The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 442. BILL C-63 - Everything You Need to Know | Bruce Pardy & Konstantin Kisin

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in-person with Canadian lawyer Bruce Pardy and podcaster Konstantin Kisin. They discuss Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Bill C-63 (aka The Online Harms Act), what powers it gives to the government, what rights it strips from citizens, and why even Americans should be concerned.Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe, a law and liberty thinktank, and professor of law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is a lawyer, academic, columnist, and outspoken critic of the illiberal managerial state, fighting at the front lines of the culture war inside the law. Bruce writes for the National Post, Epoch Times, and the Brownstone Institute, among others, and serves as senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He has taught at law schools in Canada, the United States and New Zealand, practiced civil litigation in Toronto, and served as adjudicator and mediator on the Ontario Environmental Tribunal. The legal ground, Bruce has written, is shifting beneath our feet. The individual is losing to the collective. An ever-expanding bureaucracy regulates life from cradle to grave, including private behavior and speech, in the name of common good. The law has become discretionary, arbitrary, and unequal. The end of Western liberal civilization, as we have known it, is conceivable. Konstantin Kisin is a Russian-British satirist, social commentator, and co-host of the TRIGGERnometry Youtube show. He is also the author of “An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West,” a Sunday Times bestseller. He has written for several publications, including Quillette, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, and Standpoint, on issues relating to tech censorship, woke culture, comedy, and other topics, but he currently publishes articles on his popular Substack. Kisin made headlines in 2018 when he refused to sign a "safe space contract" to perform comedy at a British college and again in 2023 when he participated in an Oxford Union debate on the motion of "This House Believes Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far." His speech at the debate received viral attention and has been seen by over 100 million people around the world.  - Links -2024 tour details can be found here https://jordanbpeterson.com/events   Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/   For Bruce Pardy:On X https://twitter.com/pardybruce?lang=enRights Probe: https://www.rightsprobe.org/For Konstantin Kisin:TRIGGERnometry Podcast    / @triggerpod  Substack https://konstantinkisin.substack.com/Twitter https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisin?r...

Hello everybody. I have the opportunity today to speak with two guests, Constantine Kisen, who is co-host of the podcast Trigonometry in the UK, popular podcast. He is a speaker and a thinker who deals with culture war issues, mostly political, in so far as the culture war issues are political. My other guest is Bruce Pardee. Bruce is a professor at Queen's University, a professor of law at Queen's University in Canada. Recently,

the Trudeau woke mob has managed to extend themselves even further into the legal Netherlands with a new bill called C63, which isn't law in Canada yet, but is soon likely to be. And it is the most totalitarian Western bill I've ever seen by quite a large margin and in multiple dimensions. And that was my conclusion upon reading it and then my conclusion upon rereading it and rereading it again, because I like to make sure I have these things right. And I thought I'd talk to Bruce about it today

along with Constantine to see if my understanding of the bill is actually correct with regard to Constantine, how he sees what's happening in Canada reflected in say Scotland and in Ireland in particular in the UK, but also in England. And well, that's the terrain that we're exploring. So join us, it'll be quite a ride. So Dr. Bharti, I think we got in touch with each other again most recently because I was obsessing neurotically about a new Canadian bill, C-63, which seemed to me to be a real masterpiece of right-thinking, utopian, resentful foolishness.

And I thought it would be real useful to talk to you about that, to make sure that I understood it. But I thought I'd start our discussion, or we could start a discussion today, by going back into the past eight years into the legal domain in Canada to discuss Bill C-16, because that's now eight years ago. And in some ways, the bill that was at the origin of the current rat's nest of pathological legislation in Canada.

And so do you want to bring everybody up to date just to begin with or remind them or educate them about what Bill C-16 was and what the fears were at the time and whether or not those have been realized? Yes, sure. Thanks, Jordan. Well, C-16 is when you and I met. And you were concerned, as I was and as others were, not very many others, mind you, but

a few others, concerned that these proposed amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act, the inclusion of gender identity and gender expression, would have an effect upon speech, essentially to require people to use the preferred pronouns of other people. And frankly, the establishment types pooh-poohed the idea and called us fear mongers.

