Law professor Bruce Pardy critiques Canada’s judicial system, exposing how COVID-19 saw the Charter of Rights and Freedoms fail to protect freedoms like movement or religion, unlike U.S. courts. He highlights former Chief Justice McLachlin’s bias toward state actions, judges’ reliance on unverified pandemic claims, and unelected officials like Teresa Tam wielding unchecked power. Pardy links identity politics—including LGBTQ+ advocacy and critical race theory—to ideological weaponization, citing Trinity Western University’s denied accreditation for its marriage policy and Jordan Peterson’s forced retraining by the College of Psychologists. The episode reveals how legal and academic institutions now prioritize conformity over evidence-based neutrality, reshaping dissent into a liability. [Automatically generated summary]
A great heart-to-heart with Bruce Party, the Queen's University law professor, contrarian, and freedom fighter.
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All right, here's today's broadcast.
Tonight, a feature-length interview with our friend, the law professor, Bruce Party.
It's June 28th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
You know, there was a tradition for years that the prime minister would appoint one or two journalists to the Senate.
And that dream of winning that appointment was enough to keep 100 journalists loyal to a prime minister.
even though only one or two would ever get that magical golden call.
The rest were certainly auditioning for it.
They say that the Senate is not a thankless task, but a taskless thanks.
And indeed, it really is the best perk you can get other than, I suppose, being the governor general.
But there is a better perk, a better patronage appointment, because the Senate has the travel and the prestige, but it doesn't actually have any power.
What is a perk that is even greater than being appointed to the Senate?
I tell you, it's being appointed a judge.
Because a judge is appointed for the same duration as that of a senator, earns even more money, but unlike a senator, actually has power.
And I put it to you that that is enough to keep so many lawyers and law professors in line, even though only a handful will get that golden nod.
The rest of them will be auditioning their whole careers.
And that is why the law, in my opinion, is increasingly political, or at least one of the reasons.
So it's very hard to find a lawyer, let alone a law professor, let alone a law professor at a prestigious school who is willing to be a little bit contrarian and willing to call out the excesses of his industry.
In fact, in this whole country, I think you can count them on one finger's hands, one hand's fingers.
And joining me for the duration of today's show is one such man.
His name is Professor Bruce Party.
He is a professor of law at Queen's University.
He is with Rights Probe, a charity designed to increase our civil liberties, and he joins me.
Now, what a pleasure to have you.
Thanks for having me, Esther.
All it's a pleasure.
Do you think I'm accurate when I say that at least for some ambitious, politically-minded lawyers, the ultimate outcome is to become a judge?
Oh, there's no doubt that it is the ambition of many.
The Last Word in Law00:11:28
Now, not all of them compromise themselves in search of that goal, but it's certainly a matter in the back of your mind, I would think, so that you don't keep yourself in the running.
Don't dismiss yourself out of hand just by wandering too far outside the lines of accepted rhetoric, I suppose one might put it.
You know, civilization is a thin veneer, and societies tell themselves stories about their institutions to hold themselves together.
And some of those stories are about our legal institutions.
And it works as long as the stories are mostly true.
And in the recent past, one begins to wonder whether or not we've gone too far and people are wondering if the stories are really true.
You are so right.
You know, when I was in law school, and this is more than 20 years ago, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was such a sacred text.
It had to be revered.
It's as if Canada didn't exist before.
Even though the first line of the Charter refers to, you know, under God, most law professors skipped that part and they thought that this was like a holy text.
And yet, after 20, 25 years of hearing that the Charter of Rights is above all, I mean, I guess it's been more than 40 years since the law said.
It didn't do a bloody thing during the pandemic.
I can't think of one systemic case of discrimination, infringements on our civil liberties, lockdowns, shutdown churches.
You can't go to school.
You can't open your business.
You can't travel in your own country.
You can't visit your family.
This so-called sacred text was proven to be a nullity.
I think that's exactly what you mean about the myths we tell ourselves.
The mythic document was the charter.
It failed its biggest test ever.
It was a great disappointment, no question about it.
It reflected, though, the faith that a lot of people put into it.
And, you know, in a way, if there's any silver lining to this COVID thing, it is in a way that for some people, a curtain has been pulled back on the way the thing actually works.
And it's actually not quite true that the Charter has ever been the foundation of our legal system.
I mean, it looks to be a very important document.
It's our Bill of Rights or the equivalent.
But really, the Charter functions only as a gloss on what legislatures can do.
And it's only really, it's turned out to be only an interpretive guide for the courts in terms of judging what the legislatures do.
