Episode #1 - Fostering meaningful plurality of perspectives through communication

6 January 2023

Resume

Valerie Pringle introduces the host of the Brave Spaces podcast, Professor Robert Leckey, the Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law. Robert Leckey, a 2003 Scholar, was Co-Chair of the Alumni Executive Committee of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation from August 2019 to April 2022.

They discuss the duty and the need for information sharing, and how the media can constrain communication, but also teach us to communicate more clearly. They touch on the evolution in the feedback, communication gaps, and the notion of a brave space.

Transcript

Robert Leckey
Welcome to the Communications and Sharing Knowledge Series of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Brave Spaces podcast.

Valerie Pringle
Hello everybody. We're going to do an introduction now to a new podcast series, which is going to be hosted by Professor Robert Leckey, who is the Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and family law.

Robert served as a law clerk for Justice Michel Bastarache of the Supreme Court of Canada. He chaired the McGill Equity Subcommittee on Queer People, was President of Egale Canada, chairing its Legal Issues Committee. Prior to his appointment as Dean, he was the director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law. He's won many awards for his wonderful teaching. Therefore, communication skills.
We're very proud that he is a 2003 Pierre Elliott Trudeau scholar, a great success. Robert, as I mentioned, will be hosting the podcast series we're about to start, which is why we're speaking to him now, to get his thoughts on communication and the information sharing.

Hello, Robert!

Robert
Hi, Valerie.

Valerie
Can you start off, maybe, just so people have some kind of orientation as they listen to you going forward, telling us a little bit about your work and particularly this communication and knowledge-sharing piece, how that's been central to your work?

Robert
I have a very clear memory. When I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto, there was a bulletin board in the hallway, and this is how old I am. When professors there had an op-ed in the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star, it would be clipped out. Literally, the newsprint would be clipped and pinned to this board, and I would walk by it, and I would see them. And I would see: these people are contributing to public education and public debate. And I would say, I want to be one of the scholars who does that one day.

So, I had, from the very beginning, the idea that you don't just publish things in books and scholarly journals, you also try to talk to people. You know, my aunt who reads the Globe and Mail at breakfast, or my parents met their neighbors… that you try to reach out to other people. And so, I've been trying to do that from the very beginning of my career. And the Trudeau Foundation had a piece in that, because when I was a scholar, my mentor was Jeffrey Simpson, who had been at the Globe and Mail for donkey's years, and Jeffrey cast his eye very kindly over the first op-ed I pitched to the Globe. And, it's such a painful process learning to speak simply. You spend all these years learning expertise, and then you got to learn to dumb it down. Oh, that sounds negative. You’ve got to learn to make it simple and clear.

But that's become a journey throughout my time as a Law prof. How do you speak to the public as well as the students? Now, as a Dean, you’ve got to speak to alumni, you’ve got to speak to other outside stakeholders. So, the communication kind of runs through the whole career I've had to date.

Valerie
And the impetus for that was the sharing of the ideas, the selling of concepts, or a profile, a presence, you know, what’s the goal?

Robert
There’re different ways of coming at it. I mean, part of it in this Canadian context, where the institutions we work in are publicly funded, it does seem to me that there's a kind of responsibility. So, I don't spend my days negatively judging the colleagues who don't do it, but I, for myself, think of it as a kind of duty. That I have the great privilege of having working conditions that do allow me to take an hour now and then to try to dash off something or talk to a few journalists.

I think we're a public resource. I think the ideas I work on, particularly the ways in which families aren't always recognized by law or aren't recognized well by law, that stuff matters to people. And I want to talk to them about it, and I want to, sometimes, try to move things forward. So, it's a sense that the ideas matter, a sense that there's a duty.

Sure, it's also kind of fun when you put something out there and you hear reactions from people. It is gratifying, and, unquestionably, there's immediate reaction to an op-ed or a TV spot that having something published in a journal has no equivalent. I mean, you put something out there, and it could be months or years before people tell you they saw your journal article. So, it's all those things, I think.

Valerie
It's interesting to view it as a duty, because, and I think, obviously, this is one of the things that the Trudeau Foundation talks about to scholars – to be a public intellectual, and to be a leader, an intellectual leader.

How do you feel you have impact or how can you tell you have impact from putting your ideas out there?

