A Canadian professor who lives in England has retracted a false claim he made in a major British newspaper: that a March fire at a historic building in downtown Fredericton was set by “woke activists” engaging in an act of “ISIS-style vandalism.”
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The false claim recently appeared in an essay in The Telegraph. It was titled “Canada is disintegrating” and was written by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham who hails from Vancouver.
Kaufmann cited the March 12 Fredericton fire – which was started by 28-year-old homeless man Cole Christopher Harris – as “perhaps the most symbolic” example of “the vogue of decolonization” that he claims is sweeping across Canada.
There was never any evidence to support Kaufmann’s claim about the Fredericton blaze.
Harris admitted that he deliberately set the fire at the Militia Arms Storehouse, which served as the Fredericton Visitor Centre. But he didn’t connect his actions to any political movement, instead repeatedly apologizing and saying that he’d lost control of his temper, and that he didn’t mean to burn the building down. He was later sentenced to two years behind bars.
That wasn’t mentioned in Kaufmann’s piece.
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