About FSU Canada
Defending Free Speech, Empowering Society.
Meet FSU Canada
Our Mission Statement
The Free Speech Union of Canada stands for freedom of speech and intellectual inquiry. We regard these as the essential pillars of a free society—foundational freedoms on which all others depend. We believe that human beings cannot flourish outside a free society, which means they cannot flourish in the absence of free speech. Free speech is how knowledge is developed and shared, as well as how our views about morality, religion, and politics are shaped. Robust debate—appealing to reason, evidence, and our shared values—is also the best way to resolve disagreements about issues big and small without descending to violence or intimidation. Importantly, free speech is the most effective bulwark against abuses of power by politicians. History demonstrates that its denial is both the aim of tyrants, because it stops people from criticizing them, and an ominous precursor to the removal of other freedoms. We also believe that the right to freedom of speech includes the right not to be compelled to express or affirm ideas that an individual does not believe.
Free speech is currently under assault across the developed world, particularly in those areas where it matters most such as schools, universities, the arts, the media, administrative tribunals and the regulated professions. Under the guise of preventing “harm”, offence, and, increasingly, “misinformation” (which is often merely politically-inconvenient speech) a deep chill has been cast over speech in our society. Much of it is self-censorship: Canadians have learned that their opinions may only be safely expressed in hushed whispers around their kitchen tables, much like citizens of totalitarian societies during their darkest chapters. Many choose to express themselves online only from behind the shield of anonymity. This is unhealthy to our society. The aim of the Free Speech Union of Canada is to restore a culture of free expression and protect it from encroachment.
We take no position on the validity of others’ opinions, political or otherwise, whether expressed in speech, writing, performance, or in another form. The defence of speech is critical and relevant only when it is provocative and controversial. This necessarily includes expressions and views with which we, as individuals, may strongly disagree. At the same time, we condemn all incitements to violence, and recognize reasonable limits on expression contained in laws against defamation and child pornography. The Free Speech Union believes that if society doesn’t uphold the right to express controversial, eccentric, heretical, provocative, or unwelcome opinions, then it doesn’t uphold free speech.
Our Board and Staff
Executive Director
Lisa Bildy graduated from Western Law School and practiced as a trial lawyer with a small litigation firm before an unexpected hiatus to raise and homeschool her sons. On her return to professional life, Lisa led a successful campaign to stop a new requirement that lawyers in Ontario commit to promoting progressive values (DEI) as a condition of practicing law. She then worked at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms as a staff lawyer, before striking out on her own in the fall of 2021 to further the cause of defending civil liberties and individual freedoms at her Ontario-based firm, Libertas Law.
Lisa is an elected bencher (governor) of the Law Society of Ontario and sits on the advisory board for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
Chair of the Board
Marko Vesely KC is a lawyer who practices corporate and commercial litigation in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has appeared as counsel before the Supreme Court of Canada, the Federal Court of Appeal, and at all levels of court in British Columbia and Alberta. He was called to the bar in 2000 and appointed a King’s Counsel in 2023.
Director
Simon Fox is a medical doctor specialising in general internal medicine and infectious diseases. Originally from Kenya, he was educated at the University of Oxford and has worked in Uganda, Somalia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea before settling in British Columbia.
Director
Lawrence M. Krauss is an internationally renowned theoretical physicist, bestselling author, and acclaimed lecturer. His newest book, to appear in July 2025 is an anthology entitled, The War on Science. Krauss did his PhD at MIT, and was then a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows before moving to become a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Departments at Yale University. Since then he has held endowed chairs at Case Western Reserve University, Australian National University, New College of the Humanities, and Arizona State University.
In 1995, he proposed that most of the universe’s energy resides in empty space, a prediction which was later observationally confirmed and which was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011. He is currently President of The Origins Project Foundation, CEO of Gus What Productions and host of The Origins Podcast.
Research Director
Collin May is a lawyer in Calgary, Alberta; an Adjunct Lecturer in Community Health Sciences with the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary; and a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
As an author, he has published several articles and reviews on topics in political philosophy, cancel culture, professional regulation, and countering antisemitism. His writing has appeared in the National Post, the Jerusalem Post, the Calgary Herald, The Hub, C2C Journal, as well as academic publications such as Academic Questions and Society Journal.
Collin holds degrees in political philosophy, religion (specializing in medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought) and law from Harvard University, the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (Paris), Dalhousie Law School, and the University of Alberta. From 1997 to 2002, Collin worked with the United Nations International Telecommunications Union and then the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland.
Collin has served on numerous federal and provincial boards and tribunals and for a brief period in 2022, was Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Collin is currently working on a collection of essays on the psychology, social theory and legal aspects of cancel culture, as well as the future of cancellations.
Director
Bruce Pardy is a professor of law at Queen’s University, senior fellow with the Fraser Institute, and executive director of Rights Probe (rightsprobe.org). He is a classically liberal legal academic who advocates for the principles of equal application of the law, negative rights, private property, limited government, and separation of powers. Pardy has a diverse academic and professional background. He has taught at law schools in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, and practiced civil litigation at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto. He has also served as an adjudicator and mediator on the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal.