And of course, that's turned out to be entirely untrue. You were exactly right in your concerns. That kind of amendment had been made before in Provincial Human Rights Code, but this was the federal version. But that's in there now, and we have all kinds of pronoun trouble. But the present bill that you refer to, C-63, is C-16 on steroids. It's got three categories of bad in it. One's an administrative bad, one is a criminal code bad, criminal law bad, and the other one is, again, like C-16,

a Canadian Human Rights Act amendment. So let me do the last one first. And so what's the purported purpose of the law? Well, the purported purpose, it starts with the cover of protecting children from online harm. That's the first administrative law bit. And who can possibly oppose that? This is part of the beauty of the way they go about these things.

It's got great cover. And nobody in their right mind would want to come out and say, well, that's not a good idea. But what that kind of cover enables is basically a crackdown on the very idea of free speech. So let's just take the human rights aspect first. They are returning to the Canadian Human Rights Act, an old section that got thrown out, got repealed during the era of Stephen Harper,

when Harper was the prime minister. And it was causing all kinds of nuisance. It was the kind of section and other these kinds of sections also appear in the provincial codes. Every province and the federal government has their own human rights code. And these codes, not all of them, but typically include this kind of restriction on speech. You're not allowed to discriminate in your speech, is what some of them say. And this section basically says that if you use hateful speech that can be taken to vilify an individual or group,

then you will be acting discriminatorily and therefore in breach of the code and therefore potentially liable to any of the perceived victims and also potentially to the government itself. And one of the problems with the human rights regime is that complaints can be made very, very easily without a lawyer, without any costs. And because the Canadian federal government has jurisdiction over the internet, this section is going to authorize complaints of all kinds to be made against people who are speaking their minds online about any and everything.

So it's going to have a chilling effect upon speech, no question about it. You put that together with the criminal code amendments. Those criminal code amendments make it, well, they do several things. Here's one extraordinary thing that it does. It makes the sentence, the maximum sentence for any violation of an offense, like any offense, any offense in the criminal code or under federal legislation, any offense that is motivated by hatred

will carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Right. Now, the defenders of the bill say, well, don't worry, the judge isn't actually going to give you life. That's not likely to happen. And that may be true, but that's not the point. Don't worry, the judge isn't actually going to give you life. That's not likely to happen. And that may be true, but that's not the point.

If you don't mean it in legislation, then don't give the judge the power. If it's in the law, it's likely to happen. If it's in the law, it is going to happen sooner or later, and it is a signal about what is lawful and what is not and what the proper punishment should be and what is not. So C63 is a reflection of how, just one more reflection of how we are losing the law. We are losing in C63 the idea of free speech itself. You know that old quote that people always refer to from Voltaire's biographer, the one that goes, I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say.

I think the reason that that quote is trotted out so often is that when you come right down to it, most people don't agree with that. Everybody says they believe in free speech. Everybody, Justin Trudeau has said he believes in free speech. There's a guarantee of free speech in the Chinese constitution.

Right, right, right. It's very easy to say. And what they really mean is, yes, I believe in free speech, but. And it's within the but, where you can find out whether or not they really do believe in free speech.

So for my money, we shouldn't have a law that prohibits hate speech. Hate speech is ugly, but people hate each other. And if they're not allowed to say that they do, well, then their speech is not free. So- It's also a very difficult and challenging thing to make an emotion illegal. No doubt. And of course, the definition of what they mean

by hate speech is, I mean, it's impossible to tell. And it's going to be under the purview of the judge to decide in any particular case whether or not you've crossed that threshold. Okay, so let's talk about the devil in the details because the angel lurking over all of this is fundamentally we're protecting children from being exploited online.

Okay, so while there are children and they are exploited online and they deserve protection, so that's all and good. What steps are taken in the bill to actually protect children who bring exploited online? And then how do we segue from that to hate? Cause those aren't the same universe. These, as I said, there are three bits in the bill

and they're in the same bill, but they're distinct. So there's the human rights aspect, there's the criminal code aspect, and then this third aspect, which is primarily one that's aimed at the protecting kids, is an administrative regime that gives an agency the power, essentially, to supervise the online platforms. But it also gives them the power to make the rules. So we don't even know what the rules are going to be. Basically, it just gives the whole control of the thing

to a government agency, to the bureaucrats, to do as they think best in the name of- Right, so they're establishing an entirely new bureaucracy. Exactly, yes. With an unspecified range of power, with a non-specific purview that purports to protect children from online exploitation, a non-specific purview that purports to protect children from online exploitation, but has the possibility

of turning into a policing state for the internet per se. And this is often how the administrative state works, right, so this agency will not be policing citizens themselves directly, but they'll be policing the online platforms and the platforms will thereby censor the people who are using them. So it's a we're not doing it, we're hands off, we're two steps removed situation, but in effect, it is the government pulling the strings of the- Okay, so to what degree do you think that even the setup

of that new administrative bureaucracy, which has very extensive powers and very poorly defined powers, as far as I could tell when I read the bill, how much of that do you think is actually devoted genuinely? I know this is a judgment call, obviously, but you have to infer that from the legislation. Right.

