Jenny Blackbird, left, Jennifer Sylvester, Jamaias DaCosta and Conor Pion pose at the University of Toronto, where they volunteer hosting Indigenous programming at the school’s radio station, CIUT, on April 9, 2018.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
For almost four months, Jamaias DaCosta has been waiting to hear if she will be allowed to return as a volunteer host at CIUT, the radio station at the University of Toronto, after she was suspended for an on-air diatribe.
The upheaval started in early February when Ms. DaCosta, who has hosted The Vibe Collective for nine years, walked into the station and found a photo of professor Jordan Peterson, captioned with the phrase “You can fix yourself.” To her, the computer-screen image felt like a pointed and very personal attack.
A psychology professor at the school, Prof. Peterson became a prominent figure in academic free-speech debates by refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns. Ms. DaCosta’s romantic partner, Connor Pion, identifies as Two-Spirit, an Indigenous term for someone who doesn’t identify as a single gender, and was in the studio, too, providing technical support.
Upset, Ms. DaCosta started her show with a 10-minute monologue that can be summed up by one of her sentences: “Here at CIUT, there is a real challenge with sharing safe space.”
Later in the same show, she turned her attention to current events, expressing sympathy for the families of Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie, two young Indigenous people whose deaths were then at the centre of high-profile murder trials.
“It’s been horrific watching the Canadian media vilify these young ones and scrutinize them while really creating these sympathetic narratives for their killers,” Ms. DaCosta, who has Mohawk and Cree ancestry, told her listeners.
That was the last time Ms. DaCosta was in the CIUT studio. Soon after, she was suspended from both The Vibe Collective and another program, Indigenous Waves. Her situation has ensnarled CIUT’s leadership in a controversial knot that weaves together pressing cultural debates – from free speech to Indigenous rights to the #MeToo movement – in the already heated environment of the country’s largest university campus.
Months have passed and little has been settled. The station is holding mandatory training on libel and defamation. The hosts of CIUT’s only Indigenous program say Ms. DaCosta’s continuing suspension makes them feel censored and anxious. And the station’s leadership has been struggling with how to handle its first harassment complaint, which was made by Ms. DaCosta last fall.
On Feb. 13, station manager Ken Stowar e-mailed Ms. DaCosta to say she was suspended “due to disparaging comments made … about CIUT and its board of directors.” Mr. Stowar also expressed concern that “certain comments … could be actionable as per Ontario provincial statutes and the Criminal Code of Canada.”
A week later, Mr. Stowar e-mailed The Vibe Collective’ s co-host, Whitney French, to say the show was “pre-empted until further notice,” and that he hoped to have the matter resolved “in the near future.” Mr. Stowar declined an interview request.
Steve Fruitman, the volunteer president of CIUT’s board of directors, says the controversy has been blown out of proportion. In an interview, he gave a different reason for the suspension, saying that Ms. DaCosta refused to meet with Mr. Stowar in person after her comments.
“Yeah, we don’t want her to say those things over the air, but that’s not why she was suspended,” he said. “It was simply, like, ‘You’re being a real difficult person to deal with, and we don’t need that here.’”
Everyone involved has been at CIUT for many years, and none are students. Though the station is housed on campus and funded in part by $310,575 in student club fees, its website states that it “reaches and represents the community at large.”
Ms. DaCosta worked at the station in the early 2000s before becoming a volunteer. She said she asked that Mr. Stowar discuss her commentary via e-mail because she “wanted a record.”
“I’ve already been through some stuff at CIUT,” she said. “I know that I need a paper trail.”
Last November, she filed a complaint against the volunteer host of another show, alleging he made comments to and about her. “He spoke about how she smells on the air in a very inappropriate and almost sexual way,” Ms. French said. “It was really uncomfortable.”
It was the first sexual-harassment complaint at the station in his 30 years there, said Mr. Fruitman. He said he immediately suspended the accused host.
In December, Mr. Fruitman hired an independent workplace investigator and sent an e-mail informing both parties − the accused and Ms. DaCosta − that the investigation would start in January. This upset Ms. DaCosta, who said revealing her identity to the accused and including both of them on the same communication made her feel “unsafe.”
Mr. Fruitman said he had already shared her name with the accused. “It’s his right to know,” he said. But while he apologized to Ms. DaCosta, he said the idea that her privacy was violated was “raising the level of theatrics way beyond where it had to be.”
These interactions were continuing when Ms. DaCosta and Mr. Pion found Mr. Peterson’s picture on the computer screen. “It was just the breaking point, it was the straw,” Ms. DaCosta said.
Mr. Fruitman said it was legally risky for Ms. DaCosta to comment on the deaths of Mr. Boushie and Ms. Fontaine. He worried about criminal charges for preventing a fair trial for their accused killers, Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier (both since found not guilty), and potential civil-defamation cases.
But Anthony Moustacalis, a Toronto criminal lawyer who reviewed audio of the CIUT show for The Globe and Mail, said neither scenario is likely. The Criminal Code requires clear intention to defame as well as purposely making untrue statements, he said in an e-mail.
The controversy has some on edge, particularly those who work on Indigenous Waves. In the days after Ms. DaCosta’s suspension, co-host Jenny Blackbird and Mr. Pion informed listeners why she wasn’t in the studio with them, using the word “censored.” A week later, via e-mail, Mr. Stowar informed them that claims of censorship were “incorrect.”
“We feel like they’re listening to the show every week to try and find a reason to kick us off,” said Ms. Blackbird, who works at U of T’s Centre for Indigenous Studies. All CIUT volunteers have been told that attendance at a workshop titled the Law & What You Can Say is mandatory but Ms. Blackbird, who volunteers at Toronto’s Aboriginal Legal Services clinic, does not plan on attending.
Still suspended, Ms. DaCosta received an update on her harassment complaint in mid-March, when she set up a one-hour telephone conversation with the workplace investigator via e-mail.
But on March 13, Mr. Fruitman e-mailed her to say that the investigation was concluded. He wrote that there was no finding of bullying or sexual harassment, but the accused was found to have been drinking alcohol in the studio and remains suspended.
So, too, does Ms. DaCosta. When contacted via e-mail to ask if there was an update to her case, Mr. Fruitman replied that there is “nothing new to report.”