The Finlayson Affair

My Trial by Bureaucratic Fire

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By Paul Finlayson

History, it is said, repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce. In Canada, it repeats as a committee. The uniforms change—epaulettes traded for HR lanyards, sabres for syllabi—but the choreography remains grimly familiar: a man becomes a lesson, not for what he did, but for whom he dared to stand with.

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was railroaded to Devil’s Island for the unforgivable crime of being a Jew who could read. I wasn’t shipped anywhere—exile is now administered via email.

I wasn’t tried in a courtroom, but in a climate-controlled office where irony dies and allegations are drafted in Microsoft Word. I’m not Jewish by synagogue or surname, but that doesn’t matter—the rules of this game aren’t written in Torah. Cowards improvise them. And standing with Jews, supporting Israel, and calling Hamas a death cult made me a heretic. A useful one. A warning.

For that, I was gagged, banned from campus, and publicly smeared by the University of Guelph-Humber. The charge? Not espionage, not violence. Just one post. One paragraph of moral clarity: that Hamas—who tortured, raped, and burned civilians on October 7—is akin to the Nazis. A sentiment fit for an op-ed in Haaretz. Unless, of course, you say it as a professor in Toronto.

There, moral clarity is radioactive.

They seized me—not physically, but professionally. Gagged me. Banished me. No charges. No student complaints. The Human Rights Complaint didn’t come from a class or a colleague. It came from the Vice Provost herself: Melanie Spence-Ariemma, who accused me of being a “danger to children.” Let that phrase linger. Not “controversial.” Not “offensive.” A danger to children. The kind of language reserved for predators and war criminals.

Yes, they went from me condemning a terrorist organization with Nazi roots to breathless shrieking about pedophilia. Within hours, her accusations and those of her friends were spreading like wildfire through the staff and faculty. It was an execution by accusation.

And the professors who spread those lies to students, saying I was under criminal investigation, that I’d assaulted someone, that I was about to be fired? Not only unpunished, but also applauded. One of them, Professor Wael Ramadan, bragged to students that he had contacted Stop Zionist Hate, inciting a mob of 300,000. That wasn’t his only group—he had five and six-digit networks urging members to flood the university with demands for my dismissal. They even linked to the school’s X account—I didn’t even know we had one.

Each was framed as a “community suggestion.” I was found guilty of polluting the environment—and not the post-Taco Bell kind.

My reputation was shredded. My inbox was torched. I contacted a staff member—screenshots in hand—who had lied to students, claiming I was arrested after a fight on campus. Her reward? Support from management. A gold star. The top bureaucrat in Public Safety sent me a letter threatening police involvement for asking staff to stop slandering me to students.

Try being gagged while 20,000 strangers are told you’re a racist and a Nazi.

I was slandered, then punished for responding to it. Silenced, then accused of being suspiciously quiet. When I protested the process, I was told I made the Vice Provost feel “unsafe.” Yes—unsafe. An email objecting to character assassination is now a security threat. We live in a therapeutic tyranny, where oppressors weep and victims whisper.

Let’s be clear: I never assaulted anyone. I never threatened anyone. However, they ensured that every student believed otherwise. “He’s been fired.” “There are witnesses.” “He’s under investigation.” No due process. No evidence. Just whispers in faculty lounges and weaponised hallway gossip.

When I tried to correct the record, I was met with more threats—treated as though I were lurking outside a daycare. One administrator even copied the Toronto Police on emails to me—a grotesque little theatre of intimidation, all before any formal allegation was made. A Potemkin process. A show trial without the dignity of a trial.

They knew the verdict before they scheduled the meeting.

Meanwhile, Ramadan—my accuser’s ally—was cleared of three human rights complaints, despite posting thousands of antisemitic messages glorifying Hamas, mocking Jewish suffering, and dredging up conspiracies that would make Ernst Zündel blush. Posts that arguably violate Section 319 of the Criminal Code, the prohibition on hate propaganda. He called Jews “filth,” blamed them for the Holodomor, and repeated every tired trope that history already condemned.

And yet—nothing.