So people see this document.
It's written down in black and white.
They think, well, they're the words.
Therefore, I have the freedoms that are listed.
But the test of whether or not you actually have those freedoms is what happens when you go into a court and say, this happened to me.
You know, please enforce my right.
And then sometimes the courts say, well, I'm sorry, I know it says this, but that's actually not what it means.
And in a way, this is the premise of our system, even with or without the charter.
The system is, somebody always has to have the last word.
And in our system, the courts have the last word.
And in particular, the Supreme Court of Canada has the last word.
And there's no overseer of the Supreme Court of Canada.
You know, and who decides?
It might be nine people in robes.
It might be 338 MPs.
It might be 40 million Canadians.
What is that club?
What is that club?
And what are their rules?
You know, I think I can't think, in fact, I don't think our Supreme Court has weighed in on any COVID challenge on the cultural situation.
Or our system just wasn't speedy enough.
The U.S. Supreme Court got straight to, like within months, they were knocking down laws.
Our Supreme Court, our system, and we sneer at the Americans, really, theirs worked.
Ours literally has not gone to worship.
Well, they I don't disagree with you, but they have the same feature that I was describing, which is there's always got to be a last word.
That's why it's such a battle.
And the Supreme Court of the United States has the same kind of last word authority that the Supreme Court of Canada does.
But one of the things that has made it work for periods of time is the philosophy that judges and courts are restrained.
They're restrained because they have such power.
If they're not elected, they can't be removed.
The government can't remove them.
The government can't overrule them.
They have the last word in a very little sense about what's going to happen in society.
And so they're very powerful people.
And the thing that has kept that power in check is an idea.
And the idea is restraint.
We will apply the law.
We will interpret it in accordance with principles.
We won't sort of wander off and do whatever we think is right.
But we've now entered a period where more courts are inclined to think that it is their job to do the policy work and to design things so that it works in the way that they approve of.
Former Chief Justice said it's a dialogue between us and the legislators.
You know, Beverly McLaughlin, restrained, was she?
She was the one who said that Canada was a genocidal state.
And she didn't even say so through a court case.
It was just a speech.
And why shouldn't she give a speech?
She's a queen of all she surveys.
I think it's telling that Xing, after finishing her tour of duty in Canada, now sits on Xi Jinping's court of high appeal in Hong Kong.
That's true.
The British judges quit when Xi Jinping took over Hong Kong.
They quit out of moral solidarity with the Hong Kong people, but also they weren't going to be, they literally were not going to work for a dictator.
I am stunned that Beverly McLaughlin shows up for work every day with a smile for the world's largest pirate.
I find that incredible.
Well, one of the things that's in flux now is what we mean by the rule of law.
It's a hallowed phrase.
It's in the Constitution.
But, you know, there's a difference of opinion about what even that means.
And here are two ideas that I like, both from Hayek.
So one of the ideas about the rule of law, and one way to conceive of it, is to think of it as the opposite of the rule of persons.
You don't want any one person ruling over you, right?
And there are a couple of ways to avoid that.
The statue of justice being blind with the blindfold.
Justice is blind.
So what we do is, number one, Hayek says, rules fixed and announced beforehand.
That's what the law is supposed to be.
So we can all know what the laws are ahead of time, govern ourselves accordingly, make sure we don't get into trouble, but you have to at least tell us where the lines are that we have to obey.
And the second way is to divide powers between our legislature, our courts, and our executive branch so that none of them have concentrated power.
And the natural instinct is checked by the other national institutions.
Exactly.
They're all checks and balances on each other.
But both of these ideas now are eroding because all three of these branches are on the same page about the necessity for having the state manage society.
You know, and I see that in America too.
I mean, we're in Canada.
We're mainly going to talk about Canada.
But I see that there are certain things that we must, you know, whether it's the CIA or the Justice Department or, I'm going to say the military-industrial complex, we have a higher duty than to allow that Donald Trump to run wild here.
Sure, you know, we may be exceeding our office, head of the FBI, sure, head of the CIA, but we have to.
We're the keepers.
I feel that that's strong in America these days, but it's always been there in Canada, too.
We don't have the same accountability in Canada they do even now in America.
We have had a longer history of State paternalism being part of the national identity, if you like.
But there is a very strong impetus now for management.
Management.
Look at David Johnson, who, surely, I mean, I look like a central casting, trustworthy gentleman, and maybe for the first time in a long time, it didn't work with him.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
And in part, I think this is maybe part of the reluctance of the courts to condemn the COVID regime, because the COVID regime was all about managing a bunch of people we had never met before.