Director
Hannah graduated from the Peter Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia and served as a judicial clerk at the BC Court of Appeal before taking a position with a Vancouver law firm. She is currently working on graduate studies in law.
Founder
Toby Young is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union in the UK. He co-founded the West London Free School in 2011, the first charter school to sign a funding agreement with the British government, and is the author of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2001), a best-selling memoir about his experiences as a glossy magazine editor in New York that was turned into a film starring Simon Pegg. He is an associate editor of the Spectator, where he’s written a weekly column since 1998. Most recently, he set up a news publishing site called the Daily Sceptic. On December 20, 2024 he was awarded a peerage, taking his place in the UK House of Lords in 2025.
Our Communications Team
Communications Team
Gabrielle Bauer is a medical writer, journalist, and book author based in Toronto. She has won 6 national awards for her feature articles and one national award for her first book, Tokyo, My Everest. Her essays have been published widely in Canadian, US and UK outlets. Her most recent book, Blindsight Is 2020 (Brownstone Institute, 2023), explores the philosophical dimensions of the Covid-19 mitigation policies.
Communications Team
Bob Liepa has had a long and successful career as a market research consultant, most recently as Senior Vice President of Research Dimensions Limited. Over his career he has designed and managed literally hundreds of research studies for a variety of clients in both the private and public sectors. He has combined big picture understanding and insights with solid research fundamentals to provide actionable recommendations and counsel to clients.
Working primarily in Canada, he has also managed international studies in a number of countries across Europe, Asia and South America. He has a strong belief in the right to free speech and expression, and welcomes the opportunity to assist in the cause of defending free speech rights in Canada.
Communications Team
Gordon Patrick is a former British Army officer who served for over a decade in military communications which included specialist NATO operational deployments. His subsequent expertise has developed to launching brands, expanding start-ups in new territories, M & A, advising boards and launching high-impact growth initiatives.
Communications Team
Maizy Thorvaldson is a Vancouver-based communications professional with a focus on civil liberties and public discourse. Since 2021, she has worked with the U.S.-based nonpartisan civil rights organization Fair For All, supporting legal advocacy and outreach initiatives. She has experience in political strategy and organizational leadership, including serving as Executive Director of Communications for the BC Libertarian Party (2021–2022). She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia.
Our Extended Network
Advisory Board
Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill is a specialist physician practicing at two allergy, asthma and clinical immunology clinics in Brampton and Milton. Her undergraduate training was in microbiology. She completed significant post-graduate training in pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology, including scientific research in microbiology, virology and vaccinology at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s highest security level biosafety laboratory in Canada, and has published extensively in these areas.
She has been active in her self-regulating profession, having been on the elected delegate council, and serving as an elected district chair to council of the Ontario Medical Association. She is heavily involved in Concerned Ontario Doctors, a non-profit advocacy organization of frontline physicians, which has, amongst other issues, advocated regarding transparency issues at the OMA and the escalating cuts to frontline health care. Dr. Gill has represented the interests of Canadian patients and physicians with testimony on behalf of COD before legislative committees on healthcare policy at the Ontario Legislature, the House of Commons and the Senate of Canada.
She was outspoken against harmful Covid lockdowns, providing her evidence-based opinions on X along with scientific support, and has fought a long battle in the courts with her professional regulator over its attempts to “caution” her for expressing opinions that were not aligned with government and its public health policies.
Dr. Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at The University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science.
He directs Buckingham’s new MA in the Politics of Cultural Conflict and PhD in Cultural Politics as well as its open online course on Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology.
A graduate of the University of Western Ontario, he earned his Masters and PhD from the London School of Economics. He was a Lecturer at the University of Southampton (1999-2003) and a Lecturer (2003-2010) and Professor (2011-2023) at Birkbeck, University of London. He was a stipendiary Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, in 2008-9.
He is the author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press/Bombardier Books May 2024), Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin 2018/ Abrams 2019), among many other titles and articles. He is affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, Policy Exchange, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the University of Austin.
Jonathan Kay is an editor and investigative reporter at Quillette, co-host of the Quillette podcast, TedX speaker, substacker, advisor to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, and an op-ed contributor to the National Post, where he previously served as managing editor.
His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Le Point. His book credits include Among The Truthers (2011), Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America (2016), Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life (2019), Panics and Persecutions (2020), Magic In The Dark: One Family’s Century Of Adventures In The Movie Business (2022), and Grave Error (2023).
His awards include Engineers Canada’s award for Journalism Excellence in Engineering, Canada’s National Magazine Award, and Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Critical Writing. Follow him on X (Twitter) at @jonkay
Dr. Chris Milburn is a family and ER physician in Nova Scotia with 25 years experience, and has been a social commentator for that same amount of time. His outspoken views have resulted in repercussions on several occasions. He and his wife Julie Curwin (a psychiatrist) write at Pairodocs.substack.com, and run FreeSpeechInMedicine.com.
Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is a Scholar in Residence at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. She was previously a Rhodes Scholar from Kenya and has a PhD in law from the University of Cambridge. She has taught at several law schools including Oxford University and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of two recent books, “Economic Freedom and Social Justice” and “Redressing Historical Injustice”.
Dr. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT.
He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”
He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. His twelfth book, published in 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.