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It’s an odd tribute on Mother’s Day. We lost my mother when I was quite young. I know grasping for memory is not like returning to a dusty video archive, but I can barely pull her up in my mind’s eye. The triggers and the sights are less effective. Indeed, I have two old blue vinyl suitcases that my brother sent me after Dad died - they are full of childhood momentos, but it is not enough. I have put them under the stairs, out of sight, out of mind.
Julie, my blood mother, who gave me up for adoption, was a good woman, and was taken by the same cancer as my fathers just a year after him.
When I was summoned to what would become my suspension meeting, I assumed—naively—it was finally about that letter. The university’s official response to my grief and suggestions that there be a bereavement program was not compassion, acknowledgement, or bureaucratic indifference - it was a Human Rights Complaint. That was their reply to my mourning. A grievance wrapped in a legal threat, delivered by people so spiritually depleted they think cruelty is well-executed policy.
I was and remain stunned by their callousness. They wear it like armour and parade it like competence. But this is what they call ‘strength’? In truth, it is their prison sentence.
To be immune to grief is to be cut off from everything that makes endurance noble. Their scaly imperviousness isn’t power—it’s petrification—a kind of emotional leprosy.
I would rather hurt, and cry, and be cracked open by love and memory than walk the halls of authority like one of those consciousness-stripped reptiles, immune to everything but self-preservation.
They survive. I live. There’s a difference.
My father, Hank Finlayson, left me with a grief that still ambushes me in the sleepless dark and a truth that burns brighter than ever: stand for what’s right, no matter who stands with you.
He was the only one who would have stood by me as I faced a university’s million-dollar smear campaign, a lawyer’s many and mutating threats, now a foolish one over a Shakespeare quote. Like me, Dad would have shaken his head at a bureaucracy that twists justice into a grotesque performance.
This fight—against lies, against antisemitism, against the moral rot of institutions—is for him. Because he lives in every word I write, in every lie I refuse to let pass through me.
The University of Guelph-Humber, armed with taxpayer funds and a vendetta, branded me a safety risk for a lawful post quoting Shakespeare’s “kill all the lawyers” from Henry VI—a line any first-year English student would recognise as satire. It is endorsing law and order.
Meanwhile, a professor with over 4,000 social media posts—many brimming with conspiratorial bile and coded antisemitism, all in breach of university policy and the Ontario Human Rights Code—faces no consequence. Just silence. Sanctified silence. While I, for a single post responding to an open call for the eradication of a democratic nation, am branded dangerous.
See analysis and photos at bottom.
I will attach only four of his posts, all approved and accepted by Humber College and the Senior University of Guelph HR departments and management. The posts violate the Canadian Criminal Code, the HRTO, and official Humber HR policy.
But strangely, three times in a row, complaints based on these vile images and hundreds were, if they were even looked at, ignored by the current managers of the Humber Human Rights department and the Guelph sister department.
Why would a human rights department ignore or be ignorant of the human rights code? The issue is that, without being insensitive, it's not in their job description; it’s in their department title. It’s like a marketing department going, “What’s this market thing?”
The administration’s posture? That in Canada, you can still triumph by weaponising antisemitism, legal muscle, and the slavish loyalty of institutions to ideologies they dare not question. That this grotesque inversion of morality is now institutional doctrine at not one, but two post-secondary institutions should stun the conscience, but the real scandal is that it doesn’t.
Let us name the depravity. Imagine, if you will, a university president and tenured professor publicly defending slavery. Imagine them praising a Klan-like organisation with a body count in the thousands. It would be unthinkable—and rightly so. Yet swap the victims, substitute the targets, and suddenly we are told to debate. To understand. To be sensitive to context. The Human Rights Department, barefaced in its complicity, shields not the victims of hate but the perpetrators of it. Are Jews born with a “kick me” sign on them?
And firms like Sherrard Kuzz and Lerners LLP, in their polished indifference, lend their talents to laundering the reputations of bigots while suing those who speak out. And filthy lucre is all that drives them. Any principle has been destroyed by cynicism.
This isn’t justice. It’s the Dreyfus Affair with LinkedIn profiles and better fonts. And I am assured that neither the lawyers at Sherrard Kuzz, the Lerner LLP one, or the Vice Provost at Guelph-Humber have heard of the Dreyfus Affair. Santayana said if we forget our history we are damned to relive it. And so we sit reliving it.