Teresa Tam, Davila here in Toronto.
Every province, every city had a new boss.
We had never met before.
How were they chosen?
Who are they?
What's their background?
What do they stand for?
What's their ideological stripe?
What party are they with?
What limits their power?
What have they ever gotten right or wrong before?
Suddenly, we had a roster of new people running things, and every politician deferred to them.
Deferred because, and this is what politicians do now.
The legislatures now pass statutes that delegate enormous rulemaking authority to other branches, to the executive branch and other authorities, like public health officials, but not limited to that.
The whole regime of administrative bodies that we have commonly now make rules and policies about all manner of things because it's part of their management function.
That, I think, is one of the cores of the difficulty.
We believe we're now in the era of the administrative state.
And if you stop any random person on the street and you ask them whether or not the administrative state, if they knew what that was.
They didn't know what that is.
No.
But they would probably agree with the proposition that it's government's job to manage society and solve social problems.
And as soon as you accept that premise, you go down the road that we're on.
You know, I've been holding in my hands here.
I haven't even referred to this document yet.
Your 20-page essay in the C2C journal.
I really get a kick out of that because there are longer pieces.
I mean, I'm a Twitter guy, so I read 280 career notes, but this is a 20-page essay by you.
Let me just read the opening headline and teaser here, and I'd like you to tuck into this.
Sure.
Legal canons and social fables.
The law in Canada has never been perfect, but now it is losing its way.
And let me just read two more sentences.
We'd love you to get into this.
I think you already have a bit.
Unashamed racial discrimination in the name of equality.
Judges refusing to hear scientific evidence and basing life-altering rulings on mere assumptions, like denying that lady her heart transfer or her organ transplant because she wasn't jabbed.
Public institutions brazenly claiming to be above the law, and courts agreeing.
Public intellectuals enduring professional misconduct investigations for the crime of applying their intellect.
Jurists Under Siege00:15:29
And you're talking about Jordan Peterson.
Professionals punished for exercising independent judgment.
Bruce Party, that's you, surveys the descent of Canada's legal system into Alice in Wonderland surrealism, a state that poses dangers to virtually every Canadian and to the future of the rule of law itself.
That is a pretty apocalyptic summary.
I mean, yet you are part of this establishment.
I mean, Queen's is a first-rank university.
You're a law professor there.
That is, you know, you are part of the priesthood in a way.
But maybe you are blaspheming.
I'm the barbarian.
Let me ask you before you get into this: have they tried to expel you like they tried to expel Jordan Peterson?
No.
Why?
No, to their great credit.
Now, I.
A short number of years ago, a short time ago, I invited Jordan to give a lecture at Queen's.
And the response of the community was divided.
Lots of people were very enthusiastic about seeing and hearing him.
Others were of the view that he should not be given a platform at Queen's.
And to their great credit, the principal and the dean of law at the time both said, no, no, this is the work that we do at universities.
We listen to people even if we don't agree with them.
And they insisted that it go ahead.
Did it go ahead?
It went ahead.
It was a tremendous success.
There were 800-plus people packed into the university's largest venue.
It was a fantastic event.
And how did the protesters protest?
Well, the protesters, the protesters on the sidewalk, which was, of course, fine.
But all the fire alarms.
Well, they did actually all kinds of things that were over the line.
They banged on the windows and managed to break one of them.
And in the meantime, it was very difficult to hear what was going on inside the hall.
I was on the stage with Jordan, and frankly, at times, I couldn't hear what was going on.
And they blocked some of the exits so that people couldn't get out in the case of a fire and so on.
But overall, it went very well.
And in a sense, the protesters only managed to make the point that Jordan was making inside the hall, which is these people just don't want to hear anything they don't agree with.
You know, I am sure that every young person, and I presume it was students mainly in that room, although there would have been others in the community.
I'm sure they won't forget that night.
The drama, the excitement, and being the receivers of a knowledge that the other side wants to ban.
There's something tantalizing about secret knowledge.
I think it's one of the reasons why people are open to conspiracy theories, because they have an alternate explanation for the world that only they know, and it gives them some sort of superiority.
And that's sort of a fake superiority.
But if there's a wise and thoughtful guy, you may get some things wrong, but Jordan Peterson is not an intellectual lightweight.
He's been thinking about these things for 40 years.
And he's tried to popularize it, and he'll debate anyone.
So he's not, you know, he may have strong opinions, but he's not a kook or a crank.
