Jordan Peterson: Canada is trampling on my God-given right to free speech
Canada’s idiotic pandering and cowardly insistence on group rights set us up for dominance by the meta-Marxists Author of the article: Jordan Peterson, The Telegraph Published Sep 02, 2023 • Last updated 4 days ago • 10 minute read 1538 Comments
As a professional, practicing clinical psychologist, I never thought I would fall foul of Canada’s increasingly censorial state. Yet, like so many others — including teachers, nurses, and other professionals — that is precisely what has happened. In my case, a court has upheld an order from the College of Psychologists of Ontario that I undergo social media training or lose my licence to practice a profession I have served for most of my adult life.
Their reason? Because of a handful of tweets on my social media, apparently. Yes: I am at risk of losing my licence to practice as a mental health professional because of the complaints of a tiny number of people about the utterly unproven “harm” done by my political opinions.
These complainers — most of whom did not even live in Canada, none of whom were my clients or even knew any of them, nor had any contact whatsoever with the persons hypothetically harmed by my views — submitted complaints to the College of Psychologists of Ontario about what I had said using a handy online form. That supposedly august body had the option not to pursue these complaints, but seemingly decided some months ago that my behaviour did not meet with their approval. I had to agree to their demands to undergo training with one of their self-declared “social media experts” — sessions of indeterminate length, cost and content — and it seems that if I did not I would be dragged in front of a formal disciplinary hearing and, if it concurred in the judgment of wrongdoing, stripped of my licence.
The right of the College to do so has now been upheld by a provincial court, despite their apparent admission that it could infringe on my fundamental rights.
My transgressions? Two tweets criticising Justin Trudeau; one criticising his former chief of staff, who resigned in the aftermath of scandal some years ago; one ironically commenting on the identity of a city councillor in Ottawa, who in my view acted in a particularly unforgivable manner during the famous trucker convoy protest; and one objecting to the actions of the physicians performing mastectomies on perfectly healthy women — often minors — alongside a criticism of a famous actress who received such “treatment” and then advertised its benefits to her unwitting fans. In conjunction, the entire transcript of a podcast I did with Joe Rogan where I expressed doubts, fully justified in my view, about the validity of the idiotic models that economists stack carelessly upon the doom-mongering climate predictions used by eco-zealots and wannabe tyrants to justify extreme policies which will harm millions. Finally, there was a tweet that apparently hurt the feelings of a plus-sized model (according to complainants she did not know) parading herself on the cover of a magazine hypothetically devoted to the celebration of athleticism and health.
Every single opinion was a political or psychological statement; every one devoid of genuinely documentable “harm” — except perhaps to the tender sensibility of certain Canadian moralists in whose mouths butter wouldn’t melt, in a country of fatal niceness and complacency.
Politicization of regulated professions
For context, there are many “regulated professions” in Western countries, including Canada; professions whose conduct is held to be crucial to the public interest, and whose practitioners must therefore uphold certain standards to protect the public. That idea worked for years. In Canada, as elsewhere, these professional colleges, with authority delegated from the government, limited their actions to situations of obvious professional misconduct.
In the last few years, however, such bodies – with their wide and untrammeled potential regulatory and punitive ability – have been weaponised by the same ideological radicals of the Left that have infiltrated and undermined higher education, media, judiciary, law, science and government. Any radical anywhere can submit the kind of complaint that can bring a professional’s life to a halt, and can increasingly rely on these captured colleges and other professional regulatory bodies to uphold and pursue their vexatious, vengeful, petty, spiteful and ideological motivated “complaints.” And this is regardless of how much good the target of their complaint has done — independent of the training, reputation or standing of the target, and accompanied by the deep pockets and infinite amount of time available for the accusers and adversaries, abetted by the resources of the government itself.
Suffice it to say: I appealed the decision of my professional college. But the court has rejected my appeal, ruling that although I had my Charter rights — my constitutional right to freedom of speech — the professional regulatory body essentially has indefinite sway over the determination of what limits they felt fit to impose in their professional context, in whatever retroactive manner they felt fit to impose them. This is a court, by the way, headed by appointees from the very administration I was criticising (and which has been criticised very recently and independently from me for the inappropriate relationships it has established with the judiciary).
Canadians now need to wake up to the fact that the right to freedom of speech in Canada is subject to limitations placed by any level of government, for any reason.
I know perfectly well that many professionals in Canada are cowed to the point where they are forced to lie; they tell me so repeatedly in private. And when professionals have to lie, they can no longer do their job properly, and the public suffers. I know, too, that this is increasingly true across the West. Hence the increasing international interest in the dangerous social experiment taking place in Canada, as we ride the forefront of the wave of woke lunacy threatening to swamp the entire Western world.
The decline and fall of Canada
Why does the situation appear particularly grim, here in Maple Leaf Country? We were, for most of my country’s history, miraculously and thankfully dull: our constitution, ensconced safely under British authority until 1982, enshrined “peace, order and good government” as the most basic principles of our dominion. This was not the clarion call ringing out to rally our good friends south of the border, who aimed at the much more dramatic and libertarian “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was good enough, however, to produce a reliable, safe, secure and free state, conservative in the classic small-c sense, with institutions both predictable and honest, and an economy both productive and generous.