Robert
Again, I'm so old that I used to get feedback in different forms. So, there would be, at times in the past, if I did a radio interview, there might be a voice message left on my office phone that I'd see the next day. Now the social media makes it much more immediate, right? So, you see stuff on Twitter, a little bit less on Facebook, you have a sense that people are engaging. So, that's always interesting. My spouse at times asks if it's just a sort of ego stroke of having people react. There is clearly something there, but you also have a sense: people are reading and thinking. And seeing the way they answer or comment, or seeing if people are going to quote, retweet, and pull out a sentence, it's always interesting to see what they pull. And if they pull a sentence I think is really important, I think, OK, I've really managed to communicate on that one.

Valerie
Well, you've touched on the evolution and change, obviously, we've seen in ways that we communicate, which have impacted the way you do your work and get your messages out. What do you think are the impacts of all the evolution and change, with social media, essentially, dominating?

Robert
Some of it is quite positive. So, I think, having done a fair amount of media myself, I try to write as a scholar more simply. So, I think, my own, even the stuff I send to the scholarly journals might be a little more accessible as a result of those years of trying to polish or simplify the op-ed, or find a way to speak to the journalist. So, some of that is positive.

Then there's the question of whether the sort of constraints of simplification are extreme? Like, is it impossible to have nuances in the media, in social media? And I know there are some pressures there, and it's hard to really deliver complicated ideas or to have the necessary caveats. So, you get quoted out of context, but there is some risk of that kind. I kind of acknowledged this is where we're going. So, I've had exercises in the last couple of years now, when I'm teaching, where the students had to tweet, at least once in the semester, just informally in the class website, but they had to make a critical comment about one day's readings, and they had to tweet it.
And that's because I know a lot of our people are going to go out into contexts where they will be the spokespeople for organizations. So, they will be trying to communicate in this new format. So, finding a way to do it, I think, that's got to be as much of our work as teaching, how to write legal memos and so on.

Valerie
Yeah, and what an exercise too, because, as you say, where's the nuance, where's the complexity in a few words, in a few letters?

Robert
I had a media training session when I was a fairly junior prof, and it was helpful, because a couple of colleagues were there. And a couple of times there were people who had had bad experiences with the media, such that they would hesitate to talk to journalists again. They felt they had been quoted out of context, and so on. And the media relations person coaching us said, one way to do is to say in very few words, it's not black and white, or you can say, this is a complex area, or we're waiting to know for sure. Like, there actually are ways you can try to do it. And it's very hard for journalists to sort of cut and fragment the quote when you say, it's not black and white. Like, there are some strategies better than others for trying to deal with that.

Valerie
What you are also, I guess, facing all the time, especially with instant feedback over Twitter and response, and people retweeting, and stuff, is the ugliness that often people get into, when people disagree and have a difference of opinion.

Robert
Yeah. And you got to decide, how much are you deterred by the idea of how people might react? So, if you can already anticipate, when you say something that you believe in, what the negative reaction will be, does that stop you saying it, or do you say, look, I got to put out the message I'm going to put out, even if I can anticipate how some people are going to react. And, I guess, you got to decide how thick your skin is, and how much you care about what it is you want to put out there. But the possibility, if you're even a quasi-known figure with a few followers, the possibility that there will be that kind of backlash or critique is always present.

Valerie
Well, and this speaks to the importance of being able to foster and participate, navigate conversations between different communities, differences of opinion. Also, you know, academic versus non-academic.

Robert
Oh, it's really tricky, right? Reaching across and even finding the words to work. So, in some of the LGBTQ activism, what are the words that you can use to communicate a radical idea to a 65-year-old judge, for example? And I remember discussions like, would they know what queer means? How do you stay true to principles while trying to translate your ideas for others? There can be communication gaps across generations, communication gaps across different social groups. It's a lot to arbitrate, and you got to try to keep listening and try to keep talking to people, and try, I guess, in certain contexts explaining that no stakeholder group is going to have everything they want, but can we be working together somehow?

Valerie
Well, you know, it is fraught at times, because it seems, sometimes people are being told, you can't say that, you can't even express those ideas. They're so not acceptable now or not politically correct, or whatever, that the conversation is just shut down.

Robert
Yeah, there's a sense that some things can't be spoken or… I think it's exaggerated often. And I think, some of the people complaining that they are being canceled and have no way to speak seem to have a lot of megaphones in front of them. So, I'm less worried than some that the cancel culture is out of control. But there are differences around the words that are used. There are also differences around how quickly things are going to change.