And people, a lot of people find real meaning in what he's saying.
And imagine going there and having to strain and listen over the smashing sounds and having the whiff of some real violence.
Well, maybe I'm going to get hurt.
You will never forget what you heard that day.
And if there's any doubt that you heard something important, that doubt is gone because the other side certainly thought it was important enough to stop.
I'm not sure if my analogy of secret knowledge works there, but you heard something that the other side wants to make impossible to know.
I think you're right about proving the point.
I've got to think that makes Jordan Peterson's followers even more dedicated.
Oh, I would think.
I would think.
But it's interesting what you say about secret knowledge, because in a way, that is one thing that characterizes the legal profession.
They are the holders of secret knowledge.
And, you know, listen, the law can be a difficult task.
You know, language has inherent ambiguities.
Things are not always straightforward.
It's difficult to make them straightforward.
But on the other hand, our legal system has become very tangled.
We have laws about everything.
The amount of rules and policies we have about everything under the sun is getting to be overwhelming.
It's difficult to make your way through the legal system without a lawyer.
Even for the lawyers, it's becoming overly bureaucratic.
It's very slow.
It's very expensive for everybody.
The access to justice is becoming as challenging to obtain sometimes as timely medical care in this country.
And not just access to justice, but, you know, Leo's saying the more laws, the more corruption.
And I'm going to give you one more quote.
I think it was La Vrenti Beria, the founder of the Soviet secret police, who said, show me the man and I'll find you the crime.
I said, if you've got a lot of laws out there, especially if they're vague and murky.
Oh, sure.
Give me the guy and I'll tell you how we can get him.
I'll tell you how we can get him.
And you see that.
There are some, I'm going to give you the case of Arthur Pavlovsky.
He is exactly what would be meant by this turbulent priest.
Will someone rid me of this turbulent priest?
Like, he will not stop.
He is turbulent in every definition.
And that infuriates the mayor and the police.
He's like an allergic reaction in human form.
And so they're going after him again and again and again.
And sometimes they win and sometimes they lose.
There's been 100 charges, tickets, 100.
I don't mean 50.
I mean 100.
And eventually he wins most of them, by the way.
But I think there's something wrong with the society that will simply keep charging a man and jailing, jailing Jane Teresa, sorry, Tamara Leach for 49 days without a hearing.
And they chose to do that to her, but not to others.
I'm sure there wasn't a single arrest of the Jordan Peterson meeting at Queen's.
Was there a single arrest?
I don't believe so.
Smashing windows is more violence than all the trucker convoy did combined.
Yes, that's true.
Threatening, blocking fire.
There may have been an arrest after the fact.
Somebody was discovered to have been carrying a garat, a weapon, but I don't think that was on the scene.
I think it was after the fact.
Okay, well, but the smashing and, you know, that's more than the truckers did.
Yes, yes.
And I feel like we are at that point where you can be rebel news.
You know, I feel sometimes like the censorship laws are called the rebel news laws.
Like they're so clearly targeting the few contrary.
Well, there's one of my favorite quotes is by a Columbian professor whose name escapes me at the moment, but he says, dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.
Oh, holy.
So if you want to stop this and stop that and restrict this and manage that, then suddenly you have a plethora of laws about everything instead of having a few basic rules about conduct and some principles.
That's a great quote.
Hey, I want to do this because I could talk to you all day, but I want to get through your C2C article.
Why don't we do this?
You've broken it down into what you call fables.
These are what you talk about, the myths that we have to have a common story, our common narrative as a society, what keeps us together.
And in some places, it's history, in some places it's blood, and nationality.
What is it in Canada?
Well, maybe it's a story.
Let's whip through these fables.
Now, the first photo I see is a picture of the Tamara Leach we were just talking about a second ago.
Fable number one, the criminal justice system is fair and even-handed.
You've already talked a little bit about this, but give me a one-liner on it.
Yes, well, so these are the things that give our system legitimacy in the minds of the people.
If you think you're going to get a fair shake if you're charged or the like, then you're going to go along with the idea that the process will protect you.
Whatever the outcome is, you're going to get a fair shake.
But you can take examples like the Tamar-Lich situation and think, well, that wasn't fair.
In the Tamar-Lich situation, as you alluded to, she was kept in jail for 49 days in total at two different times for a charge that was nonviolent within a system in which people charged with all manner of things, including violent crimes, are let out on bail rigidly, including terrorists, by the way.
And on both these occasions, she was put in jail by lower court officials and then released by superior court judges when the case came before them.