If the legislation was honest and well-written, it would very specifically target the target of its purported reason for existence. Yes, yes. Right? If it was designed, for example, to produce a more general regime for online policing, to me that's what it looks like.

And if so, is that a consequence of poor legislative design? Is it a consequence of intent? What do you think's going on there? Well, what's going on there is what's been going on inside our law with respect to empowering the administrative state for a long, long time. So standard legislation now, at either the federal or provincial level, is authorizing legislation, meaning you pass a bill about a certain subject, and it might contain some rules in it, but it also contains the authority, the delegation of authority to the bureaucrats, to an agency of some kind, to the minister minister or to whoever, to a human rights commission,

to make policies or guidelines or regulations about certain things. And you can't tell by reading the statute what the rules are. And so you've transferred legislative authority essentially from the legislature to the bureaucracy. And this is not the bureaucracy stealing it. This is the legislature giving it.

Because they don't want the responsibility of doing it. And they don't wanna have to go through the minutiae figuring out what the right rules are. So they just shove it off into the back rooms. And this is the way the administrative state works. Now, it's like, it's like in state, it's a kind of collusion between the legislature and the courts.

So the courts, we have these three branches of government. Yes, we have the legislature, we have the courts, and we have the administrative state. And, you know, the division between them is cleanest in the American version of things. But we, in Canada and the UK, we have them as well. And the legislature and the courts are together supposed to be supervising what the executive branch, the administrative state, is doing.

Because the general rule is supposed to be the administration, which used to be the king, after all, can't do anything that's not authorized by the legislature. So these three things are checks and balances on each other. But now they're all on the same page. And the courts and the legislature are convinced about the need for this expansive, overwhelming administrative state. And so instead of supervising the administrative branch and the courts, instead of making sure

that they stick within their powers, the legislature's delegating to it and the courts are deferring to it. And so what we end up with- And the legislators don't have to take responsibility? Exactly. In any, in either way. Because we don't, and we can't find

who's responsible anymore, right? It's all sort of a mystery. It's a moving ball. And this is the way administrative agencies and government departments and ministries can be quote agile. They want to be agile. They want to be able to respond

to societal problems quickly. Well, if you're able to respond quickly, that means you have the legislative power in your hands and that nobody else knows exactly what's going on until it happens and sometimes not until after the fact even. So that principle of the rule of law that said the rule applies to everybody, both the ruled and the ruler. If you have an agile government making rules up as they go along, well, that means by definition, the rules can't apply to them because they have the power to change them whenever they

want to. And so we have agile governments who are managing us, managing society, solving social problems. We are in a managerial area in the law. Management, I would put it this way, management, the ethos of managerialism has supplanted the rule of law as the basic idea. Instead of the rule of law, we have rule by law now, which means that the law is nothing more than a tool for the government to use, to create, on a whim, whenever they need it to make you do this. And there was no better example of all of this

than during COVID. You had people standing behind microphones on a Tuesday afternoon saying, well, the rule tomorrow is going to be this. That's agile government. It means the legislature is not taking on its role of making the rules. And the executive branch has taken over,

making the rules, applying the rules, and enforcing the rules, all on its own. And that is not the way the Western legal system used to work. We have managerialism instead of the rule of law. Constantine, is there anything so far in Bruce's discussion that triggered any echoes about similar situations in the UK? Well, there's a couple of pieces that I would pick up on

that I think are relevant. And the first one is what you mentioned about the fact that the bill is quite expansive, yet only a small part of it appears to be dealing with the core issue, which is the protection of children. We had the online harms bill, which was ostensibly about the same thing, but in its original drafting included all sorts of other things completely unrelated to any of that. And it's not a surprise because what we have seen over and over in the UK is that quite

often the attempt to protect people from hate or whatever has actually nothing to do with the trigger that causes. So give you an example. Sir David Ames was an MP who was murdered by a terrorist. And the next day, all his colleagues went into Parliament and started talking in Parliament about how this shows that we need to tackle online hate. David Ames wasn't killed by online hate, he was killed by an Islamist. Likewise, more recently, Parliament actually, to cut a very long story short, suspended its own rules of procedure because

