Canada’s law against free speech

Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor, is straightforward in his reaction to Bill C-16, which would amend the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act to include “gender identity” and “gender expression” as illegal grounds for discrimination, and would require them to be considered an aggravating factor in criminal sentencing.

“The new laws scare me,” he proclaims in one of the first slides from his new YouTube lecture on political correctness. The professor’s speech, which clocks in at just under an hour, is part one of three such talks that Peterson promises to eventually share with whoever cares to watch and listen.

Since Peterson devotes a reasonable chunk of his address to his view that there is no scientific evidence for non-binary gender identities (which, along with his pledge not to honour any student requests to be re- orthodoxy, under which his vocabulary is arbitrarily restricted rather than his mind broadened to respect fellow human beings. We are not certain why programs that, in theory, should be about treating others with dignity seem so often to devolve instead into the imposition of speech codes, but we suspect it has something to do with the fact that creating a genuine appreciation of individual differences can’t start by forcibly stifling differences of opinion if it is to succeed.

In his video, Peterson shares the authentic concern it causes him to express reasonable criticisms — whether they be that the Human Rights Act modifications are over-broad and clumsily written, or that a person’s motivations (including whether or not an action was motivated by “hatred” of a protected group) can never really be objectively ascertained. And that is appalling. It should not be a frightening experience to voice legitimate qualms about legislation, no matter its subject or laudatory purpose.

Peterson’s worry that Bill C-16 will chill authentic and productive academic debate about gender is well-founded. The bill seems more likely to prevent the sort of healthy airing of views and theses that would otherwise have allowed Peterson’s critics to expose what they see as the flaws in his arguments.

This is why Peterson is upset: he sees value in the free exchange of thoughts. Yet he also sees, in the area of gender as well as others, that the room for such free exchanges is contracting dramatically, both on campus and in society in general. He is right to be disturbed.

In reminding us of the heavy cost of censorship, even censorship that is agreeable to the majority (and is there really any other kind?), he has isolated an issue that should alarm Canadians. As a quasi-private institution, the University of Toronto is free to forbid the expression of certain ideas, as ill-advised and sad as that may be for an institution of higher learning. But we should be even more frightened, and less forgiving, of legislation that makes it the law of the land that an individual could be fined or even jailed for inadvertently using the wrong pronoun when referring to a tenant or colleague.

Trendy or not, such restrictions have no place in a freedom-loving country.