Bruce Pardy, Queen’s University law professor and Rights Probe director, warns Canada’s regulatory bodies—like the Ontario College of Psychologists—are weaponizing vague terms to silence dissenters, from Jordan Peterson’s legal defense to nurse Amy Hamm’s disciplining for supporting Rowling. Courts ignored COVID mandates for years while the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice imposed undebated vaccine rules and condemned the Trucker Convoy, exposing judicial bias. Pardy links this to historical conformity experiments, framing "woke" ideology as a dominant technocratic force that labels skepticism as misconduct, threatening platforms like Rebel News through laws like C-11 and C-36. The result? A managerial state eroding free speech, demanding compliance before accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the smartest guys in Canada, one of the few freedom fighters left in academia.
His name is Bruce Party.
He's a professor of law at Queen's University, and he's the boss of rights probe.
We're going to spend almost an hour with Bruce Party.
Boy, it's a good one.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, a feature conversation with Professor Bruce Party, professor, journalist, activist.
It's January 10th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Well, you can count the number of freedom oriented professors on the fingers of one hand in Canada these days and I say that with a great sense of sorrow.
There probably are more, but few are willing to stick their heads above the parapet, because I think that these days cancel culture will destroy even the toughest and biggest.
In fact, I suppose the greatest public intellectual in Canada these days, at least measured by book sales and crowds to hear his speeches, is our friend Dr. Jordan Peterson.
And would you look at that?
They're trying not just to cancel him, but to remove his license to practice psychology because of some public tweets he's made.
Well, Dr. Bruce Party is a professor for freedom.
He joins us today.
We'll have a wide-ranging catch-up on the year that was.
Professor Party, great to see you.
Thanks for being with us.
Thanks for having me, Ezra.
Always a pleasure to be with you.
Well, thanks for saying that.
We are in dangerous times.
And I think, let's talk for a second about our friend Jordan Peterson.
You know, you don't have to agree with everything the guy says, but he's certainly a great discussor.
He's a great conversationalist.
He chews things over.
I think he's a man who tries to think things through in good faith.
I think he's a great teacher.
He has strong opinions.
That's fine.
I think that when the Ontario College of Psychologists summons him to a hearing, an ethics hearing, and threatens to take away his license because of some tweets he's made, I think they're trying to say, if we can take on Jordan Peterson, millionaire, celebrity, intercontinental star, we can take on you.
So don't you get any big ideas, fall in line.
That's, I think, what they're trying to say.
If he's scared, you should be scared.
What do you think of that?
I think Jordan's case is a case for the Times.
I mean, he is all those things that you mentioned.
He is an exceptional public intellectual and has helped, by reports, millions of people through his writings and his teachings and so on.
And this action by his college is, unfortunately, it's not an aberration.
It is consistent with the pattern.
He's just a very big fish, and it's become a public thing, which is great.
I mean, that's the only good thing about this.
Because of Jordan's status, this has now become a very public kind of witch hunt.
And that's what it is.
It's a kind of witch hunt.
It's not just the College of Psychologists, psychiatrists.
It's professional regulators of all different kinds.
I mean, nurses are being disciplined for believing in binary sex.
We had our own issue at the Law Society of Ontario, where they tried to require all licensees to adopt their own statement of principles, which required them to embrace the ideology of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
One more example: the College of Physicians of Ontario basically told their licensees that they were not allowed to express opinions that were anti-lockdown, anti-mandate, anti-masking.
They just weren't allowed to express their medical opinions about those issues.
So, across the board, we are seeing regulators be much more aggressive in an ideological sense.
You are not now allowed to step outside the lines of their preferred ideological agenda.
And it is a very disturbing pattern to see.
And Jordan's case is one of these cases.
And I hope that it will bring this issue into the public mind and let people see what is happening.
Yeah.
It'll be interesting to see if he's just too big for them to swallow because this is a real showdown.
I mean, he is as big as they get.
If they can get him, they can get anyone, is what I'm saying.
And I think that's sort of their bet.
But he can be stubborn.
And, you know, I remember when he said something that got him suspended on Twitter.
And I don't know if you've ever been suspended on Twitter, but they have this, they used to have this sort of Stalinist move, which is that they would not reinstate you.
You had to reinstate yourself by deleting your tweet.
They wouldn't delete it for you.
They would never do that.
We would never delete our censor our people.
They have to censor themselves.
They have to discipline themselves.
And Jordan Peterson refused to do that.
He had millions of followers.
It was an enormous and commercially valuable outlet for him.
