Hub Podcast

Staying normal in abnormal times—Jamil Jivani discusses his career and fighting for his community

Ontario's Advocate for Community Opportunities Jamil Jivani speaks during the Queen's Park daily COVID-19 briefing in Toronto on Thursday, June 4, 2020. Rick Madonik/The Canadian Press.

This episode of Hub Dialogues features editor-at-large Sean Speer in conversation with Macdonald-Laurier Institute senior fellow Jamil Jivani. They discuss his unconventional career, the importance of role models, and confronting preconceived ideas about race, politics, and ideology.

You can listen to this episode of Hub Dialogues on Acast, Amazon, Apple, Google, Spotify, or YouTube. A transcript of the episode is available below.

Transcripts of our podcast episodes are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

SEAN SPEER: Welcome to Hub Dialogues. I’m your host, Sean Speer, editor-at-large at The Hub. I’m honoured to be joined today by Jamal Jivani, who’s a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and author of the book Why Young Men?.

I’m grateful to be able to speak with him about his intellectual and professional journey, including the challenges of confronting preconceived ideas about race, politics, and ideology. Thanks for joining us, Jamil.

JAMIL JIVANI: Thanks for having me, Sean. Great to be with you.

SEAN SPEER: Let’s start on a biographical note. You graduated from Yale Law School, but then you did something rather countercultural. Instead of pursuing a career in big law in New York, London, or Toronto, you chose a path of advocacy, writing, and community organizing. What caused you to choose this different path?

JAMIL JIVANI: Yeah, I think a few things happened. So, one of them is that when I was at Yale, I realized that there is a gap between what people who we sort of consider to be elites—whether that’s because of the money they earn, or the prestigious education they have—there’s a gap between sort of what they talk about and how they live their lives. And I realized that a lot of these institutions were more concerned with saying the right things and what we might cynically refer to as “virtue signaling” than they were to actually, you know, change the grassroots conditions that most people of the working and middle classes grew up in. 

And I think that learning about the gap between some of these elite institutions and the way people en mass live their lives, the majority of us, whether it be in the United States or Canada, I think that really made me want to live in the middle between those two worlds. As opposed to, you know, just work at a corporate law firm or just teach at a law school.

SEAN SPEER: Your former classmates, did they understand your choice? Or do they think you’re crazy for the opportunity costs that you’ve given up in terms of income, status, and everything else associated with being a Yale Law alumni?

JAMIL JIVANI: Yeah, I think some people do find it odd to understand, especially when you come from a single-parent household and you didn’t have a lot of money, and then you get the chance to make a lot of money. I think a lot of people don’t understand why you wouldn’t be enthusiastic about sort of pursuing the biggest salary possible. So that does come up when we have conversations. I think, also, the idea of not wanting to earn as much money as possible, a lot of my classmates think of that as sort of a progressive or liberal decision, right? Like, maybe you’re a bleeding heart, and you don’t want to make the money because you want to go work for the ACLU or you want to go work for some kind of left-wing advocacy organization. 

So, when I also rejected those opportunities, I think it’s a hard thing to square for a lot of people who, and I don’t mean this in a critical way, but just who I think assume they know why people make the decisions they make. And when you encounter someone who maybe challenges some of your basic assumptions, I think it’s hard for a lot of people to reconcile with that.

SEAN SPEER: You’ve dedicated a lot of your thinking and advocacy, including in your 2018 book, which listeners should buy and read, Why Young Men?, to questions about the circumstances and conditions facing young men in society, particularly those who don’t grow up with male role models. What drew you to those issues? And why do you think they’re so important, Jamil?

JAMIL JIVANI: Well, for me, it never even really felt like a choice. I was born into a family dynamic where my father being absent was one of the most influential parts of my life. I mean, it’s odd to think that someone who’s not there has that much of an impact on you. But that is, I think, the case for a lot of children, especially boys who grew up without father figures in the household. So, it’s always been something that I’ve paid a lot of attention to in my personal life.

 I grew up in a neighbourhood where a lot of my peers also were in that same circumstance, where they didn’t have fathers. In an interesting and I think uniquely Canadian circumstance, we were in the suburbs of Toronto living in houses that were just built. So, it wasn’t like there was some kind of pre-existing multi-generational cultural dynamic. You had a bunch of boys without fathers growing up in an area where there wasn’t really that many people older than us. And so, it was just something that was so clear to me, the need for that kind of intergenerational mentorship and support and guidance. 