And it certainly seemed like the prosecutor was determined to hold her in jail and maybe even punish her before her trial and before conviction for this crime of the century that she committed in Ottawa, even though, as you say, it was a peaceful protest.
So this is one of the challenges, one of the examples, and this is not to say that this happens all the time.
It doesn't.
But if you can pull out anecdotes, examples of things where it doesn't go right, then the strength of the story begins to weaken.
And when you learn things.
And this is what they mean in the law, not to bring the administration of justice into distribution.
That's a great line that's burned in my memory because you've got to conduct yourself in a way that people have confidence, even especially the losers.
The losers have to love and trust the system enough that when they lose, they say, well, I had my shot.
That's exactly right.
There's another phrase that goes, justice must not only be done, but must manifestly appear to be done.
And when they put Moise Kurimchi, the out-of-control, vendetta-driven liberal donor, as the prosecutor for Tamara Leach, they undid that and they undid that on purpose.
And by the way, that same prosecutor tried to have our reporter, Sheila Gunread, convicted of contempt of court.
Out-of-control madman.
Now, I should tell you.
Go ahead.
They just recently replaced him, sacked him as the prosecutor on Tamara Leach.
And part of me says, thank God what took you so long.
Another part of me said, well, I wish that madman would go all the way to trial just to get a proper smackdown by a court.
The silver lining in this situation, if you watch the thing the whole way through, was in the way that the Superior Court responded to the attempts to have her released.
The committals were done by one level of court, and then the Superior Court in what I thought were very good judges said, this is not correct, and then let her out.
Unshackle that woman.
So there was a silver lining.
It takes a long time to get that silver lining.
Arthur Pavlovsky, he was initially convicted.
He was banned from traveling outside the province.
What has that got to do with anything other than they didn't want him on a speaking tour?
Anytime he made a Facebook post, a sermon, or a media interview, he had to read a little handwritten script.
I don't know if you remember this, Justice Adam Germain, hand-wrote a little thing.
Here's what you have to say.
I came up with this as a judge.
I'm quite proud of my wording.
And you have to self-renounce every time.
And that was the law for months until the Court of Appeal finally came and unanimously threw that out.
Justice comes slowly.
Listen, this is one of the things that hurts.
Expensively.
Expensively and slowly.
It's one of the two of the things that burden our system now.
It needs to be fixed.
All right.
I said quick snappers, and we didn't go quickly there.
Fable number two, judges are impartial.
You've got a shocking story about the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Go ahead.
Yes, well, it's a very published story.
So shortly after the end of the convoy and after the Prudo government had invoked the Emergencies Act, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court gave an interview to Le Devore.
I believe it was in April, and the convoy was in February.
And in that interview, as published by the DOR, the Chief Justice condemned the Kanban and suggested that the powerful forces in the country ought to have done what they did, essentially.
So we've got a pundit on our hands now.
And if anybody else other than a judge has said that, there would have been no trouble because it's an opinion.
It's a perfectly valid opinion.
But he's the Chief Justice of the whole system.
And shortly after the Emergency Act was invoked, a number of applications were brought to challenge the validity of its implication, of course, and those applications have now been heard at first instance by the federal court, not yet decided.
But this could very easily go before the Supreme Court of Canada.
And now you have the Chief Justice who has already essentially given his opinion about this issue.
And so going back to this idea that justice must not only be done, but manifestly must appear to be done, it would be difficult if you were bringing the applications to think, well, I'm going to get a fair shake from the Chief Justice because he's already told me what he thinks.
And not just on that, before the vaccine mandates, I mean, the vaccine mandates to this day have not yet been to the Supreme Court.
But the Chief Justice announced publicly, very early, that he was going to enforce a vaccine mandate in the building of the Supreme Court for the Supreme Court step.
So he tells you without a hearing, without a pro and a con, without an argument, he's basically told you where he stands on the civil liberties issue of the day.
And it was very interesting that different courts took a different approach to this question.
I believe the federal court said the vaccination status of our judges is not public information.
It's private.
It's up to them.
Whereas other courts, like Supreme Court of Canada, said all our judges are vaccinated as a matter of policy.
So it's a very interesting.
Let's whip through some more of these.
Fable number three, courts find facts with evidence.
Right.
Right.
Well, this is one of the basic propositions, right?
One of the strengths of a judge is that they know nothing about anything else.
Right?
So they can start with a blank slate.
They don't have the ingrained predispositions of experts.
And they have to base their findings of fact on what they hear in the courtroom and upon nothing else.
That's the whole idea.
