This proceeding is a disgrace, an outrage and an affront to every thinking and civilized person in Canada
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'I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it,' Poilievre says, quoting Voltaire
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The College of Psychologists of Ontario should scrutinize itself
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Poilievre says in Canada because of “the cancel culture and the woke movement, we’ve seen at university campuses and in the media and now increasingly in big, powerful corporations, and most recently with a professional licensing body, we’re seeing the idea that someone can lose their job, their status, their ability to study because they express something that is contrary to the government line. Now, I don’t believe that is the Canada we want.”
Poilievere ends by pointing to section 2(b), titled Freedom of Expression, in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“2(b) or not 2(b)? That is the question,” said Poilivere. “And the answer is that, as Voltaire has been quoted as saying, ‘I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it.’”
Jordan Peterson has had an impeccable professional reputation throughout his 20 years as a research psychologist at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. He has immense clinical experience and his pioneering work in bringing psychology to a vast worldwide internet audience, including 15-million people all over the world who follow him on three different social media platforms, has made serious psychology much more accessible.
The complaints against him (Jordan Peterson) were brought by people with whom he says he had zero clinical contact and have nothing to do with his function as a clinical psychologist.
The latest of a dismal sequence of outrages and oppressive acts officiously imposed upon the very distinguished and widely admired academic, clinical psychologist and public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, is an intervention by the College of Psychologists of Ontario purporting to require Peterson to undergo a lengthy course of “media training,” in order that he might conduct his online communications “more appropriately.” This is a stupefying insolence from a professional body intent on pettifogging and harassing an extraordinarily successful colleague.
Instead, many of the complaints involve Peterson’s criticism of the Trudeau government, in each case a perfectly civilized expression of reasonable dissenting opinion, more learned certainly, but no more abrasive than the comments of opposition politicians and media critics of the government. In particular, Peterson is attacked for retweeting Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, for criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his former chief of staff, Gerald Butts, as well as the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and an Ottawa city councillor, and objecting to the threat of the Ottawa police to take custody of the children of some of the Freedom Convoy protesters last winter.
Peterson has very correctly rejected this request that he submit to
re-education and will be required to appear at a disciplinary hearing where coercive measures will doubtless be invoked against him under threat of the revocation of his clinical licence in Ontario, with the resulting damage to his reputation, as well as a suspension of his right to practise as a psychologist within Ontario.
In a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau, Peterson explicitly blames on Trudeau this movement to empower the regulatory bodies governing the medical, legal and psychological professions with the ability to terrify their members over their “own conduct and the increasingly compulsion-based and ideologically pure policies that you (Trudeau) have promoted and legislated.
I simply cannot resign myself to the fact that in my lifetime I am required to resort to a public letter to the leader of my country to point out that political criticism has now become such a crime in Canada that if professionals dare engage in such activity, government-appointed commissars will threaten their livelihood and present them with the spectacle of denouncement and political disgrace. There is simply and utterly no excuse whatsoever for such a state of affairs in a free country.”
It wasn’t until six years ago, when he had a
disagreement over grammar (the trans pronoun business) and his own University of Toronto issued menacing letters to him, that — suddenly — his professional qualifications, his very presence on the U of T campus, all came into question and were put in jeopardy.
Who knew that she and he, zhe and zher could raise such a storm?
From that shameless campus assault on thought and debate, Peterson rocketed to world status. It provided the
explosive.
This near solitary professor, wandering unknown the green swards of the U of T lawns, grew into the most celebrated champion of all of that used to be seen as the sacred concepts of western democracy and genuine liberal philosophy: Free speech. Free thought. Open debate. Defence of the humanities. Calling on universities to untangle themselves from fashionable ideological imperatives. Academic independence.
Like him or not, he has been the catalyst, the prime mover in what is the highest stakes debate of our day.
The CPO, obviously, has not taken in any of Peterson’s impact or even given the slightest acknowledgement of the arguments and debate he has fostered.
It is, by choice, ignorant of the consideration that he is the foremost, most celebrated, member of the guild it presumes to rule. It also ignores the thousands of testimonies of the good he has done, and the immense positive response to the messages he has offered. Instead it has given favour to a dozen choice objections to his, extra-clinical, perspectives.
It has treated, as mothers treat babies in swaddling clothes, these political complaints. He criticized the prime minister for example, and (horror) he retweeted Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, a vileness not to be tolerated!
Dropping all irony, what does the CPO council think they are at? What are their qualifications, their motivations, for blistering or attempting to blister the reputation and standing of the only member of their association the world even knows? Who gathers crowds in their thousands to listen to a “clinical psychologist,” and draws millions to his internet lectures? And who are they to insist on social media training for the greatest media personality their profession has even seen?