And as I got older and went through university, went to law school, I could see the differences where you do have people with strong, multiple generations of parents involved in their family and you can see what that produces in terms of stability and health, and resources. So, it was just something that I had a strong interest in. I wanted to, through the book, explore the different ways that impacts young men. In some cultural circumstances, like where I grew up, that could lead to things like youth violence, gang involvement, dropping out of school. 

In other cultural contexts that leads to opioid abuse, like you might see in the Midwestern United States. Or in Europe, where I did some of the research for the book, that is the sort of cultural breeding ground for things like extremism, where terrorist organizations and extremists recruit young men. So depending on your circumstances, I do think that lacking the family and community infrastructure around a young person, it does lead to so many of the issues that dominate our new cycles and the kinds of things we talk about all the time.

SEAN SPEER: So, we’ve sort of set up for listeners, some of the professional choices you’ve made, and the issues that animate you. Now, I’d like to talk a bit about how you think someone like you can best make a difference. You’ve spent some time in the world of politics and government on one hand, but you’ve also spent time in the world of on-the-ground organizing. 

How should we think about the relative role of these types of activities in achieving progress? Where do you think one can make a bigger difference?

JAMIL JIVANI: To me, it’s almost like a grass is greener situation. When you’re in the ivory tower, when you’re in the government, and you’re fighting for change there, for example, you often will look out the window and be like, “I’d rather be on the grassroots because I want to be closer to the people, I want to see the issues and pursue solutions up close. I want to feel, tangibly, what is happening in the world.”

But then when you’re purely working on the grassroots side, you’re frustrated about decisions on how resources are allocated, you’re frustrated about policy, about legislation. And so, it does feel like the best situation is trying to achieve some balance between those two perspectives, especially if your goal is to solve problems. I think that we’d like to assume that a lot of people who work with problems want to solve them. But often, that’s not the case. I do think, you know, being mindful of the need to have some balance between the grassroots perspective and the sort of ivory tower perspective is important. 

The worst thing that happens though, is when people in the ivory towers become so arrogant and self-assured that they don’t realize how much they don’t know. I think that’s where some of the most destructive decisions get made. I think the last two years in terms of pandemic policy, and school closures, for example, has been a great example of that. Where you only look at these children and these parents as data points on a spreadsheet when you’re thinking about reducing case counts without taking into account the grassroots impact of that, especially for working-class and middle-class families. So, I think some balance is needed. 

In terms of me personally, I try to find that balance every day. I do think that being able to communicate with people through media is one way of trying to speak to both audiences. And it’s, it’s not easy to be able to talk about the world and view the world in a way that resonates with people who occupy different places on the political spectrum, but also on the economic spectrum. But that is something that I’ve been trying really hard to do as a communicator, and I think that’s one of the things that I’m hoping that I can help accomplish. Wherever I may be sort of based is another matter, but in terms of just being able to communicate messages, identify problems, advocate for solutions, I think that’s a key thing that we need to be able to do better. 

And right now, there’s just so much division over where people are getting information. People are living in the sort of information silos, and if we can figure out how to communicate across those differences I think it would make a massive difference for people. 

SEAN SPEER: What’s fascinating, Jamil, is that we’ve known each other for some time, but in this conversation, in your answers so far, a kind of light bulb has gone off for me. You’ve talked about positioning yourself in the middle of these different worlds and straddling the world of elite opinion and decision making and policymaking on one hand, but then also trying to situate those efforts in the real-life experiences of the people for whom those policies or those decisions will necessarily have an impact.

Do you want to talk a bit about your decision to get involved more in policymaking and government decision-making? How has that been perceived by the people with whom you work on the grassroots? Do you get pushback sometimes on decisions that are made by governments that you may be involved in? How do you communicate compromises or some of the choices that you’re making are all ultimately in the best interest of the communities that you’re serving? 

JAMIL JIVANI: Yeah, it’s a great question, especially when we’re talking about communities that have been under-resourced. And I say under-resourced a number of ways. I mean, sometimes that can mean purely finances and budgetary allocations, but under-resourced can also be quality of staffing in schools, quality of police services, you know? It doesn’t have to just mean money. It can also just mean what are people actually getting from the government and is it a high enough quality that can actually encourage social mobility instead of just keeping people where they are, despite how hard they might work, despite how well they might do in school, despite how creative and innovative they may be.

