This letter first appeared in our March 2025 newsletter. You can subscribe to PEN Canada’s monthly newsletter to receive the latest free expression news and hear about our PEN community.
Now, more than ever, amid mounting authoritarianism in the world, free expression matters.
Many of us no longer feel safe crossing into the US, fearing potentially hostile scrutiny of our social media posts. Authors and publishers face losing the American market for their books – or being unable to afford to publish some of them at all – due to the threats and uncertainty surrounding tariffs and to actual censorship of books in many US schools and libraries. We’ve seen growing efforts to censor books in our own schools and libraries. And we watch, dismayed, as eminent American universities, threatened with the loss of federal funding, cede academic freedom to unconstitutional and illiberal directives from the US administration. We see the American media scorned and attacked by a government that, contrary to all principles of fairness, and with overt disdain for freedom of the press, dispenses fear or favour to the press at will, according to its interests.
Sleeping next to the American elephant, we in Canada cannot but be affected. The times call for us to strenuously assert our belief that free expression matters.
Over one hundred years ago, PEN International was founded in London. It set out its principles in a document – the PEN Charter – restated in the aftermath of World War II, at a time when militaristic nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism called for brave and concerted resistance. Let us recommit to those principles and assert them loudly, repeatedly and together, now, and in the years ahead:
- LITERATURE knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.
- IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.
- MEMBERS OF PEN should at all times use what influence they have in favor of good understanding and mutual respect between nations and people; they pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel all hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace and equality in one world.
- PEN STANDS FOR the principle of unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations, and members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world wherever this is possible.
- PEN DECLARES for a free press and opposes arbitrary censorship in time of peace. It believes that the necessary advance of the world towards a more highly organized political and economic order renders a free criticism of governments, administrations and institutions imperative. And since freedom implies voluntary restraint, members pledge themselves to oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends.
With my best,
Grace Westcott, PEN Canada President
