The Jordan Peterson Centre for Commissars Who Can’t Read Good

Calling on all freedom-loving Canadians to back JP

By Anonymed (an anonymous Canadian Doctor)

Apologies for the clickbait, but no such centre exists…yet. He may never read this (though he did retweet one of my articles a while back so who knows) but I’m going to make the case that he should use his immense reach to do more than just make an example out of one particular professional college. I want him to provide the means by which Canadian professionals of all stripes can fight the tyrannical bureaucracies that have come to rule them. Peterson has the ability to do so and I think, if he does, he will see just how much backbone his fellow professionals actually have.

Peterson has been a more or less constant fixture of the Canadian political landscape for years. His impact on the English-speaking intellectual world (and those of many other languages too) is hard to overstate. But just as he was finally settling in with The Daily Wire and back to being angry and hilarious on X/Twitter, the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO) decided to make an example of him. Peterson once remarked that he had been canceled hundreds of times - by which he presumably meant complained against and sued by every leftist under the sun - and so it’s almost hard to believe the CPO waited this long. Regardless, that time is now. Peterson, as most readers will know, is being asked to undergo “social media training” on pain of losing his professional license. The charge, as far as I can tell, is that non-patient, non-colleague members of the public took exception to some of his more vociferous tweets and lodged complaints. Despite pushing for this obviously political hit job to be dismissed, an Ontario Court recently ruled that the college may proceed. Peterson claims that his right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, has been violated.

I wrote an article about this a couple of months ago for Minding the Campus and, for those who haven’t read it (how dare you!?), I disagreed with Peterson on this issue, at least in one sense. Clearly the CPO is out of its onion on this one, but while I agree that freedom of speech is a fundamental right, I still think codes of conduct for professionals are reasonable. The problem, as I said in the article, is that we don’t live in anything like a reasonable time. Our professional organizations are so ideologically blinkered that trusting them with anything beyond stamping our  hall passes once a year is to give credit where it is most certainly not due. But the problem for me is not necessarily the standard, it’s the double standard. Bodies like the CPO are only concerned with decorum and “professionalism” when the speaker is out of step with their newfound pieties. It’s not that codes of conduct can’t be a thing, it’s that our current codes of conduct are about as objective as the id. A similar point was made in the Financial Post last week by Howard Levitt. The question before the court ought to have been whether the CPO code of conduct is a) completely crackers, and b) applied in a non-partisan and neutral manner? Any impartial look at the DEI dung that is current regulatory policy would reveal that neutrality is something like the opposite of the goal. All that to say, the CPO and similar organizations need to be cleaned out, top to sticky bottom, and their grotesque inner workings made known to the public they have betrayed. But I think there is more to this than just freedom of speech (which I like…I like it a lot).

Peterson is obviously free to do what he wishes with his own time and money, and while I’m a little worried the Charter argument won’t hold up in this case, I’m rooting for him. He recently tweeted a link to a GoFundMe page that has raised $75,000 in a week. And this is in addition to his own personal wealth, the power of The Daily Wire, and, who knows, a cheque from Elon? Money is no object in other words. With such a “war chest”, as he calls it, maybe he’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court so that the next generation of professionals will have full Charter jurisdiction over their professional organizations. If he does that, all power to him, and he will have done his country a great service. 

My own proposal is that, in addition to building an army to fight the CPO, he consider finding and funding the countless guerrillas who are fighting right now, on principle, with their own money, as well as those who would take up arms if only they had the ammunition. Canada has organizations like the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and others that will defend a minority of dissenters. But their capacity is limited and applies, so far as I am aware, to Charter jurisdiction only. We know many of their cases - Amy Hamm, Mike Ramsay, Caroline Burjoski and so on. Most are social media savvy individuals who have been “canceled” in one form or another, and while their fights are worthwhile to support, there are those within their profession who are being silently persecuted, or, like myself, nearly lost everything and are in the process of suing the shit out of everyone. 

Obviously I have a dog in the fight, but I don’t really care if the money comes my way. My point is that arming professionals with a means to fight could change the landscape dramatically. Those codes of conduct, which in medicine’s case can mean career destruction over anything said or done deemed to be “culturally unsafe”, could be beaten back. It wouldn’t just be a battle for freedom of expression, it would be an all out assault on the Orwellian compassion-speak that permeates the professions at every level.

Conrad Black recently wrote an article calling on all freedom-loving Canadians to back Peterson, lest we all fall prey to the same fate. I agree, but with all due respect, countless numbers of us have already suffered this fate, and many of us are already at war. While great men are often the difference-makers in history, so too are those ordinary citizens who will not have their dignity besmirched by the apparatchiks of the day. So, if I may be so bold, Professor Peterson, take your case as far as you need to, but use your reach to help the rest of us fight alongside you. You don’t have to name your foundation after Zoolander, but if you build it, people will come and they will fight. Until then, frater in armis (dra-matic!).

___

Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Last line of pretence: How sanctimony undermines the anti-woke resistance

There are now two ways to support Woke Watch Canada through donations:

1) By subscribing to the paid version of the Woke Watch Canada Newsletter for - $7 Cdn/month or $50 Cdn/year

2) By making a contribution to the Investigating Wokeism In Canada Initiative, which raises the funds necessary to maintain and expand Woke Watch Canada’s research and investigation into Dysfunctional Canadian School Boards, Education, Indigenous Issues, Free Speech, and other areas of Illiberal Subversion and the Canadian Culture Wars.