But on principle or stubbornness or a mix of the two, he would not self-censor.
And he managed to wait it out.
And Elon Musk saved the day.
That same personality and belief system is at play here.
He will not bend the knee.
He's not going quietly.
He's publicly fighting with the Ontario College of Psychologists.
I don't think anyone even heard.
I didn't know there was a college of psychologists before, but now they're getting a little bit famous.
By the way, we have a petition, savepeterson.com.
I don't know if he needs us to save him, but last I checked, we sent more than 6,200 people to the college to complain by phone or email.
So I think their secretary is being a little bit busy.
But he is calling their bluff on.
How do you think it's going to end?
Oh, I wouldn't want to try and call that.
But listen, the pattern here is not unlike the Twitter situation that you mentioned, in that what they have asked him to do is to undergo a kind of sort of a re-education program.
Sounds like something out of Stalinist Russia.
Yeah.
At his own expense, to add insult to injury, to be instructed on the proper way to express himself on social media.
I mean, it is to laugh.
Who could possibly instruct Jordan Peterson on how to express himself on social media?
Yeah, they're going to even coach.
That was the word they used.
We're going to coach you.
That was the word they used.
But his stubbornness, the way you put it, or his principledness or the combination thereof is one of his great strengths.
He's not going to do that.
He's just not going to do it.
And so it's going to become a game of chicken between the college and him about who's going to back away first and how it's going to end.
I have no idea.
But part of the problem here is illegal.
And we can go into that in more detail if you like, but this thing they've asked him to do to be coached or re-educated comes even before they've had a hearing.
This is not the resolution.
This is a small committee saying, oh, well, we have these complaints against you.
The complaints, by the way, are not from any of his patients.
They're just from other psychologists, I presume, who don't like what it is that he's saying on social media and the like.
But in any event, there's a small committee who've received these complaints who have decided, well, let's have him coached.
And so there's really a process problem here as well.
And this is not uncommon, not uncommon amongst regulators.
They're sort of laws unto themselves.
They are given great powers in statutes that create them, and yet they are parts of the state, right?
They're part of government because they have a regulatory role, and you can't practice as a lawyer or a doctor or a psychologist without a license from them.
So it's very problematic.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that Jordan Peterson relies on his psychology practice to pay the bills anymore.
But that's not the point.
It's that status, his professional credential is part of his identity.
It's part of the basis of a lot of his ideas.
They want to take that away to embarrass him, to discredit him.
And because, as you point out, it is a regulatory vehicle that is not optional.
Like it has the power to end a man's career.
And you mentioned nurses.
I think you and I both know a nurse in British Columbia named Amy Hamm.
That's the one, yeah.
Who sponsored a billboard that just said, I love J.K. Rowling.
That's the author behind the Harry Potter series.
Because she was skeptical of transgenderism.
She's now being accused of being unfit to be a nurse because she could do violence to a transgender patient.
I don't even know what the thinking there is, but there's an example of a, quote, little person who doesn't have the star power or the financial resources or the legal resources.
Now, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms is helping Amy Hamm.
But that's an example of someone who could be crushed by this, who doesn't have the international cachet to fight back.
That's why I'm hoping.
And I think they bid off more than they can chew, because I think Peterson is stubborn.
And I think at the end of the day, they've gone too far today.
Now, five years from now, who knows?
This may be the new precedent, the new norm.
But I don't wish any harm on him, but I'm delighted they went for him because I think they bid off more than they can chew.
And I think he's going to cause a good precedent here.
I think he's going to win.
Right.
Well, I certainly hope you're right.
And I think he's got a good shot.
And I'm, you know, we're all behind him.
And as you say, if they were going to pick on anyone, I mean, he's the one probably most able to take it.
And Amy, Amy is only one of a whole number of examples who have been subject to this kind of discipline.
The central problem, I think, is in the idea that the regulators are entitled to discipline their licensees for something as vague as unprofessional conduct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Vague Regulations and Unbecoming Conduct00:15:28
Conduct unbecoming.
What even does that mean?
You've been quite unbecoming tonight, dear.
Your jokes were off color.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was unbecoming.
In a different era, that maybe sort of works because everybody sort of knew what the boundaries were.
Maybe arguably not, but it becomes much more difficult in this era when unbecoming has a political edge to it.
They're defining it in political terms.
If you are not on board with essentially a progressive or woke agenda, I mean, if you don't believe in transgenderism, if you don't embrace equity, diversity, and inclusion on their terms, if you object to the COVID mandates or any of a number of other ideologically tinted things, then they have the power to say you are being unprofessional.