The University of Guelph and Humber College lack the power of the École Militaire to send me to Devil’s Island, but I don’t think it’s because of my lack of enthusiasm. They have the same instincts, just less reach. To praise a society simply because it lacks the teeth to complete its vendetta is like applauding a snake for not striking after it coils.
And as in Dreyfus’ France, the guilty will remain protected. The university’s own Esterhazys will keep their desks, titles, and pensions—and the media, like Zola's enemies, will avert their gaze.
How far have we come? A hundred and thirty years later, the whisper campaign, the official slander, the institutional grovelling before prejudice masquerading as principle. The paperwork may be digital, the lawyers may charge more, but the machinery—moral machinery—is unchanged.
This isn’t justice; it’s institutional sadism with a benefits package. The university has spent hundreds of thousands, at the end, likely to near a million, on legal fees and salary replacements to invent a cause to fire me. And the lawyer from one of the law firms they’ve brought on now scours my Substack for reasons to sue, claiming my words make me dangerous.
If she wants to read, she can pay the $6 subscription like everyone else. Student tuition shouldn’t subsidise her vendetta.
The irony is surgical. At Humber’s Human Rights office—where one might naively expect reason to pop in for tea—justice is flipped with the kind of gymnastic contortion that would make Orwell drop his pen and pour a stiff drink. They hired a “neutral” investigator, which in academic HR-speak means someone who arrives pre-convinced and invoice-ready.
Far from a fact-finder, she functioned more like a court-appointed psychic—channeling the unspoken desires of management and producing conclusions with all the credibility of a horoscope typed on university letterhead.No employee in Canlii’s entire archive has ever been reinstated directly after a so-called “favourable” external investigation. I’m not even convinced those exist. Such investigations are just ceremonial baptisms for management’s desired outcome. Rubber stamps with billable hours.
The goal isn’t justice—it’s to fabricate just enough procedural sludge so that lawyers can fling missives in court like spaghetti, hoping something sticks. These aren’t legal arguments—they’re the bureaucratic equivalent of a Labrador’s tail thumping against the kitchen counter as kibble’s poured: loud, aimless, and entirely self-serving.
The number of reinstatements? It makes China’s conviction rate look admirably restrained—nothing in the databases.
Maybe, just maybe, some forklift operator at the University of Manitoba got his job back after tipping over a vending machine in a hypoglycaemic fugue. But even he probably had to sign a loyalty oath to HR’s preferred font size.
The rest? They were ceremonially marched off the premises, report in hand, while HR lit candles and praised the fairness of the process. It’s not justice—it’s administrative euthanasia with paperwork and a fruit tray.
This process isn’t a path to truth; it’s a theatre of exoneration for power and damnation for dissent. For me they had the gall to call it a “fulsome opportunity” for justice—spelling “fulsome” wrong, naturally—while a stadium of evidence screams “all lies.”
I’ll never understand these lawyers.
Do they know they’re lying, or have they marinated so long in institutional self-righteousness that they’ve mistaken deceit for virtue? Either way, you can’t reason with them—because reason requires a pulse. I’ve given up debating mannequins in lanyards who call it justice when the right person bleeds.
If Dante were updating Inferno today, he’d need an entire mezzanine level between the Eighth Circle (fraud) and Ninth (treachery), exclusively for HR consultants, equity deans, and in-house counsel.
They’d be chained to ergonomic chairs, condemned to give TED Talks on procedural fairness while being waterboarded with their nondisclosure agreements.
This betrayal isn’t just personal; it’s a symptom of a deeper rot. The same sanctimonious hypocrites who wear equity badges scapegoat Jews for the world’s discontents, proclaiming they can hate Israel without touching its people.
What astonishing arrogance—to trample the reputations and rights of a community while congratulating themselves on their virtue. This isn’t political folly; it’s moral decay, dressed in rainbow pins and tenure tracks. They’ve domesticated the lie, taught it tricks, and given it a corner office.
I once hoped for allies. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a Canadian advocacy group, CAUR, my faculty association, the first seemed the best, but their door was only ever open more than a crack.
Kind Jewish gentlemen quoted Liverpool’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” over breakfast, but their solidarity was, I guess, more rhetorical.
