Acadia and University of King’s College join “Can’t Buy My Silence” campaign

Two Nova Scotia-based universities have become the first Canadian postsecondary institutions to sign on to the “Can’t Buy My Silence” campaign, which aims to eradicate the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in cases involving sexual harassment, abuse, or other forms of misconduct or bullying.

Acadia University and the University of King’s College made the joint announcement on Dec. 7, 2023.

“We’ve been through an experience recently of having established an independent review for allegations of sexual assault against a retired professor,” said William Lahey, president and vice-chancellor at the University of King’s College, referring to the case of professor Wayne Hankey, who faced charges of sexual assault, gross indecency and indecent assault involving three male complainants dating back to the 1970’s and 1980’s. Hankey died on Feb. 5, 2022, a month before the first trial was scheduled to begin.

“Part of that story is the way in which a previous complaint against that professor in the early 1990s was dealt with in a way that was surrounded by secrecy, which allowed a false narrative about the true nature of that individual’s wrongdoing to be perpetuated over more than three decades,” said Lahey. “We have no desire to ever do that in the future, and therefore we thought the right thing to do was to, in a sense, codify our now-existing practice by signing onto this pledge.”

The “Can’t Buy My Silence” campaign was co-founded in 2021 by Zelda Perkins, the first person to break her non-disclosure agreement with convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein in 2017 and Julie Macfarlane, a law professor emerita at the University of Windsor who resigned in protest when she discovered the university had allowed a colleague with a history of sexual predation to move to another employer with help of an NDA.

The campaign argues that NDAs are now commonly used to allow perpetrators to move on unscathed, and that victims of bullying or harassment are often silenced using NDAs, even though the agreements were initially created as tools to protect corporate trade secrets.

“Universities have been frequent users of NDAs,” said Ms. Macfarlane. “We know how often students – especially graduate students working closely with faculty – are bullied or harassed … We consider all students everywhere to be deserving of this protection.”

Acadia signed on after a small team that included Allison Smith, the university’s sexualized violence response and education coordinator, and student Elisabeth Dobson brought a proposal to president and vice-chancellor, Jeff Hennessy, who then took it to the board of governors.

“The fact that this young student, Elisabeth Dobson, wrote an article in their student paper and had the hope that our administration would adopt this pledge, I think that that was very compelling to the administration,” said Ms. Smith.

Ms. Dobson, an undergraduate student in her final semester of business administration at Acadia said, “I think it’s an awesome precedent for other schools in Nova Scotia and across Canada, because it’s such an important thing for sexual violence and equity policies to be policies and not just statements. Actionable policy creates change, in my opinion, and I’m glad to see that Acadia took those steps.”

Jordan Roberts, sexual health and safety officer at King’s, said the initiative will help reduce the barriers to disclosure. “The more that we can say to people, ‘We’re not going to limit how you share your experience; we’re not going to limit how you talk about what’s happened to you,’ …it is providing a transparency that can help people reduce those barriers in their considerations of coming forward.”