You know, I think the worst example of this was the doctors who had a second opinion during the COVID scare.
And when I mean scare, it was a disease.
It really did kill people.
But there was a mania and a panic, and you must obey these public health officials who no one had ever heard of before.
And they only had one view.
And then everyone came into lockstep.
Like I happen to know YouTube's community editorial guidelines almost off by heart.
And one of their rules, and they would cancel, they would suspend a YouTube video.
They might even suspend your channel, cancel a channel.
And we're always at risk for that because we've got 1.6 million followers on YouTube.
We've never done anything obscene or violent or illegal.
But one of the rules on YouTube's community guidelines was if you disagree, it's on COVID misinformation.
Now, certain things like if you say there's microchips in the vaccine, we weren't going there.
But one of their rules was if you opposed or contradicted local health orders.
So not the science now, as if science forbids you to question it.
The whole idea of science, in fact, the root of the word is to observe, to be skeptical.
But if you challenged local health authorities, like if you challenge the politics, that's a community strike.
But they went after the doctors who had a second opinion.
Any doctor in Canada who dared to say, well, these vaccines are untested.
They shouldn't be mandatory.
There may be other therapies that are less exotic that may work.
Hydroxychloroquine is a thromycin, ivermectin.
If you even talked about those, what used to be a legitimate part of being a doctor, may I have a second opinion?
I'd like to seek a second opinion.
It was the colleges of physicians and surgeons.
I think they were the key to the whole thing, Professor.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, but you're absolutely right.
The wording in the even the wording in the general proposition that the College of Physicians and Surgeons has about keeping on the right side of the line.
Not even the COVID announcement, but the one that says, you shall watch your words, essentially, says that you should not contradict, and I forget the exact wording, but essentially it says you should not contradict the consensus of the profession.
It doesn't say you shouldn't be unscientific.
It is based upon consensus rather than on science.
And it suggests, by implication, that having a contrary scientific or medical opinion is not something that you should be expressing.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Which is a reflection of the bad place that we're now in.
Well, let's talk about that because last week we talked, I mean, we had a good wide-ranging conversation about the courts and was there any hope there.
And I have to note, I mean, you're a law professor, please correct me if I'm wrong.
But it's now almost three years since the state of emergency was invoked.
If I recall, it was March of 2020.
Well, it's January 2023.
We're coming up on three years now.
And if I'm not mistaken, our Supreme Court has yet to bother itself with any case touching on the pandemic, the lockdowns, the mandates, the curfews, the vax passports.
Am I wrong to say that our Supreme Court has literally taken a three-year vacation from the pandemic?
Have they heard a single case touching on the matter?
Not to my knowledge, no, but I'm not sure that I would attribute that to their fault necessarily because they have to wait until an appeal comes to them.
They have to decide whether or not to take the appeal unless it's by right.
And these things take time.
So I'm not sure.
I mean, there's a lot to criticize in this period from the courts for sure.
I'm not sure that I would start with that one.
Well, let me correct myself because I think the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court did make a kind of ruling.
He himself declared a vaccine requirement for the Supreme Court office.
He publicly said that.
He said, to work for me in my building, you must be jabbed.
And he didn't have a hearing on that.
He didn't have a debate.
He didn't seek expert opinion.
He just said, this is how it's going to be.
And every other judge in the country said, oh, okay, now I know what the Capo de Tutikapi has to say.
The boss of all bosses, the final battle in any judicial quarrel.
He's just said where he stands.
He's for vaccine mandates.
So now I know what to do, because if I'm against vaccine mandates, I know I'm going to be overturned.
Well, I know that because he just expressed himself and he literally implemented it.
So in a way, the Supreme Court of Canada's Chief Justice, without a hearing, without that Latin phrase, audi alterum partum, here the other side, he just said, oh, yeah, not only do I support vaccine mandates, I'm going to implement one.
You can figure out where I stand and act accordingly.
I think that was a sneaky and atrocious act of bias.
Am I overreacting?
Well, as you know, I'm no fan of vaccine mandates, and I'm troubled by that.
But there's something that the Chief Justice said during this period that I think is more egregious.
And that is comments that he made in an interview to Le De Voir condemning the Trucker Convoy.
Right, right.
And that's sort of an out-of-court statement.
His opinion, his take on an act of controversy that had not been adjudicated yet, could very well end up in his courtroom.
And it's a very well-established principle that judges should not publicly express their opinions on matters that might come before them.
And this is no ordinary judge.
