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A Grim Warning from Jordan Peterson About the Death of Free Speech in Canada

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Woke minions will rue the day

  • National Post
  • 18 Jan 2024
  • JORDAN PETERSON
“I believe that time has been kind to my decisions: the reality of the idiocy that I pointed to then, whose reality was then denied by most, has become something increasingly apparent to an increasing majority of people in the interim,” Jordan Peterson writes.

In November 2022, the administrative board that regulates the conduct of psychologists (and much more than that, it turns out) decided that my political views were a disgrace to my profession, that of clinical psychologist. I was therefore sentenced by that board, the Ontario College of Psychologists, to a bout of mandatory re-education, of indeterminate duration, at my expense, with my learning not evaluated by any standard method but subject to the opinion of those charged with, profiting by and exploiting my forced studentship. I took those decision-makers forthwith to court, and lost. The decision of the Ontario College of Psychologists was upheld. I then appealed, to a higher court. On January 16, 2024, that appeal was rejected. There were no reasons provided.

This means that my legal options have been exhausted. Thus, I face two choices. I can comply, when the College goes ahead with its determination to require my re-education, dutifully attend whatever bloody classes their Dei-enthusiast “social media experts” (whatever those are) determine to inflict upon, confess the sins of my classic liberal/conservative or even Judeo-christian political, philosophical and theological commitments, repent and silence myself — or even become a standard-bearer for the faux-compassionate woke cause, at least publicly.

I WOULD SAY EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS AGAIN. — JORDAN PETERSON

Alternatively, I can tell my would-be masters to go directly to the hell they are so rapidly gathering around themselves and everyone else, lose my right to practise or even to describe myself as a psychologist, and suffer the consequences on the reputation front:

“Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, disgrace to his profession, forfeits his formal licence, in consequence of his crimes.”

And what exactly were those crimes? — because there’s the rub or, at least, one of them. This is where the reader should pay careful attention, Canadian or otherwise, because this is what lies ahead in the West, given the course our leaders and their still-blind and deaf followers are charting. It should be hard for anyone considering this situation to believe that I am playing straight with the facts, if they have any of their own opinions or values whatsoever — because if what I have done and said constitutes the equivalent of a professional crime, you can be sure that your own head is full of like transgressions, regardless of your political stance, and your own tongue therefore likely to spill the beans.

I criticized three Canadian political leaders: a councilwoman in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, for what I regarded and still regard as her disgraceful behaviour during the Canadian Trucker Convoy; Justin Trudeau’s former principal secretary, Gerald Butts, a man who resigned from one of the highest positions within the office of the former amidst a scandal that had enveloped the Teflon-coated Liberal administration; and the woke poster boy and shining narcissist himself, Canada’s Prime Minister, a man who has done more to destroy my country than anyone else, in reality and reputation, nationally and internationally (and that includes his father, who was no shirker in that regard).

I pointed out the shortcomings of the idiot costly self-aggrandizing virtue-signalling demoralizing lie of the power-mad climate apocalypse-mongers — that on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the entire three-plus-hour transcript of which (!) was submitted to my College as evidence of my disgraceful conduct.

I voiced my objections to the politically-correct insistence that morbid obesity be regarded as the equivalent to the highest standards of athletic beauty, and I took a certain Hollywood actress or actor to task because that same person (oh tortuous grammatical niceties) used its platform to parade the advantages of double mastectomies when performed on the bodies of perfectly healthy young women.

I regret none of these actions. I would say exactly the same things again. Furthermore, I believe that time has been kind to my decisions: the reality of the idiocy that I pointed to then, whose reality was then denied by most, has become something increasingly apparent to an increasing majority of people in the interim.

I should point out, too, that these crimes were reported on the publicly accessible Ontario College of Psychologists website informer page not by anyone who had ever been a beneficiary of my professional services, or any people that knew them, or any of the people directly criticized, or by anyone who knew them, or even (in the main) by citizens of Ontario, my home province, or Canada. They were instead brought to the attention of the “authorities” by activists in other countries, many of whom also lied in writing, claiming that they were in fact clients of mine. About a dozen of such people reported me — this in contrast, by the way, to the millions or now even tens of millions of people who have found the work I have done and the stances I have taken of clear psychological benefit, and who have said so, buying my books, watching my lectures and even directly informing the College of their favourable judgment.

What does this all mean for me? Frankly, very little, practically speaking. I have options, in my fortunate and privileged position. I am no longer financially dependent on my practice, which I had to fold up in 2017, in the wake of the first scandals that emerged around me. I am independently wealthy. I am also not dependent even on my formal status as a psychologist. This makes me very unlike my colleagues and fellow professionals, for whom a threat to their licence is an intolerable threat to livelihood, reputation and family stability, financial and otherwise. I could even move to the U.S., say — to one of the still-free states — and join my daughter, who has done so for equally political reasons, and as an increasing number of Canadians have determined to do.

