Good news: judicial review!

Association of Academic Staff of the University of Alberta is pursuing judicial review in an important case for academic freedom (mine)

For those of you who read this earlier post about the grievance related to my 2020 dismissal from an academic service position at the University of Alberta due to my expressing criticism of gender ideology, I have good news.

My faculty union, the Association of Academic Staff of the University of Alberta, to its credit took a grievance about my dismissal to the Alberta Labor Relations Board. We lost there, twice: the initial arbitration and the appeal to the ALRB of the arbitrator’s decision.

As I explained in that prior post, the language in those decisions was so disastrous in the precedent it set for academic freedom that AASUA is now pursuing judicial review of the ALRB rulings. This is a rare occurrence, though I don’t know what the numbers would be across Canada (I don’t know if anyone gathers statistics on this: if anyone in the comments knows where to look, please say!).

At this point, I am essentially not involved in the case (though of course I am very interested in the outcome). It is now AASUA’s case entirely, and does not require me to offer evidence or testimony in the deliberation process. For AASUA, quite properly, the case is only about academic freedom.

For me, however, and for people who have been watching the case, it is also about gender ideology. Whatever ruling is arrived at (I know nothing about that time frame, though I will certainly report the outcome whenever I learn it), that we are still living through a period in Canada in which women are penalized at work for insisting on the relevance of biological sex to women’s experience is astonishing. How much longer can it go on?