Либерализм в России закончился?

Of the proposed federal Bill C-16, Peterson told the Toronto Sun: “These laws are the first laws that I’ve seen that require people under the threat of legal punishment to employ certain words, to speak a certain way, instead of merely limiting what they’re allowed to say.”

Peterson has also said he believes freedom of speech is under attack in Canada.

What’s the legitimacy to Peterson’s claims about Bill C-16? We fact-checked them.


First things first:

What is Bill C-16?

The bill proposes adding gender identity and gender orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act. This means that it would become illegal under the Act to deny someone a job or discriminate against them in the workplace based on the gender they identify with or outwardly express.

If passed, the bill would also add gender identity and gender expression to the Criminal Code in two ways:

Section 718.2 is about what principles should be taken into consideration when a court imposes a sentence.
Section 718.2(a) is about how a sentence should be increased or reduced to account for any relevant aggravating or mitigating circumstances.
Section 718.2(a)(i) speaks about offences where evidence shows that action was motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate based on social groups. This list already includes race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, and sexual orientation.

2. Section 318 is about hate propaganda.

Subsection 318(4) adds gender identity and gender expression to the definition of an identifiable group for the purposes of “advocating genocide.” This legislation would protect transgender and gender non-binary peoples from being a targeted group in an act of genocide.

The House of Commons voted in favour of the bill in October. Next, it will go before the Justice Committee.

What has Peterson said about Bill C-16?

“I think that some of the things that I say in my lectures now might be illegal,” Peterson says in this video (at 17:35). “I think that they might even be sufficient for me to be brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission under their amended hate speech laws.”

He says he’s concerned that something he says when he’s teaching can be “transformed suddenly into hate speech.”

In a panel discussion on TVO’s The Agenda in October, Peterson said not only would not using someone’s preferred pronouns be considered discrimination under the new human rights legislation, it would be a form of hate speech.

“That’s why I made the video. I said that we were in danger of placing the refusal to use certain kinds of language into the same category as Holocaust denial.”

In the same discussion, he said:

“If they fine me, I won’t pay it. If they put me in jail, I’ll go on a hunger strike. I’m not doing this. And that’s that. I’m not using the words that other people require me to use. Especially if they’re made up by radical left-wing ideologues.”

Analyzing Peterson’s claims

According to Brenda Cossman, a professor of law at the University of Toronto, Peterson is “fundamentally mischaracterizing” Bill C-16.

“I don’t know if he’s misunderstanding it, but he’s mischaracterizing it,” Cossman says.

(Brenda Cossman spoke to Torontoist about this, but you can find what else she’s said on the issue here.)

Cossman says it seems Peterson is trying to argue that the misuse of pronouns could constitute hate speech.

“I don’t think there’s any legal expert that would say that would meet the threshold for hate speech in Canada,” she says.

Our courts have a very high threshold for what kind of comments actually constitutes hate speech, and the nature of speech would have to be much more extreme than simply pronoun misuse, according to Cossman.

“The misuse of pronouns is not equivalent to advocating genocide in any conceivable manner,” she continues. “If he advocated genocide against trans people, he would be in violation, but misusing pronouns is not what that provision of the code is about.”

Cossman, who has participated in a debate with Peterson, takes issue with the way he uses the language to describe what could happen if he was found in violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code.

“If he was found guilty by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, he would have been doing something illegal but not criminal,” Cossman says. In other words, he wouldn’t go to jail. Jail is only a punishment for committing a criminal offence—a violation of the Criminal Code.

If Peterson was found to be in violation of the code, there are different possible remedies. He could be ordered to pay money, he could be ordered to correct the behaviour, he could be ordered to go to training, etc.