This is the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
So even if he were to recruit himself, should that case come before him?
And the case I'm referring to is the challenge to the Emergencies Act, which has been brought.
Even if he were to recuse himself from hearing that case, I mean, the fact that he's the chief justice and has expressed this opinion, you know, surely should be considered to have influence, you know, through the hierarchy of the courts in the country.
So it's very hard to calculate what kind of influence it might have had.
So for my money, that was a bad moment and didn't do the reputation of the court and the justice system in the country any good at all.
Yeah.
You know, for years, I've seen out of the corner of my eye people come up with homemade law.
And it's often very good people who almost none of them have gone to law school.
And I'm not making a snobby or elitist comment.
I'm just saying I hear people talk about common law, which is a real thing, but they're using that to describe something else.
Free man of the land, maritime law.
These are all actually, all of these words have meaning, but they've been reassembled like a Lego set into sort of using the language of lawyering into these alternative legal theories where I'm not a person.
I mean, you know, I'm like, it's, I'm not a legal person and I don't accept this.
Like they have all this verbiage that sounds legalistic, but it's sort of gobbledygook.
And the belief in this alternative legal system has exploded over the last three years.
And my theory for that is sort of obvious.
People look at the legal system that they have been told their entire lives is the best in the world, the fairest in the world, the freest in the world.
We got to trust it.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it defines who we are as Canadians.
It'll protect your rights.
You know, the wheels of justice turn slow, but they do turn.
And the arc of justice, arc of, you know, bends towards justice.
We've all been told believe in the law, believe in the courts, believe in our system.
And yet our system failed.
And so these good people who cannot fathom, cannot understand how everything broke at once, how the opposition parties did not oppose, how conservatives were not conservative, how the media became, they went from skeptics to propagandists,
how the doctors were either silent or silenced, how the police became enforcers of goofy mask rules and had measuring tapes and they shut down school playgrounds.
And so people looked at this madness and they thought, I must process this in a way that I mentally don't break.
I'm going to come up with a new legal system.
Like, I just think it has so utterly damaged people's belief in every institution, political, media, legal.
I mean, I know, I used to be a real vaccine guy, not because I was obedient or loved big pharma.
I just sort of thought, well, of course they work.
Why would I, you know, you got to be a bit of a kook to, I mean, I took every vaccine that I was supposed to and then, you know, one or two more.
But now I sort of think, what was I, was I just sort of sold something to make a investment, you know, to pay off Pfizer's investment?
Like, even I and I, I don't think I'm a you know, you know, people disparage rebel news, but I don't think we're wild-eyed.
But now I look at, should I have trusted the public health experts as much as I did?
Should I trust all these institutions with broke, they broke at the same time, Bruce.
Every check and balance failed at the same time.
Sure, sure.
And I've sometimes said that this is, you know, if there is any silver lining to this COVID debacle, it is that it has pulled back the curtain and we can see how things actually work or don't work.
I mean, it's sort of like the witch hunt against Jordan.
The only silver lining to that is that they are revealing themselves and how they really work.
And the same kind of discovery has happened during COVID.
And people have been shocked and appalled at how things don't work the way they thought they did.
And it's a hard lesson to take in because you go through your life assuming that institutions work in a certain way.
You know, government departments, public health, courts, the legal profession, the medical profession, and so on.
And then you discover that actually it's not that way at all.
It's a bit like, I mean, it's a bit like waking up in the Matrix and finding out that the world that you thought you lived in doesn't really exist.
And you're right.
Some people have gone searching for another legal theory upon which to base their life.
And these theories, I'm afraid, I totally understand the motivation.
I understand what they're trying to get to.
I respect the individual liberty that they seek entirely.
But the theories that I have heard during this period, the common law theory that you're talking about and so on.
I mean, if you wandered into a courtroom and tried to argue these things, you'd get nowhere.
Yeah, I mean, of course.
And there have been some cases that have gone to court and some judges have gone very deep in rebutting and refuting and condemning it.
Of course, it's a goofy counter theory, but the fact that it's being embraced so widely shows a desperation, shows a desperation from people that they can't believe things happen.
And I mean, there's even someone who calls herself Queen Romana or something.
And people follow her.
And how can that be?
Well, because they're so disillusioned with the way things are.
And who do they look to?
Remember, the Truckers had no official backer.
No, you know, I suppose Maxime Bernier was supportive of them and good for him, but he doesn't have a seat.
No political party, no media support.
They were really unfunded.
Grassroots people tried to fund them, but both crowdfunds were shut down.