And I think that’s one of the biggest points of tension when we think about under-resourced communities. If the conversation is purely about money, then there’s always going to be, in my opinion, a fairly unhealthy dynamic when it comes to dependence, where people on the grassroots level, in many cases rightly, point out, “Hey, we deserve more money to solve this problem.” But the reality is that governments, and we’ve seen this, this is not a partisan thing—I mean, every single party in place, is only going to spend so much money, right? 

Even the Trudeau government, which has spent a very large amount of money, would still be criticized, for example, for not addressing the clean drinking water issue fast enough and efficiently enough. No matter how much money the government spends, there are going to be shortcomings in terms of what they’re spending that money on. 

And I think what I try to do, as best as I can, is one, address the financial issues where possible in terms of grants and resource allocations. But also, really try to encourage people to see policy as more than just an exercise in spending cash; that there are ways of changing how systems work, there are ways of increasing accountability for public services, there are ways of improving the ladder of opportunity presented to children from working and middle-class families that doesn’t have to limit ourselves to just talking about spending more money in the very systems that people rightfully criticize.

The obvious ones are things like schooling, for example. But even in the world of policing, or in recreational services, after school programming, childcare, I think there’s such a rich world of policy debate—and I know you guys explore this at The Hub—that I think a lot of communities need to be better engaged in so that the menu of possible solutions is at their disposal. That is one of the hardest parts of doing this kind of work, is getting to that point where we’re talking about policy in that sort of way. 

You know, I don’t expect the average mom or dad to have time to read policy briefs. That’s why it falls onto people like myself, it falls on to resources, and media platforms like you guys, it falls, ideally, on to elected officials to share the kind of information with parents and with families so that they know what sort of options exist and can pursue the best options for their communities. That doesn’t happen very easily. Sometimes in the pursuit of that, people get frustrated, and frankly, political and partisan agendas often take off in that regard. 

So as a conservative, for example, the stereotype is that a conservative like me would go around and tell working-class people, middle-class people, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, do it all on your own, the government owes you nothing except to get out of your way.” I don’t actually believe that. I mean, I’ve really never believed that, but especially in light of what the last two years has produced as far as pandemic policy, the government has been so involved in everything in our lives.

It would be so dishonest to say, “Well, now the government can just pull out and leave you to your own devices.” I mean, governmental policy has systematically disadvantaged, over the last two years, a large percentage of children, a large percentage of workers. And I think, therefore, some sort of responsibility has to be taken.

I think part of it is helping people understand that being a conservative, doesn’t, at least from my point of view, does not mean necessarily the sort of Ronald Reagan definition of conservatism; the neoliberal sort of definition of conservatism that I think a lot of people have been accustomed, whether it’s to culture or politics, to believe is the only way conservatives can address these sorts of issues. That may be a multi-generational effort to shift people from thinking that way, but I think that’s one of the responsibilities that we have to take on.

SEAN SPEER: That’s a great answer, Jamil. On the issue of the pandemic response, you talked a bit about how it’s contributed to growing polarization in our political and policy discourse. 

Let me put that question to you. I think it’s fair to say that in recent years, I’ve discerned that your own conceptual and practical positions have come to sharpen a bit. You’ve become a bit firmer and more convinced than when we first met. Would you agree with that characterization? And if so, what would you attribute this change to?

JAMIL JIVANI: I mean, there’s probably a lot of ways I can answer that question. But I’ll just give you one very clear answer. In 2020, every powerful institution in this country, corporations, universities, media, companies, governments, all spread a message to people who look like me, people whose parents come from the same kind of countries that my father comes from in Kenya, that we have a systemically racist and biased country that is actively working against our betterment. That was the message we were told. We were told by everyone with a megaphone that this country is designed to be against people of colour. If you fast forward a year later, now all of those same institutions are getting angry at our communities for not complying with government mandates and policies fast enough.

How can you treat people that way? How can you say to these communities, including our Indigenous brothers and sisters, that the government is against you? And then as soon as liberal elites deem your compliance necessary and mandatory, they tell you “Forget everything we told you about why you should not trust the government, you better trust the government ASAP, or you’re going to lose your job, lose access to society, you won’t be able to participate in our country.”

The fact that that kind of hypocrisy existed from liberal elites, and openly, unashamed, not embarrassed, not even feeling the need to explain how you can treat people this way—that was something that just became very clear to me that there is hypocrisy. 