But during COVID, some courts went so far as to take judicial notice of certain facts about the vaccine, especially in family law cases where there is a dispute between parents about whether or not a child was going to be vaccinated.
And there's more than one example, but I speak about one example from Saskatchewan where the judge basically said, I'm going to take judicial notice of the fact that the virus is dangerous and that the vaccine is safe for children to take.
Judicial Notice of Race00:05:05
And that's the way it went.
It was.
Same thing with that Adam Germain case I mentioned before.
He said, everyone knows someone who has died from COVID.
No, you're just a locked up, terrified old man who deals with other locked up, terrified old people, some of whom are sick.
And by the way, I'm getting old too.
I mean, we're all going to get old.
But don't tell me that you know a damn thing about anything.
You're not in schools and restaurants.
You're not in bars or gyms.
You're terrified and you talk to other people who are terrified.
You don't know a damn thing.
And it was, you know, sometimes having old people as judges is very, you know, the words senator, senior, a lot of, a lot of, you know, age and wisdom are correlated.
They really are because you have life experience.
Yeah, sure.
But in this case, it was the worst because you had the people who were afraid of themselves giving advice to young men.
Right.
It wasn't the old judges getting myocarditis playing sports at school.
Right.
Very outrageous.
Fable number four, justice is blind.
You sort of talked about that already.
A little bit, yes.
But we have gotten to the point now where our idea about equal treatment under the law has morphed into something very different.
The idea of justice being blind is just that.
The law shouldn't care who you are, what your characteristics are, whether you're a man or a woman or a rich or poor or black or white or trade or gay.
We should apply the same rules to everybody without regard to your identity.
And we've now gotten to a place where the law very much wants to know who you are, both in civil matters, in human rights tribunal matters, in criminal sentencing.
They want to know what race you are and other kinds of characteristics so they can adjust the rules in accordance with the groups that you may or may not belong to.
And there was a very interesting statement by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario from last fall where, and this is not a new thing, but it's new to see it said out loud this way.
They basically said in black and white, white people cannot claim discrimination under the code.
Now, I'm not sure that's entirely correct, but it's certainly that trend that we've been headed down for quite a while.
You know, I'm not even kidding when I say, I wonder how that works for people who are mixed race.
Well, this is the absurdity of it, right?
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
I mean, Barack Obama was black, but he was also white.
And I think so many people in humanity, I mean, everyone's fascinated by those DNA tests, 23andMe, because they want to say, well, what percentage of me is this and that?
And, you know, a lot of people were kicked out of some place and moved to some other place.
That's the history of the world.
I mean, my own family 120 years ago was kicked out of some place.
And I don't know.
It's just such a strange thing that people who were not hard done by hundreds of years ago are being reimbursed either legally or financially by people who didn't do anything wrong to them today.
But this is what happens, though, when you start down the road of trying to treat people as though they are merely members of groups instead of individuals, right?
You reward them and punish them for things they had nothing to do with.
And then they start to think of themselves in those terms.
I think that's the weaponization of race, and I think that's the new weaponization we see with sexuality.
I mean, gay rights was one thing, but the T in LGBT and the Q, that's not, it's got nothing to do with the L and the G.
I think it's about weaponizing gender, weaponizing sex, weaponizing psychology and self-identity, just like wokeness around race.
And I think that I think the critical race theory and cultural Marxism, I really think it's, I think it's real.
And I think it's too coordinated.
I mean, for it not to be a strategy.
Well, let's put this in very simple political terms.
So in a sense, the idea that everybody should be entitled to the same rights regardless of their identity is a classical liberal idea.
Justice is blind, equal treatment of the law.
We don't care who you are.
The alternative, which we're thick into now, is that it's not just a question of our freedom to do things that we want.
It is the fact that we must have societal endorsement of what we're doing.
And to that end, the state will manage your attitudes so that you must approve of what other people are doing in their own lives.
Those two things are very different visions.
We used to use the word tolerance.
Do you tolerate?
Are you tolerant?
Now it has to be acceptance and even advocacy.
Reminds me of the summer job grants program a few years back where you had to sign an attestation that you agreed with Justin Trudeau on social policy.
It's got nothing to do with the summer job.
Right, exactly so.
Challenging College Psychologists' Advocacy00:11:53
You've got so many fables in here.
I can't go through them all.
Fable seven, public inquiries provide accountability.
Well, we've learned that one from Justice Rollo and David Johnson, who has a Chinese name I learned, David Jiangshan, given to him.
He's so well known.