That all started to change in the 1980s. Our dashing prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau — father of the current Prime Minister, our current clown prince — was searching desperately for a legacy and for a solution to the chronic problem posed by the Quebec separatists, who were genuinely threatening the integrity of the country. Quebec was the last feudal country in the West: extremely traditional and dominated by a very small, tight, essentially hereditary elite right until the end of the 1950s. Quebec dumped all that in a few short years in a fit of 1960s freedom, also dropping its birth and marriage rate with exceptional rapidity (both are now among the lowest in the world) and abandoning the Catholic church in favour of a crude nationalism and a more-or-less socialist utopia favoured by those who pushed to also tear apart the country.
Trudeau senior, constitutionally displeased with the fundamental derivation of Canada from Britain, seized upon this opportunity to make his mark in history, and began to agitate to “bring the constitution home.” He did so, rewriting our primary legal agreement, and appending to it his much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms, paraded before Canadians as the ultimate guarantee of the freedoms we had enjoyed anyway under the much more reliable aegis of British Common Law. But Quebec put up its middle finger, refusing to become a signatory to the new agreement – even after Trudeau’s government abandoned both its spine and its principles to include a poison pill in the very Charter that hypothetically protected our citizens: the clause in Section 33 of that document, indicating that those very constitutional rights can be abridged more or less at will by any government in Canada, federal or provincial, if inclined to do so.
The Canadian government, in its own documentation, notes with unconsciously ironic understatement that “Section 33 is unique among the constitutions of countries with constitutional democracies.” It is unique because it essentially guts the Charter – and it was designed to do so, to appease the very Quebec that it never did appease and which has never in the 40 years subsequent to the “repatriation” formally signed on to the agreement.
And that is not all. Canada was a very early adopter of the idea of “group rights.” The Quebecois, again, began to obsess about the potential threat posed by English Canada (really, the English West, led by the culturally-dominant Americans) to the language and culture of their province. They had some reason for this: the ascendant US was and is a cultural force to be reckoned with, and even English Canadians were uneasy about the elephant to the south, capable of rolling over at any time, careless of its much smaller northern neighbour, and simultaneously much noisier and more effectively theatrical. To keep the country together, Canada began to prioritise the rights of its so-called founding peoples (the British, the French and the original inhabitants of this land, the native Canadians) and to insist that the groups they composed had rights equivalent to or superseding those of individual citizens. This was a very bad idea then, and it has become a worse idea in the subsequent decades. Canada parades itself as a “multicultural” society, pretending that a brainless tolerance — really, a spineless niceness — constitutes the way forward to peace and tranquility, forgetting entirely that too much multiculturalism often stokes unrest.
This bad situation is made worse by the naïve virtue-signalling of, ironically enough, Pierre Trudeau’s son: an unqualified part-time drama teacher who in a recent poll was found to be the country’s least-popular prime minister of the past 55 years. It was that same Justin Trudeau who famously proclaimed that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” in 2015, insisting that the country has little uniting it except its embrace of cultural diversity and its putative values of openness and respect.
But what is a country without a central identity? Aimless, and therefore both anxious and hopeless; worse, prone to domination by the fractionated ideas that will fight necessarily for central place in the absence of the centre that must by one means or another be established. That is the shadow-side of the naïve “multiculturalism” that has doomed the world to continuous fractionalism and all its accompanying horrors.
Canada’s idiotic pandering and cowardly insistence on group rights set us up for dominance by the meta-Marxists who insist that the collective take priority over the individual. Canada’s inclusion of the notwithstanding clause to unsuccessfully satisfy separatists gutted the protection of the rights that might otherwise have protected the individual against group-think. Justin Trudeau’s insistence that Canada has no central identity has allowed the ideologically-possessed fools who know nothing of the great British Common Law tradition and who have contempt for the Western tradition to make their postmodern ideas the central axis around which this once-reliable country now by law is required to rotate.
In principle, Canadians enjoy the right to free speech, but the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is severely and fatally limited by the notwithstanding clause, and leaves our rights endangered.
I have been expressing my Charter Rights — though really I view them as God-given, and rooted more in British Common Law — by writing, lecturing, and using social media. Consequently, I have run afoul of the petty authorities in Canada, including at my former place of employment, the University of Toronto, where my opposition to an infamous bill, C-16, made it impossible for me, eventually, to continue as a professor at that cowardly institution, though it also brought my opinions and work to broad public attention. Since then, I have continued to voice my opposition to the current administration in Ottawa, and the destructive ideological idiocy that is threatening my country and the West itself.
As such, I will fight this idiocy all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. I have instructed my lawyers, in the aftermath of the rejection of my appeal, to inform the College that I will not comply with their forced re-education mandate, and to proceed with the disciplinary hearing they have promised will occur. In the past, such hearings have been videotaped and made public. I doubt the College will have the stomach to do the same in my case, although I will make every effort, reasonable and unreasonable, to ensure that every element of these proceedings is open to widespread international scrutiny. I have already posted the relevant documents online, as I am perfectly happy to have everything that I have done assessed in full.
But I know few people are in a position to conduct such a fight: I have the resources necessary to wage a multi-year court battle, ruinously expensive (tens of thousands of dollars a month) though it is. I also have the means of communication at hand to publicise exactly what is going on. I do so on the behalf of those who are unable to do so.
Regardless of the outcome, I have made arrangements with other jurisdictions — Canadian and elsewhere — to re-establish my licence, in a heartbeat, if the authorities in Ontario succeed in purloining it from me.
I’ll leave it to readers to think through what that would mean for free speech in Canada – and, for that matter, in the rest of the increasingly benighted Western world.
Oh Canada, indeed.