It’s not something that liberal elites are sensitive to. You cannot point out to them “Why are you this way, one day, and another way the next day?” and they will change. They will actually see that as a reason to reconsider their positions. It’s not about being consistent. It’s not about principles. It’s about power, and what is most expedient for their interests in the given moment. 

And for people like myself, and many—I’m not going to speak for others, but there are many other people in this country who are caught in the middle of that whole switcheroo that our institutions did. Well, on one hand, we were saying to them, “Wait a minute, Canada is not racist, why are you trying to pressure us into saying those things?” and then in the next minute, they’re asking us to tell our communities that “You’re dumb, or you’re bad, or you’re an anti-vaxxer or you’re immoral for not going along with the agenda.” So that’s an example of the kind of thing when we say, “Why are my positions sharpened?”. It’s because I think we’ve seen the character of some of these institutions, and the reality is that there are very few people willing to pay the price that it costs to call this out and to take it on. 

And frankly, if I learned anything, from my time at Yale Law School, was you have the privilege now, of being able to do a million different things. And if one of those things I can do is be a person who stands in the middle of the storm, and say, “You’re not going to treat working people this way. You’re not going to treat poor people this way. You’re not going to treat minority communities this way. They deserve more respect. They deserve more dignity. I deserve more respect. I deserve more dignity.” And whatever the cost is of delivering that message, I’m very happy to deliver it. 

So, that is one of many examples I could give you where it became very clear to me that people feigning some sort of sensitivity to the circumstances as someone like me grew up in were willing to throw us under the bus as soon as it became convenient. I’m not going to sit around and wait to get thrown under the bus. I’d rather call the bus while I see it coming.

SEAN SPEER: You anticipated one of my next questions, which is, I have the sense that you face social costs for self-describing as a conservative, which you’ve done in this conversation, and for challenging some of these ideas which are or have been popularized in the broader media and culture, as you say.

Do you want to talk a bit about the social costs of, in effect, choosing a different path than the one that was expected of you in the mainstream culture?

JAMIL JIVANI: I think there’s this sort of sense that it’s hard to be a normal person in abnormal circumstances. My life is abnormal in the sense that more people pay attention to what I say, more people follow me on social media, more people either like me or dislike me. I’m in a weird situation that I think a lot of people who are in public life are, and I’m not unique in this respect. 

Anyone who’s got a decent social media following, anyone who winds up in the newspaper, anyone who has a job with some sort of prestige attached to it, is in the same kind of situation where just an abnormal amount of attention is being paid to us. What I think has happened here is that there’s this pressure from a lot of elites that if you are in this strata of society, you can’t be a normal dude. 

I think of myself as being no different, no better, no worse, than the majority of people in the country. I go to church, I care about my family, I have opinions on different issues, some of which would be considered maybe typical conservative views, some of which are not. I watch a lot of sports, I listen to music, I have a certain gut sense of what is right and wrong. And the social pressure that exists is to suppress all the things that make us normal people when you occupy these professional or social positions, and almost now have to play a role that is more informed by fitting in and playing it safe and not being offensive and not disrupting the status quo. 

And I’m sitting here thinking of myself, “Do you know how hard I had to work to get to law school? Do you know that I was illiterate as a teenager, according to the public school system, and within half a decade, made it to one of the most prestigious schools in the world?” I did not do that, I did not work that hard, I did not get that support from my community and my family so that when I made it, I could now be anything other than who I am. What is the point of being successful if you don’t get to be yourself? And to me, that’s all I’ve been fighting for. And that is controversial. 

Unfortunately, it is controversial to be a normal dude in these abnormal circumstances. So outside of elite opinion, outside of universities and Twitter activists and all that space—where I’ll be honest, I do enjoy getting into a little bit of a back and forth with those sorts of people—but outside of all of that, when I’m like at my church, when I’m in my community, when I’m visiting my family, my friends, I’m not controversial; I’m a normal guy. And to me, when we talk about challenging the way power works in our country, where a very small number of people who are hostile to conservative values have a ton of power over our economy, over our political system, when we talk about challenging those folks, it’s not about being hard right to balance them out with some extreme position on the other side. It’s just about fighting to exist as a normal dude. If I can do that, then I think that that to me is the plan here, that normal people get to exist in abnormal situations and we’re not changed but those situations get changed. That would be the ideal way that I think we would exist.