I mean, he sent his daughters to university there.
He was the president of the university.
He was a governor general.
He could have sent his daughters to any school in the world, Cambridge, Harvard.
He sent them to Chinese schools.
They're not the finest schools in the world, but they're the way to get connected to China.
He's a Chinese asset.
I don't know.
I don't know if you ever thought so.
I'm not aware of that, Becker.
Fable eight, professional regulators are non-political and act in the public interest.
I mean, that's the case of Jordan Peterson.
That's right.
And that hearing was heard just last week.
Do we know?
We do not know the outcome yet.
Well, it'll be very interesting because that's the College of Psychologists on Ontario.
Yes.
And all their complaints were from, I mean, Jordan Peterson doesn't have any patients anymore, right?
I know.
Correct.
So these aren't people who said, oh, he mistreated me or he took advantage in some way or he violated.
You know that.
It's not even on the table.
The question is merely, you know, how he behaves on social media.
And so they're using, they're really, it's an abuse of a law.
It's a vexatious litigation, but because it's not in a real court, it can't be dismissed with prejudice.
The lawyers making submissions in the case last week even said at one point, they said, it's not even a question of the content of these tweets or the comments.
It's the tone.
That's incredible.
On the one hand, the College of Psychologists of Ontario can do whatever they please and who's going to stop them.
And if they can take Jordan Peterson down a peg, that's a message to everyone else in the country.
If we can take him down with his fame and his fortune, we can take you down, buddy.
But on the other hand, Jordan Peterson is an irresistible force.
He has such a following, and he's very sharp himself.
Very sharp.
And he has a spine.
Yeah.
Well, that's the essential thing.
And I don't know how that's going to play out because, on the one hand, institutionally, they will suffer damage in the court of public opinion if they rule against them.
And it may eventually, Peterson may eventually win if it appeals to a court of law.
But on the other hand, you've got this nest of activists who say, I got him.
I've got him in my little kangaroo court.
I'm the boss here.
I'm not even a real judge.
I'm the boss.
And I got him before me.
I got to get him.
This is my one chance to get him.
I think you've got a hell of a thing because why wouldn't they stick it to these are the woke activists?
Why wouldn't they stick it to him?
Well, and this all gets tangled up in the role of these executive bodies like the regulator.
The regulator is a government body, even though it's self-regulation.
And, you know, when the courts, you know, hear the application with respect to what the college has done, then you get the question of whether or not the courts should defer to the regulator or whether or not the limits are strict.
I mean, all of these issues we're talking about are displayed in cases like this and bring to light the dilemmas that we are now facing as a society and as a legal system about how the rules are supposed to work and who gets to say.
You know, I was a lawyer.
I graduated from law school.
I practiced a bit, but then I got busy doing other shenanigans, but I kept my status with the law society because I sort of liked it.
I liked calling myself a lawyer.
But that opened myself up to complaints identical to this.
I didn't practice law.
I didn't have any clients.
But that conduct on becoming a lawyer, such a catch-all, they would, they, it was a handful of people who would, every time I would write a newspaper column, they would submit it.
And there was a point in time when I was responsible for 10% of all the work at the Law Society of Alberta's complaints.
That's what they told me.
And I got to know the staff there, and I jokingly said to them, I'm sorry, you have to read all of my columns on all my TV shows.
I got on a first-name basis.
They were pretty friendly.
All 24 complaints were dismissed, but imagine 24.
And it took a lot of time.
And I made a decision because I like thinking about the law and using the law, but I don't want to be a lawyer.
I haven't done that in more than 20 years now.
So I said to the law society, I'm happy to resign, but I can't resign under a cloud of an accusation because that's called a deemed disbarment.
So we actually arranged it so the moment they acquitted me from the last one, I just said, okay, I'm done now.
Believe it or not, the two complainants sued the law society to try and bring me back in so they could punish me.
It's crazy.
But that's what they're trying to do to Jordan Peterson.
Yes.
Because he is such a success.
They want to say he is, I don't know, the equivalent of disbarred or defrocked.
I don't know what you say about a psychologist who has been disciplined, but they want to attach that huge asterisk to his name because he's out there, combination of psychology and philosophy and history.
Like it's such a wonderful thing.
And they want to say, no, no, no, he's disbarred.
But another interesting thing about this case, though, is that it's not even disciplinary yet.
They haven't even done an investigation yet.
Really?
All this is a preliminary order, if you like, suggestion, that he submit to retraining about how to behave on social media.
He's a master of it.
He's got millions of followers, and they'll teach him.