By far the easiest thing for me to do personally, therefore, is to say to the College “do your worst, you petty tyrants,” and let the cards fall where they will. I could even report, in detail, publicly (very publicly) on the re-education process, as I most certainly will do, if I decide to go that route. I could take the inevitable reputational hit mentioned previously, and continue going about my happy and profitable business. I have positioned myself very carefully, knowing all this was coming, accepting its inevitability, so that I wasn’t even particularly upset when the news came down. My personal security and desires, however, are not the point, and they haven’t been, right from the beginning. Here’s the point:

Canadians, mark my words: Your much-vaunted Charter of Rights isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, as one of its last remaining signatories has been continually striving to indicate. Your right to free speech is essentially non-existent, as evidenced by the court decisions we are now considering. You have almost no real rights to property. Your rights to mobility can be taken away without consequence at any moment, as they were very recently. You can all-too-easily become the indentured servant of anyone you dare to hire. Your tax load is going to continue to increase, and rapidly. Your economy is predicted to be the worst performing of any developing country for the next three decades — and that failure will be trumpeted, positively, as the “degrowth” necessary to save the planet (thus so conveniently providing those who, like Trudeau, have no interest in monetary policy to parade their ignorance and Machiavellian idiocy as a positive virtue: “I’m saving the planet” is a get-out-of-jail-free card for any and all crimes and justification for a grab for power the likes of which we have never seen. The failure of my appeal means that your professionals — engineers, physicians, lawyers and teachers, among others — are now required by administrative fiat to conceal what they really think and believe (which is precisely the truth you most truly need from them) lest they run afoul of the administrative minions who have now been granted full sway over their tongues and pens.

The Supreme Court has already determined this: hence the failure of my appeal. Regulatory boards in Canada are not required to apply the law correctly, as law professor Dr. Bruce Pardy recently pointed out. Furthermore, they can infringe charter rights — and those are your most fundamental rights — if they do so “proportionately.” And what does “proportionately” mean, practically speaking? It means any way they choose, unless you have the courage, time and resources to object. Fighting these pathetic demons has already cost me weeks of work and close to a million dollars. Are you, fellow Canadian professionals, feeling up to that task? I thought not — and have seen very little evidence of courage or ability from you on that front. So we can just imagine where that will leave the typical Canadian, who dares to speak his or her mind. Finally, and furthermore: the infringement on your rights — all your rights — can and will be justified by the courts if the action that does so promotes “charter values” guaranteed and promoted nowhere in the fundamental legal structure that makes up Canada — and those have become precisely the diversity, equity, inclusivity, group-rights conceptualization of humanity and vengeful quasi-marxist but worse victim-victimizer narrative that all goes to make up the progressive ideals of the carnivorous sheep who now rule this sad and blind land.

Are you listening, Canadians? If you refuse to abide by rules so radically leftist that they would have been and were in fact eschewed until recently by the outright socialist Canadian New Democratic Party, your opinions have now become outright illegal. Present them, even think about them, at your peril. And if you think I’m exaggerating, or beating my own drum, for reasons of my own, ask yourself this: what in the world is in it for me, in so doing? I could at any moment and so easily end my association with my increasingly mad profession, as I have the universities who so recently showed their disgrace in Washington, D.C. (I’m talking about you, presidents of MIT, Harvard and Upenn), and go about my perfectly functional life, without the burden of scrapping with idiots — without even the necessity of facing the full reality of the political idiocy and wilful blindness that now makes up the Canadian scene.

But I think I’ll fight a little longer. Bring it on, you bloody pikers: take your next steps, bureaucrats: write me, and tell me how exactly we are to conduct my re-education. I’ll play along, find out exactly what you will do, now that you’ve been emboldened to do whatever it is that the darkest resentful demons lurking in your evil little low-level administrative hearts most truly desire, even to your own detriment. I’ll see how burdensome playing your pathetic game becomes, and I will publicize every single bit of it. And, if I get tired of it, which seems highly likely, I’ll hand over the bloody licence I am increasingly embarrassed in any case to possess and let you continue journeying oh-so-morally to the dismal, fearful, pessimistic, moralizing, petty, butter-won’t-melt in our mouths hellish straits that you envision as the paradise best fit for your fellow citizens, yourselves and your children.

You have won the battle, minions of the deep state, faceless-for-now but not for long bureaucrat-authoritarians, but you haven’t won the war. And here is a warning, too, as is only fair: So far I have been constrained in my response to your pushing and prodding and overlord-nagging by the requirement not to compromise my efforts on the legal side. But that’s all over with, now, isn’t it? So there are no holds barred, as far as I am concerned. And it may be that you have nothing better to do with your nasty narrowly-circumscribed micromanaging bodies and souls than to cause me trouble. But we’re going to perform that dance on the international stage, with all that light shining on your machinations, and you may well come to rue the day you attempted to take possession of my tongue.

Jordan Peterson: Canada is trampling on my God-given right to free speech

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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

charter
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Photo by The Canadian Press

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.