Lawyers promised help, but pro bono is just Latin for pro publicity. If they don’t read a document or learn a fact, they’re not allies—they’re tourists. I’ve learned the hard way: kind words aren’t action. The procedural route through Guelph-Humber is a dead end, rigged from the start.
So I walk alone, not out of cynicism, but clarity.
I’m not fighting for the Jewish community, though I appreciate the kindness of strangers. I’m fighting because opposing antisemitism is right. After all, truth is worth defending, even when it’s solitary.
I’m fighting for my father, who died three years ago, a loss still raw enough to choke me. Hank Finlayson was my rock, he would have stood by me when no one else did—not family, friends, or institutions.
He taught me that truth isn’t a negotiation; it’s not subject to HR memos or rebranded as “discomfort.”
Lies don’t get a free pass just because they wear suits or titles or invoice their cruelty in six-minute increments. Every step I take through this bureaucratic labyrinth—every word, every refusal—is how he lives on. Like the Russians say, as long as we carry them in our hearts, they are not dead. He lives in my defiance, in the part of me that will not grovel, will not submit, and would rather burn than bow.
The tears I shed aren’t for my career, shredded by a bureaucracy that mistakes dissent for danger. They’re still just garden variety grief.
But I think of dad often, he, back on the Russians, lives in my heart and I will not let him be forgotten.
I am glad that he didn’t have to share all this pain in this journey, because I know I couldn’t have kept it from him, and he would have listened. Just a prairie boy with a strength and dignity that did not stoop with age. He would have seen through the lies and called them out, but he would have moved quicker to Christian faith and resignation than me.
I don’t believe this fight is winnable, not in a system where justice is a morality play staged by HR. But I don’t need to win to honour him. I just need to stand my ground and never be broken.
I’m writing a book, “But Not Through Me,” after Solzhenitsyn’s cry against complicity. It will be on this saga and include relevant essays on Israel and Judaism.
It’s dedicated to my father, a testament to his lessons and his resolve.
This book isn’t for profit—let’s not kid ourselves—nor for applause. It’s for truth, for the man who taught me the value of truth.
The university, the lawyers, the sanctimonious liars can buzz like flies, but they won’t silence me.
Perhaps their legal foot soldiers will read it and fling more sanctimonious faeces from behind a paywall—strutting their disdain for free speech and sneering at my Charter rights like robed inquisitors mistaking Substack for sedition. But I’m not here to win their approval. I’m here to sterilise. To disinfect. To drag their rot into the sunlight and make damn sure their lies don’t pass through me.
Hank Finlayson lives in every page I write, in every truth I defend. This is his legacy, and it’s mine.
I walk alone now, but I walk for him.
I like the title. My dad always liked the Russian novelists, too.
“Let the lie come into the world, even let it triumph. But not through me.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Paul Finlayson May 11, 2025
Grandpa with the grandkids. The kids are grown up now.
Pictures below are four random, but verified posts of Wael Ramadan. All were analysed to see if they were violations of Humber College's Human Rights policy, the HRTO (Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario - it supercedes any college/university HR standards), IHRA - international standard on anti-semitism, criminal standard, Hate Propaganda, Criminal Code 318-320) Violation.
All posts were deemed in violation by all standards used.
The violations are serious, especially given the pattern of 4,000 posts and dismissed complaints, suggesting systemic issues at Humber College, the University of Guelph, and Sheridan College.
Comparison with Paul Finlayson
Finlayson faced suspension and impending termination for one post supporting Israel, while @waelramadan1948 faces no action despite multiple complaints. With allegations of bias involving Vice Provost Melanie Spence-Ariemma, this disparity raises concerns about fairness and observes a startling dismissiveness to a society that should and must demand procedural fairness.
Your father would be so proud of you! What a wonderful man he raised.
Have you considered applying to Hillsdale College, UATX, University of Florida or other institutions of higher learning that have abandoned dogma and encouraged viewpoint diversity?
Please don’t quit. I am a subscriber. How can I contribute? You are not alone.
Larry Birch
Smiths Falls, Ontario
Your father would be so proud of you! What a wonderful man he raised.
Have you considered applying to Hillsdale College, UATX, University of Florida or other institutions of higher learning that have abandoned dogma and encouraged viewpoint diversity?