So, the social cost is very real so far as I probably couldn’t get a job teaching at a law school again without going through a lot of headaches. I probably couldn’t get a job running the average progressive non-profit organization at all, but certainly without going through some hoops. Even running for office one day is going to be more of a challenge if I decide to do that because there is now a whole bunch of people who don’t like me, whereas if I just kept my mouth shut, that wouldn’t exist. So, there’s absolutely a social cost. 

But I just remind myself, every time I go to church, every time I go out in the community, every time I talk to people, I don’t have a social cost with those folks. In fact, I actually think that I represent them and reflect them a lot better than the people who claim—the leftists, for example—who claim to be fighting for them, but then seemed to hate everything about what these people believe every chance they get. So yeah, I guess that’s my take on the social cost issue.

SEAN SPEER: One project that you’ve been involved in in this regard is trying to create the conditions for young people to be able to speak for themselves and not feel constrained by these social pressures. It’s an essay contest being run at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, where you’re a senior fellow, called, “Speak for Ourselves.” Do you want to talk a bit about that project, its genesis, and why you think it’s so important?

JAMIL JIVANI: I mean, that project comes out of exactly what we’re talking about. It’s this idea that everywhere, every school, every workplace, every community center, every mosque, every temple, every church, there are tons of people who just aren’t as activist-oriented, are not as progressive, are not as hardened in their politics, as the liberal institutions, the elite institutions, demand. 

They’re going to work and they’re being told, “Hey, you got to put pronouns in your email signature.” They’re going to school, and they’re being told, “If you write an essay on this topic, you’re going to get a low mark, you’re going to have to appeal to your professor if you want to do well.” They’re constantly being made to feel like they’re having to fit in by being something other than themselves. And our hope is just to make people feel that they’re not alone. Because feeling alone and isolated is a very unhealthy thing, regardless of who you are, what you believe in, where you come from. 

Our hope is to show people, you’re not alone. And if you do want to talk about these things, whether it’s privately, we have a network of mentors out there for you from a broad range of diverse communities, who want to have your back. If you just need to talk about what you’re going through this sort of pressure, you might be feeling to homogenize, we’re happy to talk with you. If you want to share your story about what it’s like on a university campus, or what it’s like at your workplace, we’ve got a platform where we can help get you published, we can help put you out there. And we’ve been able to do that for a lot of people at this point. I’m really happy about that. 

I do believe that there is this sort of attack in some ways, on people who don’t want to be obsessed with politics every single moment of every day. That somehow if you’re a young person who’s not sitting there posting the right things on Instagram, or saying the right things on Tik Tok, that you’re a bad person for not being hyper-political. I don’t think people should be made to feel that way. 

Especially when you’re from a minority community, like I am, and like others who work on this project are, because we are often manipulated by these media narratives that suggest we are all this homogenous activist group with this singular set of sort of demands and perspectives. It’s not true. We all know it’s not true. And I think it’s about time that those who are pushing those lies get called out for it.

SEAN SPEER: Let’s get a bit concrete. This has been a fascinating conversation about the broader culture and, as you say, the constraints or parameters around what people feel comfortable thinking and saying in mainstream institutions. You’ve talked a bit about your own personal journey and experiences, but in recent days, you’ve described in an essay having to confront these issues in your role as a radio host here in Canada. 

Up until recently, you hosted a show where you had fascinating guests—from the Toronto Raptors’ Fred VanVleet to American Black intellectual, Coleman Hughes—talking about issues that matter to you and that matter to your your listeners, including the Black experience in the kind of modern society, issues around fatherlessness and so on. And yet, your time as a host came to an end recently. Do you want to talk a bit about that experience and what you think it says about some of the broader issues we’ve been talking about today?

JAMIL JIVANI: Yeah, and I think given that it’s Black History Month, I think it’s worth sort of putting a bit of context around my experience with iHeartRadio and Bell Media. We have in this country a pretty storied track record of Black men who are considered to be the first to achieve something. Or Black men who are trailblazers winding up in what I think are pretty difficult and unrealistic, unreasonable circumstances. So, I’m thinking about the first Black police chief in Toronto, the first Black head of the Toronto District School Board, the first Black head of the of Toronto Community Housing. I’m thinking of Justice Donald McLeod, one of our most esteemed Black judges in Canadian history. I would argue, probably the most well-known Black judge in Canada. One of the youngest and first Black deputy chiefs of Toronto Police. I’m looking at Kaycee Madu’s current situation in Alberta, where he has been, temporarily I hope, suspended. But he is the first Black Minister of Justice in any province in the country. I could go on and on. We have these examples of Black men who get put in very public positions.