And so, when censors, at least in the university context… there were groups who, you know, maybe for two centuries have been shut out. And as things start to move, they don't just want it to change tomorrow, they want it to change yesterday. And so, when you say to them, you know, changing these things will take a little time, sometimes they listen and they feel, you're basically stonewalling, saying like, we're refusing to change. But honestly, some things in an institutional setting do take time to change, and you got to be working with a lot of people. So, there can be a lot of challenges in these discussions.

Valerie
Well, I guess, you saw that a lot, probably, with your work with Egale and the Subcommittee on Queer People and stuff. And again, some of it is language, some of it is ideas.

Robert
Yeah, they go together. But if you can really accept that people you respect and can learn from have different views than you do, and we'll use different words. And then you say, what can I, how can I learn from that? It can help instead of just jumping to judgment.

Valerie
So, this podcast, these podcast series is about brave spaces, which is a concept that the Trudeau scholars are working on, and themselves. What does the notion of a brave space mean to you?

Robert
I mean, the brave space, to me, evokes a conversation, a form, a setting, where I have to be open to being surprised by what I hear, being uncomfortable hearing some things while outside the comfort zone, the idea being that being exposed to new ideas is important, but not easy. And so, clearly, the brave space is contrasting with the idea of the safe space. But it's important… I guess, the balance is keeping in mind that in ways, some people don't recognize, the conversations we come to, we don't all enter on equal footing. So, there are people who will come in having a sense of being deeply marginalized. And so, it may be easy for the people who feel at home in the space to say, let's make it a brave space. But nonetheless, on the whole, if you think of how traditionally rules that silence people, how they play out for, say, vulnerable minorities. Like, we tend to come on the downside of those things. So, personally, I tend to be in favor of less regulation of speech, rather than more. Thinking, and from my own personal perspective, you know, if you start to have some rules around censorship, it's going to be the shipment to the gay bookstore that's going to be stopped at the border first. And so, the awareness that that's how police power and how censorship tends to work – it tends to shut the people who are already vulnerable. That leads me, certainly, to favor less regulation, more openness to a whole lot of people saying a whole lot of things. But it may not be very comfortable for some of the people in those conversations.

Valerie
You know, when people talk about communications, they think, writing or talking, not listening. When you think of communications, are you thinking, communicating your ideas, your point of view, with a point of winning people over?

Robert
But even to try to win people over, you’ve got to be listening to them, to know where they're coming from, how they're coming at that. I work in the Faculty where there's always a couple of legal traditions in play, and if you're trying to explain an area of law to someone, it's helpful to know what they know already. So, what are they expecting to hear, how is what you're sharing today different from what they know already?

That seems to me already, even trying to persuade people, you got to be thinking about them and listening to them. I may also be influenced – I taped a podcast with Beverly McLaughlin, the former chief justice of Canada. And she was certainly talking about the importance of listening, and it made me think as well.

But whether it's teaching, whether it's leading, whether it's all these things, you certainly got to be doing a lot of listening as well. So, yeah, that is communication. And even if you're writing, sharing the draft to people and listening to them, what did they see in it? How did it communicate to them? I don't think you can just do it alone in your office.

Valerie
So, what are you hoping will be the takeaway from this podcast for the people who are listening? Do you, sort of, have a vision for these conversations? What you want people to learn, what you want to learn?

Robert
I mean, already, I anticipate certain things are going to be common. Like, you ask, how has communication changed in the past couple of decades? Nobody's going to ignore social media, right? But I do hope that hearing how a range of people who have been actively engaged in communications, how they think about it and speak about it, maybe it'll help the listeners to be a little more self-conscious and intentional about the choices they make and the way they communicate, and the choices they make about what they read, what they listen to, what they do with it.

So, I hope that we’ll have a short series of vignettes that help people clarify how they're doing their own communications in their lives.

Valerie
But without it, you're really lost. I mean, if you're just… if you're not communicating your ideas and getting feedback, then you might as well just be in a bubble, not much of a point.

Robert
It’s always a collective endeavor.

Valerie
Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you and I hope it goes brilliantly well, and I'll be listening.

Robert
It's a pleasure for me too. Thanks so much.

Valerie
Thanks, Robert.