Bell Media Fired A TV Host Who Went On Fox News And Said Two Spirit People Are "Confused"

The CP24 host was initially suspended for one week.

Bell Media has fired TV host Stephen LeDrew following his appearance on a Fox News program, which initially resulted in a one-week suspension.

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LeDrew, who is a former Toronto mayoral candidate and a former president of the Liberal Party of Canada, hosted an afternoon news show on Toronto cable channel CP24. He recently went on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss LGBT issues in Canada.

Carlson asked LeDrew to defend a poster seen in an Ontario elementary school advertising LGBT inclusivity training for staff. At one point, he attempted to explain the term Two Spirit by saying it referred to people who are "confused" about their identity.

Two Spirit is a term used for a number of Indigenous gender and sexual identities, referring to a person having both a masculine and a feminine spirit.

"Two Spirit sounds like there's someone they don't know whether they're fish or a fowl, they don't know whether they're frick or frack," LeDrew said. "So they're clearly confused."

LeDrew was suspended by Bell Media for violating CTV's news policy and code of conduct. (Bell Media owns both CP24 and CTV.)

On Monday, however, Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington reported that LeDrew was not coming back.

"I can confirm Stephen LeDrew is no longer with Bell Media," Scott Henderson, the company's vice president of communication, confirmed to BuzzFeed Canada.

During the discussion, LeDrew defended LGBT inclusivity training as a good thing, but he admitted that "until your producers showed it to me, I hadn't seen" the poster they were discussing.

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The poster, seen in an Ontario elementary school, has been shared on conservative websites for months as an example of out-of-control political correctness.

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David Mastin, president of the Durham Local of the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario, confirmed to BuzzFeed Canada that the poster is real.

The acronym on the poster — LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP — is not actually used by the school. It was merely "acknowledging that keeping track of diverse LGBTQ identities can be overwhelming," Mastin said.

"In our union, we use LGBTQ as an umbrella term for all marginalized sexual and gender identities," he said. "This workshop was created for our local leaders ... who sought assistance in using inclusive language in their professional practice."

UPDATE

Dec. 12, 2017, at 01:37 AM

This article was updated on Dec. 11 with news of LeDrew's firing. The initial version was published on Dec. 1.