancel.”
The saddest part of the backlash to UBC Accountable has been the impact on writers who are at the end of their careers and should be looking back on their accomplishments with pride, unfettered by the idea that there are those who want to erase their contributions to Canadian literature.
“This thing ushered in a whole new kind of loneliness,” Ellen says. “Unfortunately, the combined timing of UBC fallout and the sorrow of aging I experience has been a difficult admixture. I no longer think of a 'writing community' since UBC, only small pockets of collegiality and support.”
Despite everything that the signatories have gone through, 90.4% of those who responded to the survey indicated that they had no regrets about signing the letter, with 58.1% indicating they were proud to have done so.
“I never doubted signing the letter asking for due process,” says Swan. “Now all these years later Justice Adair has found in her decision that the people who continuously accused Galloway of rape on social media had harmed rather than helped public discussions of sexual assault.”
Only three authors surveyed said they regretted signing the letter, with one of them writing, “I only regret signing the Letter because of how the fallout impacted my mental health and overall quality of life. I held my head high the times I was iced out in public…but it took a toll.”
“I feel like a lot of things I've tried to do in support of the writing community were for nothing so I just keep to myself now,” Ellen says, “a nervous recluse, with only a small select number of friends I trust.”
"I have mostly checked out of the Canadian literary community,” Mary says. “But after Steven Heighton's death, I kind of feel like I will check back in, because his passage has reminded me that Canadian letters and literature actually still exist, or, at least, once existed.”
Blacklisting and other forms of censorship are an affront to all writers. I encourage all Canadian writers to contact their local and national literary organizations to request that they make a public statement in support of free speech and unequivocally denounce the practice of ideological blacklisting writers for expressing their views on matters of public importance.
If you are a Canadian writer or artist who has experienced blacklisting or if you believe you may have been blacklisted, you can email me confidentially at truthandconsequences@substack.com.
Hi All, this evening a commenter on this post crossed a line into what looked to me like online harassment. The comments were in my view also unrelated to the content of this post and were plainly unhelpful. In case that wasn't clear, as I believe it was, I just want to state my unequivocal support and respect for Meghan Bell and thank her for a number of courageous and helpful things she has done to help the literary community move on in a positive manner.
Although I have not had any direct contact with her I have similar respect for Sierra Skye Gemma. The reason this story is so captivating is because its complex. There are so many factors at play for many of us in how and why we fell into the roles we did. Untangling all of this can be tricky and even painful. But it will be downright impossible if everyone continues to think the worst of each other. And I refuse to do that.
So I thank all of the people who come here with an open mind and good intentions. It's the way forward. And thanks again to Meghan Bell for helping set that standard with her dignified comments. They are greatly appreciated and welcome.
Brad, thank you for continuing to write about the fallout from the UBC accountable letter, and about Galloway's ongoing legal battles as well. I, too, was a signatory, but I've always felt I remained relatively unscathed because I'm a children's author, and was therefore not in the direct line of fire - a bit removed, certainly more unknown. I'm stunned and saddened to read of the negative impact signing a letter for due process has had on so many authors. And I remain to this day infuriated that the entity that is UBC, got away with their absolutely egregious handling of the situation. I was an adjunct up there at the time so I got to see - not everything, but some - of how it all went down. From the outset I and many others were deeply uncomfortable with how events unfolded, but only a few of us dared question what was happening - not because we were braver (hell, no - I've kept my head very far down from that day forward) - but because we didn't have a lot at stake. For many up there, who were hoping for full-time positions, for example, in a notoriously tough field to make any kind of living in, they didn't dare speak up (and let me emphasize, I don't blame them) - but I know some of them shared our discomfort. The ripple effects have been profound and long-lasting. Thanks for continuing to shine a light.