The Human Rights Office that crucified me refused to act on him. Jewish students who filed complaints were told to reflect on their actions. To wait. To consider “context.”

I didn’t get context. I got a muzzle.

After the ban, I was told I’d be on “paid suspension.” A bureaucratic fiction. Each semester, I had to beg to be paid, threaten legal action, and fight for drug benefits—ironically, drugs necessitated by the PTSD their abuse caused, after their threats drove me to CAMH.

Every missed paycheque, every cancelled prescription, every HR non-response was another brick in the architecture of institutional sadism. Shunning, laced with periodic threats, appears to be their preferred model of corporate goodwill.

Eventually, I stopped asking for justice. I started asking for decency.

I didn’t get that either.

Staff were instructed not to reply to my emails. Not to speak to me. Even the new department head was forbidden to contact. When I asked for payroll records? Silence. When I asked for the lies to stop? They called it harassment.

They lie. I ask them to stop lying. I’m the problem.

This isn’t discipline. It’s psychological warfare. And it works. According to the Journal of Traumatic Stress, ostracism activates the same brain regions as physical pain. Chronic social exclusion, when mixed with defamation, produces what psychiatrists call complex trauma.

I call it what it is: abuse.

I’ve watched colleagues exclude me. I used to wonder: Why so cold? Why the silence? And then I remembered—they’ve been told I’m dangerous—a liability. A threat. And once that lie takes hold, cruelty becomes policy.

My only daughter, Sophia, wrote publicly in my defence. Because no one else would, her piece is on my Substack, freedomtoffend.com. She’s 18. She understands what senior faculty do not: silence in the face of slander is not neutrality. It is consent.

My unions—OPSEU and CUPE—were supposed to protect me. Instead, they became accessories to the purge. Ignoring my pleas. Slow-walking grievances. Refusing to fight. Most days, they function as management’s little helpers. Labour and administration, united in cowardice, wrapped in a bow of institutional Jew-hatred—the final scene of an evil Hallmark film.

The lines have blurred—and I’ve been buried beneath them.

And yet—I refuse to go quietly.

This country now arrests Jewish students for protesting Hamas slogans, while mobs calling for genocide march unbothered through downtown Toronto. Police avert their gaze. Human Rights Offices tell us to “understand complexity.” Another way to phrase it: it’s open season on Jews.

Before I was ejected, I wore my IDF hoodie to campus. Not to provoke—but to help teach inclusion to anti-Semites. They were welcome. I just refused to apologise for who I stood with.

If Canada has a Dreyfus Affair, this is it. Not because I’m heroic, but because cowardice is now policy. I haven’t been sent to Devil’s Island. But I’ve been cast out into bureaucratic exile and made invisible. Made monstrous with not even a whiff of guilt. Defamation wasn’t whispered—it was manufactured by management.

It’s surreal, how quickly it happened. One month, I’m thriving—teaching, popular, engaged. The next time, I’m thrown to the curb and called every vile name imaginable. Not by students. By management. And now, seeking justice feels like risking my financial future. When I say my dogs are the only ones who stood by me, it’s only half a joke.

This country is sick. Even Israel now issues travel warnings to Jews visiting Canada.

And our political class? Craven. Ethically bankrupt. Sold out to anti-Semites for votes. A politically concentrated, religiously unified faction—yes, mostly from the Muslim community—has revealed its teeth. And no, facts aren’t racist. The slogans are about Gaza, but the goal is clear: the elimination of Jews.

I’m not looking for sainthood. I’m not even asking for reinstatement. Going back after all this would be like asking to become Samuel Paty—the French teacher decapitated by those who mistook gossip for divine instruction.

I am asking for the truth. For justice. Or, failing that, for the lie to be named.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered more than I ever will, once wrote:

“Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

I echo that.

The lie may triumph. But not through me. Not through my silence. And not through the silence of anyone who claims to care about freedom, truth, or the dignity of Jewish life.

Let the record show: I stood.

Let the record show: I was warned.

Let the record show: I will not sit down.

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Thanks for reading. For more on a related topic, read Douglas Murray, a voice of reason in a sea of confusion

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