Like it was the most organic, natural, authentic political movement, I think, in Canadian history.
And it was, you know, George Orwell wrote in 1984, if there's any hope, it lies with the proles.
Lies with the proles.
Ordinary working class people, not the fancy pants.
They are who saved us.
They really are.
It was straight out of Orwell.
It's a miracle that they were as peaceful as they were, that they were as diverse as they were, that they were as positive.
I was down there.
I couldn't believe people were singing O Canada spontaneously.
There were a lot of F Trudeau flags, but there were far more Canadian flags.
It was the most positive Canadian moment I have ever been to in my life and the most real one.
That really was providential.
That was a political.
It really was.
It was not a moment to miss.
It was a remarkable atmosphere of peaceful people who were angry, but also joyful.
It was an interesting combination of things.
But, you know, trying to look for, again, the positive in the sea of negative.
I mean, one of the first things that has to happen in order for us to actually achieve significant change in this country is for a critical mass of people to be discontented with the way things are.
Curtain Pulled Back00:03:19
And I think we need to understand that this is not just a consequence of COVID.
COVID was the thing that pulled back the curtain.
But a lot of these things have been around for a long time.
The trends have been there for decades.
We have worked ourselves to this moment, to this situation where our institutions work as they do now or don't.
And so we shouldn't be under any illusion that this was a blip and that things are just going to die down and go back to normal.
Normal was not all right.
And we didn't realize that until COVID came along.
Yeah.
It's just incredible.
And I see that so much in the media.
The media used to be so skeptical of power.
And I think part of it is that they've been slowly colonized.
And part of it is that they, you know, journalists are typically more government-oriented, more liberal, more expert.
I mean, if you had an expert in a white lab coat versus a rough and tumble trucker, they know whose tribe they're with.
They're very classist and tribalist.
But I can't.
They are now.
They are now.
They didn't always pick that team.
There was a time when if a trucker come along and had a beef against somebody in a white coat, they would have heard him out and investigated to see what the story actually was and try to seek to speak truth to power.
They don't do that anymore.
Yeah.
And now they challenge those who challenge power.
They're enforcers.
I think part of that is the colonization of the media.
I think anyone who says that the multi-year, and it's got to be over a billion dollars now, in handouts and grants and bailouts and subsidies to the media, anyone who says that doesn't have an effect, I think they're just ignoring human nature.
And I used to follow the Canadian Association of Journalists, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Amnesty International, Penn Canada, all these groups, all these alphabet soup of groups.
And they used to love sparring with the government.
I mean, how many times did Amnesty International and the Canadian Bar Association write about Omar Cotter and his civil rights versus how many times did they write about the civil rights of the unvax?
And if you look at what the Canadian Association of Journalists has to talk about these days, it is only about one thing, getting more money from the government.
They've just completely abandoned any focus on journalism, let alone holding power to account.
It's all about rent-seeking, as the economists would call it.
Sure.
Getting more money from Trudeau and getting Trudeau to shake down Facebook and Google for more money yet.
Sure.
I mean, all that is true.
All that is true, but I'm not sure it's the whole story either, though, because there is an ideological part to this, which I think was showing itself even before this funding model came along.
I mean, many of the people who work in the mainstream media are, well, some of them are university graduates who have learned, essentially, an ideology in their studies.
Nuremberg's Echoes00:09:17
And they think the world works in a certain way.
And one of the reasons that they don't challenge things that woke governments do is that they are woke and they are consistent with the agenda or the story or the narrative that they've been taught is the way things are supposed to be.
And that's just one other, I mean, there's lots of threads in this, I think, but that is one of the dynamics that we're up against.
An awful lot of people, especially in the chattering classes, are of one mind about their worldview.
And more and more governments are on board with that view.
A lot of corporations, big corporations are on board with that view.
Public institutions, universities, and the media itself, they're all, I mean, it's becoming, I hate to use this word lightly.
But this is the way totalitarian societies grow up.
Everybody's on the same page and nobody challenges each other about where it is that we're going.
And we have to go there all together.
And if you step out of line, like Jordan or like Amy or like one of the other people that we're referring to, they're alluding to, then you get the authority and the power of the state coming down against you because you must not do that.
That's the problem.
It's like you said before, you've broken the consensus.
The consensus may be wrong, but you must abide it.
How dare you step out of the consensus?
It's a famous picture of August Landmesser, the one Nazi with his arms folded in front of his chest who wouldn't seek heil.
And everybody has always said, oh, that would be me.