And the deal is that he has to pay the expenses of this coach.
And of course, it's an open-ended thing.
The coach will decide when he's had enough.
I'd love to be such a coach.
How do I get a gig like that?
But part of the argument on behalf of the college is, well, but this isn't disciplinary.
I mean, this is just a preliminary thing, and it really doesn't deserve to be examined this way.
Well, you know what that is?
They are trying to, they can't outdebate him.
I mean, one of the favorite debates I've ever watched of all time was when he was on Channel 4 and then you scaffolding him.
And permit me just to throw a clip of that.
Sure.
Because to this day, I think that was perhaps the most glorious interview I've ever seen.
Indulge me.
Here's a minute of that.
You cited freedom of speech in that.
Why should your right to freedom of speech trump a trans person's right not to be offended?
Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.
I mean, look at the conversation we're having right now.
You know, like you're certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth.
Why should you have the right to do that?
It's been rather uncomfortable.
Well, I'm very glad I put you on the spot.
Well, I get my question.
But you get my point.
You get my point.
It's like, you're doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell's going on.
And that is what you should do.
But you're exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me.
And that's fine.
I think more power to you, as far as I'm concerned.
So you haven't sat there and.
Oh, that's so, so good.
Jordan Peterson's a pretty good debater.
You're probably not going to get him that way.
He showed a lot of, he's got a big following.
He's financially successful.
How do you get him?
How do you get a guy like that?
Well, you manipulate the legal system.
A legal system that was built to protect patients from abusive psychologists has now been taken off mission by woke extremists.
And it's not just the college of psychologists.
I mean, so the idea of professional competence more and more.
And not across the board, not in every case, but you can see how more regulators are looking at professional competence through an ideological lens in there.
Well, that's why they shut down, I think it was called Trinity Western University in B.C. wanted a law school.
And they forbade them.
They said, yeah, your teaching's up to snuff.
There's no doubt your curriculum is rigorous, but you have a student personal conduct policy not to have sex outside of marriage.
That includes gay sex.
Because you have this student conduct code, we are not allowing you, we're not going to, so the Law Side of Ontario and some of the other law societies said in advance, we will not acknowledge that anyone, even someone who is gay, you can be gay and go to Trinity Western.
Sure.
Even a gay graduate from Trinity Western Law School will not be certified in Ontario or other provinces.
You can come from a law school in Saudi Arabia or Iran and take your tests and be certified, where they literally stone gays to death.
But how dare you think that a Christian university will be able to accredit lawyers?
And this brings us all the way back full circle to the charter because the Supreme Court of Canada heard that case and deferred to the law societies to do as they had done, even though the only charter right in question was held by Trinity Western and its people.
They had the freedom of religion.
The law societies are part of the state.
They're subject to the charter.
But the Supreme Court said we're going to defer, essentially.
We're going to allow the law societies, as long as what they've done is reasonably within what we are going to imagine as the values of the charter, then we're going to let it go.
Well, Bruce, it's great to catch up with you.
And I understand that you may be going back to teaching, is that right?
Eventually, not this September, but the September after that.
Right.
Well, I'm very glad.
And I think that there's not a lot of professors out there who are willing to speak out.
I mean, it's been a while since I was in law school.
I think back then, dissent was more allowed.
In fact, some professors encouraged it.
I wonder if that's how it is in the academies these days.
Well, there are always fun moments where the debate is the thing.
And I am of the opinion that at the universities, generally, that is becoming more rare.
People are much more uptight about saying the wrong thing.
You can see it in the student body.
They don't want to get criticized in this age of social media.
I think there is- Students recording everything on phones.
It's not a- It's got to be tough.
You can't get one word wrong.
Well, also, there is a, for my money, inside the universities, there's also a narrowing of acceptable thought on the part of the faculty and the granting agencies and so on.
So in many ways, the university environment has narrowed in that sense, yes.
Well, listen, I wish you good luck.
As I said at the outset, you're a rare person in the legal community in the highest heights of the priesthood, and yet you haven't bent the knee.
That's very rare.
I don't know if I would survive.
I survived law school 25 years ago.
I don't know if I would survive it today.
Well, you know, a lot of people go to law school and they do survive it, and they become terrific lawyers.
But I think for some, it can be a challenge.
Yeah.
Before we go, is there anything we should be keeping an eye up from you?
Is there a website?
This essay you wrote is on C2C journalism.
C2C Journal, yes.
And all the stuff I do is posted on the Right to Probe website, righttoprobe.org.