Conrad Black: The Charter is dead — Jordan Peterson's forced re-education proves it
The monster of the administrative state must be brought to heel.
The refusal of
the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson against the outrageous aggregation of
injustices that have been inflicted upon him by academic and professional
authorities and the lower courts neatly completes the self-exposure of the
bankruptcy of our system of protection of civil rights — everyone’s civil
rights. This treatment of Professor Peterson, Canada’s leading public
intellectual and probably the most famous and esteemed Canadian in the world,
is extremely important for what his case reveals and its implications for all
Canadians.
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To summarize the
facts in his case, he was accused of violating the group rights of militant
gender activists at the University of Toronto, where he was a distinguished
professor in 2016. They demanded that he address them in newly devised
terminology recognizing their non-binary gender self-identifications. He
emphasized that he intended no offence but that his constitutionally and
academically guarantied freedom of expression was being violated by their
attempted dictation of his duty to address them in newly devised language that
has no philological legitimacy. The administration of the university wavered
and waffled, declined to support the professor, and warned him he risked facing
the rigours of a Human Rights inquisition. His employers effectively put all
academic traditions of liberty of expression over the side and valued the claim
of activist students to be offended by their inability to dictate novel forms
of address over Professor Peterson’s right to enjoy freedom of expression as
guarantied by our Constitution in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Following that
precedent, the College of Psychologists of Ontario that is the governing body
of licensed psychologists in Ontario, responded to receiving a handful of
complaints about utterances expressed by Peterson on the Internet, two of them
from foreigners who do not live in Canada, none of them having ever had any
personal contact with Peterson, and not objecting to his language or
professional competence, but merely to his opinions on some gender issues, on
Justin Trudeau and his compatriots, and on the issue of climate change.
Notwithstanding the extremely tenuous nature of the objections to his comments,
the association ordered Peterson, under pain of suspension of his license to
practice as a psychologist in Ontario, to submit to an indefinite course of
counselling on public relations and communication. The governing body of the
psychological profession is putting the nonsensical complaints of a miniscule
number of people, out of the hundreds of millions who have heard Peterson,
ahead of his same constitutionally entrenched but in fact worthless and
meaningless right of self-expression. One may ransack the works of George
Orwell, Franz Kafka, and Arthur Koestler in vain to find a more preposterous
example of what Shakespeare called “the insolence of office.”
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Jordan Peterson is so renowned in his profession that
he has already been offered membership in several other psychological
associations and has received generous offers from the United States and
elsewhere to relocate. This fact alone indicates how deficient Canada has
become in the protection of the rights of its citizens. Because of his immense
international success, and unlike all but a handful of other professionals, he
was able to pay the more than $1 million in legal fees that his unsuccessful
resistance to this official persecution has cost him. The Charter is obviously
now inoperative, and no one in this country should be under the slightest
illusion that their rights of self-expression will be defended against any
collective faddish or fringe opinion.
Pierre Trudeau
told me as he championed the Charter of Rights that the addiction of the French
to abstractions and particularly comprehensive assertions of truths, would make
it much more difficult for the Quebec nationalists to undermine federalism in Canada
with what he described as a squalid dispute between official echelons of
politicians over which of them will have what rights when the real issue was to
assure full rights to all citizens. We would proclaim and be precise about
rights and proclaim the great achievement of that proclamation over the
self-interested haggling of politicians. He acknowledged that this could lead
to some unrigorous findings by individual judges, but believed that if the
quality of judicial appointments was maintained, that would all be sorted out
eventually, if necessary by legislation. It was an astute political tactic for
defeating the separatists, the reason for Trudeau entering political life, but
his optimism about our courts was misplaced.
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There has been, as every informed Canadians knows, an avalanche of ludicrous judicial decisions, and the Supreme Court of Canada, because of inappropriate appointments to it from successive prime ministers, has become an almost constant source of absurd judgments. In one case a few years ago, the high court determined that the Charter’s right of assembly guaranteed the right of employees of the government of Saskatchewan performing essential work to strike. The upper courts have allowed judges to make an incoherent smorgasbord of our laws, with a shrinking number of reliable precedents and highly idiosyncratic lower court interpretations that pay no attention to the normal meaning of the language or intention of the legislators. This means that when the courts have finished, the legislators haven’t been legislating at all-just putting forth thoughts for the delectation of the bench. But even more sinister, the courts as a whole have followed the legislators into complete abdication in allowing the administrative state to function as it wishes without any apparent reference whatever to the text of law. In the case of Jordan Peterson, his freedom of expression counts for nothing in the face of churlish and self-righteous students or even a few frequenters of the Internet.
Jordan Peterson
has already rendered great service to this country; not least in declining to
follow the well-traveled road to other generally more mature jurisdictions.
Canada is at a crossroads. If we do not act now on our rights and duties as
citizens, to install legislators who will assert the liberties that we
understood to have been our birthright and to have been guaranteed to us, and
to elevate responsible judges who put the fascist monster of the administrative
state back under the jurisdiction of the legislators and competent jurists, we
will cease to be a functioning democracy at approximately the same speed as our
decline in comparative prosperity. More than four centuries of Canadians have
believed that our destiny was more distinguished than this. The time is coming
soon when we must prove that they were right.
https://archive.is/2024.08.17-110528/https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-the-charter-is-dead-jordan-petersons-forced-re-education-proves-it#selection-2801.0-2937.836
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