No, it would not have been, because the last three years, we had a daily test of if that would have been you or not.
And we saw it.
And it's shocking how fast.
And the demonization of people, the demonization of the other.
It took, you know, Hitler came to power in 33, but it wasn't for six years.
It took him six years to slowly and methodically transform the law and the culture of Germany to become Nazi.
It didn't happen in one year or two years.
But my God, how quickly we, and I'm not saying that lockdownism was Nazi murderous, but I'm saying, look at how quickly the us versus them, the demonization.
And frankly, there were some similarities.
There was a ghettoization.
There was, I mean, listen, the Nuremberg Code, which was basically part of the verdict of the Nazi doctors trial, our modern idea of medical ethics and consent came from the Nazis as a response and an antidote and a prevention to it.
And there's been nothing in our history since the Second World War that has violated that Nazi Nuremberg, that Nazi verdict in the Nuremberg Code.
Can I just, can we just talk about that for a sec, though?
I mean, I'm not sure that's, I mean, the Nuremberg Code has been referred to a lot also in these times because people are grasping for things.
And it is true that it contains these principles that you refer to, no question.
But it's not enforceable law in Canada.
And we already have those principles in Canadian law.
We didn't need Nuremberg to insert those.
They were in the common law before then.
And if you went to a doctor and the doctor treated you or operated on you without your informed consent, that would have been a tort.
You could have sued them.
And Nuremberg didn't change that.
So I think it's a reflection of the dynamics that you were referring to earlier, which is people are appalled at what's happened and they're reaching for things.
And Nuremberg is not a bad thing to reach for.
I mean, it's a very good expression of the ideas that we're endorsing here.
But it's not an independently existing piece of international law that you can go into a courtroom and say, here's Nuremberg.
Apply this.
I take your point.
I'm not saying you would go to court and say, I apply under the Nuremberg.
I mean, it's not even written as law.
It's basically principles.
The Nazi doctors did atrocious things.
And this is some of those incredible psychological experiments done in the 60s and 70s.
There was the ash conformity test, if you know what I mean, where a group of people who all were pretending to be random people in the public, but all of them were in on it except for one actually naive person.
And they were told which of these two lines is the same length.
And on queue, every once in a while, all of the people who are in on it would give the wrong answer.
And the ash conformity test would test if the one person who said, what are you talking about?
Those lines are obviously not the same length.
Would he go along with it just to fit in?
And I think like 35% of the time, the person would give the wrong answer, knowing it was the wrong answer, just to fit in.
That was called the ash conformity test.
Well, there's also the Milgram experiments.
Well, that's the one about the white lab coats.
Will you cause pain to someone?
Yes.
Or at least think you are, because someone in a white lab coat said you must.
Right.
And it was terrifying.
And they had the white lab coat move on us for three years.
The white lab coat.
Top doctor says, the top doctor, is he the best in patient care?
He's the best researcher.
He's got best grades in school.
He was a government doctor.
He's not a top doctor.
He's a government doctor.
It's different, don't you think?
I don't know.
Hey, listen, I want to ask you something.
You said that the silver lining here was that people were waking up.
Let's call those people awake.
And let's use that word differently than woke.
Okay.
Yep.
Our side's awake.
The other side is woke.
I think the woke outnumbers the awake many times.
I think woke is now the new normal.
I think people who go to school are taught wokeness.
They don't even realize they're being taught something so flavorful and so ideological.
just normal to them it would be like i meet yeah i meet young people i and i talk to them about woke at them and And sometimes they say to me, that's the first time anybody has ever used that word in a derogatory sense.
Yeah.
You know, I was talking to a teacher a while ago, and it was like I was saying to her something like, it's okay to litter.
Like something that we all, we all agree put garbage in the garbage can.
Like it's not, it doesn't even feel ideological anymore.
It's just what you do.
And anyone who doesn't do that is not just antisocial.
They're wrong.
I mean, I think a couple of generations ago, that wasn't the way.
And in some countries in the world, it's not part of the culture.
But how challenging wokeness is like if you said, oh, I believe in littering.
People don't say that's the other point of view.
They say, that's just crazy.
I've never heard anything.
So you just sort of outs there.
That's not even a place on the political spectrum.
Like, I don't know if you, I don't know if that points.
So we can cut those.
Well, go ahead.
Sorry.
Let me try this.
This is the way I've put it recently.
I've suggested to somebody that, like, so talking about regulators and courts and lawyers and public officials, it's not that they are completely closed-minded.
It's not that they are insisting upon only one answer or that they don't tolerate debate.