I think what leads to a lot of tensions when a Black man is put in this position is that the people who either hire us or appoint us want us to play two roles. One is to be the sort of institutional team player where you do everything that people expect you to do in your job. But then the other is to be this change leader, where because you’re a Black person in this role—in particular a Black man because I do think that the gendered aspect of this is relevant—that when you’re put in this role as a Black man, you’re supposed to change the system.

On one hand, they want you to be a team player. On the other hand, they want you to change the system that you’ve been asked to lead. It is highly unsustainable. And I think that’s why with all these other men that I mentioned, they’ve wound up in challenging circumstances. Many of them forced to resign, many of them in scandal, many of them brought to disciplinary hearings. Because you wind up with tension, you wind up having enemies. It’s just it’s a difficult spot. And that’s essentially what occurred in my case with iHeartRadio and Bell Media. 

They hired me after George Floyd was tragically killed in Minneapolis in 2020. And anyone who looks back at 2020 will remember that summer people were talking about race and racism every day, it was the biggest thing, aside from COVID-19, happening in the entire world at the time. And they bring me on because I can talk about those issues, I know those issues, I’ve lived through them. I have written a book, in part, that discusses things like police brutality, and its impact on communities. I am in some ways what they’re looking for as far as someone who can put on the radio to talk about these things. 

But then, as time goes on and they start to realize that just because someone has expertise in issues, just because someone is Black, just because someone is a Black man in particular, doesn’t mean that they know what conclusions they may draw from what’s happening in society. As the months went by, there’s a number of moments where the tension became quite obvious, where I was being put in a position to play the role of what I would call a liberal stereotype: the type of Black man who is what the average liberal elite would imagine someone who comes out and talks about systemic racism, talks about how white people are the centre of the universe and they’re affecting everything that happens in our community, and we cannot solve any problems without the government being driving the ship. And I just don’t believe those things. These are not things that come from my life experience. They’re not things that come from my research, my intellectual growth.

As it became clearer and clearer that I was not going to be that sort of liberal sort of parrot, the tensions just got worse and worse. And they boiled over a year and a half or so into me having the job where my commitment to diversity and inclusion was being questioned. It was a very frustrating thing to go through because, as you mentioned, Sean, a lot of my guests are Black. We worked so hard to make sure that Black communities were well represented on my show as a personal goal of mine. It was something I was very concerned about as we put together our shows because I recognize that I’m coming from a community where the diversity of our experiences, our perspectives, our potential solutions to problems that plague our country, we were not getting a chance to platform that diversity. And I wanted to do that.

To be told, “We’re not sure if you’re in line with our diversity and inclusion mandate,” it’s like, “We have a more diverse show than any other show in your markets, I would, on any measure, I would bet that.” So that was a frustrating thing to go through. Then I was told I was going to be taken off the air for a few weeks so that we could then, in the new year, discuss this. They wound up ambushing me with the termination instead of actually discussing the issues. 

So, to this day, I still don’t even know the specifics of what their issue was with our show. I’ve never gotten answers to those questions. I would love to know it to be honest with you, like what exactly our show was not doing. But I do suspect based on my interactions with them, based on their tone, and based on things that they’ve said to me before, that it really did come down to the fact that I was not the right type of Black person. I’m a conservative, I’m a Christian, I have very strong beliefs on a number of issues that I think they wanted me to talk about in a different way. And I think it became clear I was not the type of guy they were going to push around. That’s my interpretation of what happened.

SEAN SPEER: It seems to me if there’s one lesson from you and your work in recent years is that this setback will hardly be permanent, that you’ll find new and different ways to express your ideas and your opinions and advance the issues that you care about.

Jamal Jivani, thank you so much for joining us at Hub Dialogues today and for sharing your personal story and your personal experiences. I have no doubt that our listeners will enjoy the episode as much as I have participating in it with you. Thank you. 

JAMIL JIVANI: Thank you, Sean.

Sign up for FREE and receive The Hub’s weekly email newsletter.

You'll get our weekly newsletter featuring The Hub’s thought-provoking insights and analysis of Canadian policy issues and in-depth interviews with the world’s sharpest minds and thinkers.