I mean, that's not true.
But what has happened is this.
A progressive ideology has taken over.
And they believe in being reasonable and being neutral.
But being reasonable and being neutral means being progressive.
And if you are not progressive, then you are neither reasonable nor neutral.
But in fact, you are guilty of misconduct.
Yeah.
That's the degree to which this ideology is taking over.
And they went from the student unions to now the law societies and the College of Psychologists of Ontario, and soon they'll be in the Supreme Court itself if they're not already.
There's an old joke sometimes attributed to Henry Kissinger, although it might not have been him.
It goes, university politics are so vicious precisely because there's so little at stake.
And that was once funny because it appeared to be true.
But now it turns out to be completely false, that they were, in fact, dangerous after all.
And that the seeds that they planted have grown and now have infiltrated everywhere.
And that's now the problem.
Problematic Ideology Spread00:03:48
Hey, let me ask you about your project, Rights Probe.
And you've got a website, rightsprobe.org.
Tell me a little bit about that.
Yeah, Rights Probe is a division of the Energy Probe Research Foundation.
And Energy Probe has been around for decades.
I, in the early parts of my career, or even before I started my career, I was reading Energy Probe material.
It was a terrific think tank that brought very clear thinking, out-of-the-box thinking to all kinds of questions.
They were perhaps Canada's first and maybe still only free market environmental organization.
And it has since, of course, branched out into many other subject areas.
But they established this division, Rights Probe, which I'm now directing.
And we are a law and liberty think tank, I think is the best way to put it.
And we've basically come to fruition during this COVID period because so many awful things were happening in terms of the incursion on civil liberties and so on that we thought it was appropriate to try and bring some clear thinking to this moment in our history.
So what kind of things do you do?
Well, we write, we do this, we give interviews, we do videos, we work behind the scenes in terms of consulting on litigation and challenges to COVID rules and so on, and in many other ways that I won't go into.
But it's been a real whirlwind and a good one.
I mean, there are so many things to do and to look at.
It's like a game of whack-a-mole.
There are new issues arising so fast that you can't finish the one before before you get to it.
And they're all part of a piece, right?
I mean, COVID looks to be a separate thing.
You know, when you talk to various people, like you talk to doctors who are concerned about the vaccines, concerned about the effects of lockdowns and so on.
And these are good people, clear thinkers, brave people who have stepped out of line, and many of them sacrificed a lot.
They know something's not right about both the vaccines themselves, about the way that the rules have been promulgated and enforced.
But many of them think, understandably, that the problem is a COVID problem.
It's a problem about COVID, a problem about the rules that were put in place to deal with it.
In other words, it was a policy mistake.
And no doubt there were policy mistakes in there for sure, but it's a much bigger problem.
And once COVID goes away, if it goes away, it's going to be replaced by something along the same lines, maybe with climate change, maybe something else.
But we are developing into a technocratic aristocracy, Which is directed by a certain class of people who know best what we should all do.
And the technology is coming along to assist them in that enterprise.
And in a sense, Rights Probe exists, and it's not the only one, of course.
Rights Probe exists to try and push back against that trend and that narrative.
Well, I tell you, we can't have enough rights probes.
And of course, we mentioned the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom.
And of course, we helped create a group called the Democracy Fund, which has been battling.
I wish there were 10 groups like that because some of the other alphabet soup groups that I mentioned before have been absent.
Rights Probes Battle00:02:01
They've just been hitting the snooze button during the crisis of the last few years.
I got a question for you.
And I don't want to take too much more of your time.
You've been very generous with your time.
But in 2016, Donald Trump surprised a lot of people by winning.
He certainly surprised Hillary Clinton, surprised the New York Times, who thought she had a 90-plus percent chance of winning.
And I think one of the ways he did it was social media.
In fact, I know that's how he did it.
And the social media companies were shocked by that and felt like they were collaborators or they shouldn't have helped.
And so they had a crackdown.
There was a demonetization.
There was a change of the terms of service, the kind of censorship, in the hope that that would never happen again.
And that's very real.
Rebel News felt the sting of that.
Well, 2022 and the truckers and the convoy, I believe there was a similar thing that happened.
The entire media party, as I call it, the regime media attacked the trucker convoy.
And I could count the exceptions in a few fingers.
Rupa Subra Manria of the National Post, and I'm almost done.
But it was social media on TikTok, on Twitter.
Rebel News was big into it.
True North.
It was all the little guys using social media that told the story.
And I know on the Rebel News side, we had 400 million views and impressions in February.
By the way, the CBC typically gets 320 million in a month.
So we were so large, I think we managed to change the narrative.
When I say me, I don't just mean Rebel News, citizen journalists, social media, ordinary people with a camera.
And so at least that's my theory.
It was a grassroots organic group of, quote, nobodies, the proles, in the trucks.
And then it was a group of, quote, nobodies with their camera phones that defeated the CBC narrative, the global news narrative.
Exactly 400 Million Views00:06:10
That's my theory.
And I feel like I had a vantage point to observe that firsthand.
And so now it's 2023.
And look what Trudeau has in the pipeline.
C-11, C-18, the old C-36, the yet-to-be-numbered online harms act.
He's got not one, but four proposed or in-progress pieces of legislation, all of which would regulate the internet, some of which are being called the Rebel News Act, like which feel like they're really trying to shut us down.
I feel like 2023 is going to be a year of censorship, whereas in 2016, 2017, it was done by the tech companies themselves.
I think Justin Trudeau is coming to silence the small independent citizen journalists of this country.
And I don't know if that's narcissism or paranoia on my part, but I truly believe it.
And I look at these bills and I can't help but say that it's right there in the blueprint.
What do you think of my theory that 2023 is going to be the year of censorship in Canada?
I don't think it's a crazy theory.
I mean, if you look at the drafts of the bills that they've been, but they put in place and the promises that they've made to do as you describe.
I mean, they have promised to do exactly that.
So it's not like you are making up a conspiracy theory.
You're basically just reporting on what they've said themselves.
And what they've said themselves is dramatically terrible in the sense that in an earlier era, you know, you just would not have believed them to be serious.
But this is where we've gotten to.
We have gotten to a place where a chunk of the Canadian public believes that they should not be subject to misinformation.
And by misinformation, they presumably mean that information that hasn't been approved by some kind of state authority.
I mean, that is the worst kind of society you can think of.
All bad societies have restrictions on speech.
It's the loss of the idea of liberty, whether it's with respect to speech or otherwise.
We have embraced the concept of a managerial state headed by people with expertise and authority to tell us all how to behave.
And that idea applies to all of the problems you're talking about, including the censorship.
Until we get rid of that core idea, until enough people say, you know what, this is not working for me.
I don't want to do this anymore.
I won't accept the idea of having a state apparatus, having a nanny state apparatus that has as its primary purpose the making of policy.
This comes down even to the idea of policy.
So policy essentially is a set of rules for people to follow.
And that today is what government does.
Government departments make policy.
And we have so many government departments and agencies and officials and regulators.
They're all making policies.
And every one of those policies is a set of rules for other people to follow.
And the rules that you're referring to are about what you can and cannot do on social media.
It is intolerable and untenable, but it's the path we're going down until enough people say enough.
Yeah, I think that's going to be a battle.
And it really could be the end of rebel news.
The Online Streaming Act, Section 9.11b, happen to know it.
Yep.
Yep.
Would give Trudeau's CRTC the power to alter discoverability.
That's a fancy way to say when you type in rebel news, do you get rebel news or are you served up CBC CTV in the Global Mail instead?
You can boost your friends and deboost your enemies.
And so they don't have to ban rebel news.
They just have to order YouTube, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter to hide us because we are not a qualified Canadian journalism organization, which is one of their licenses.
That's the way to kill rebel news, not to ban us.
A court, at least for the first time.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
It's exactly right because, and so there's a parallel between that and what happened during COVID.
And the parallel is this.
This is the way administrative states behave.
They don't just go out and ban things directly because they have charter rights and so on to worry about.
They have gotten to the practice of doing through the back door what they would have difficulty doing through the front door.
So it is exactly as you say.
It's not like they're censoring you in the sense that no one can read you or watch you.
It's just that they're adjusting things so as to reflect, you know, a preference for a certain kind of content.
And that's a much more difficult thing to challenge legally as well, because it's not direct.
It's very cool.
Well, it's the year that'll make us or break us, I think.
Professor Bruce Party, what a pleasure to catch up with you.
Thanks for being so generous with your time.
Folks can follow you at rightsprobe.org.
You're also published in the mainstream media, which I'm very grateful for.
I see you've written recently in the National Post.
I'm glad they still give you a forum there along with Rupert Subramania and Barbara Kay and a few other anti-woke voices.
So keep it up and thanks very much for spending so much time with us today.
Oh, thanks, Ezra.
Always nice to be with you.
Right on.
There you have it.
Dr. Bruce Party, Professor of Law at Queen's University.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.