Labour Party MPs feared what would happen to them if they did not vote the correct way on the Israel-Palestine conversation. And again, following the Ferrari that broke out from that, the argument was, well, MPs need to be nicer to each other instead of dealing with the fact that there was a mob outside parliament who was intimidating the parliamentarians. So very often, it seems to me that a lot of the time, the mind has been made up that we need to deal with online hate, whatever that means, and then whatever happens is then used as an excuse to do that. Secondly- then used as an excuse to do that. Secondly, help please. It's got to be kind of in the nature of,

I think how tyranny unfolds in the real world. It's something like, there's a pre-commitment to a set of ideological axioms, and then whatever crisis comes along is just assimilated to that and used as a shoehorn to move it forward. And so, has there ever been a tyranny that's emerged spontaneously that didn't present itself to begin with as fostering security and improving civic health or public health for that matter? The Nazis were improving public health like mad throughout the

1930s. I mean, some of that public health improvement was genuine. There's a fair bit of it that wasn't, but the cover story was really solid, right? And it was often compassion, even with their, the whole Nazi, the catastrophic Nazi, Nazi policies of euthanasia that culminated in the Holocaust began with the language of compassion, right? So. Well, quite. And actually the thing that really revealed to me how much of this is ideological

was I was on a British program called Question Time, which you've been on. And what they do is they have a panel of guests and before the main show starts, they do one question for discussion that is guests. And before the main show starts, they do one question for discussion that is a warm-up that's not recorded. So people are a little bit more loose in that part of it.

And the question at the time was, Donald Trump had just been unbanned from Facebook. Was this the right thing to do? Whatever. And they came to me. I made the deeply controversial point that I think the president of the most powerful country in the world should be allowed to speak in public. This didn't go down well.

But what happened afterwards, they went to the left-wing politician on the panel, the Labour politician on the panel, you know, and she without missing a beat when they went to her, she went, we must have the safest internet in the world. And to a round of applause. And what that signaled to me, I think, gentlemen, is that we have completely lost the battle over the way the conversation is being had in being able and willing to say some harm is a consequence of freedom and that's a price that we're willing to pay. And I believe that until we get the conversation onto that footing, we're never going to win this argument.

Because if the argument is about, well, we must make people safe, then that will always necessitate more tyranny. By default. Of course. And so I see, certainly in the UK, I wouldn't speak for Canada or the United States, a complete failure of quote unquote our side to make that argument.

That we are willing to sacrifice some whatever safety means in the context of words and that's a whole bunch of BS in my opinion anyway. Whatever that means, that has a price and there comes a point where too much safety means too much giving up of freedom and we're not prepared to do that. We haven't been able to make that argument. I agree with you and I think one of the problems is that we approach that argument from the wrong end. And what I mean by that is I think we should start with the presumption that you're allowed to say anything you want, like anything you want. Now, what might the exceptions to that be? Well, here's one. If I go up to somebody on the sidewalk and say,

give me your wallet or I'll stab you. Okay, well, that crosses the line because now I'm threatening imminent violence. That's an assault. And it's okay for us to say, no, that's not allowed because it's violence. But if you start from that end, then you can say, well, are there any other exceptions?

And maybe yes and maybe no. If you start at the harm end, there's all kinds of harm you do just by speaking in ways that are clearly- Anything serious. Anything serious. If you're campaigning to be elected to something, then you are trying to do harm to your opponents. You want to make them lose.

Or if you are running a commercial enterprise and you want to outsell your neighboring competitor, you're trying to do them harm. And if you succeed, you will do them harm. Maybe they go out of business. That's legit. You are allowed to cause people harm by your speech. Harm is not something that's prohibited. We have to get back to the idea that we live in the world and people succeed and they fail.

And sometimes they fail because of what other people do. And too bad, because they're free. It's a free world. In a free world, you are going to be hurt by other people. Too bad. So let's go back here now to why, how we get from protecting children against online exploitation, which apparently necessitates,

as you pointed out, the construction of a very ill-defined, expensive, and highly autonomous new administrative system, not bound, if I remember correctly, by normal rules of evidence. Well, so, yeah, so, well, number one, that's absolutely true in the administrative realm, but it's also true in the human rights realm, right?

So these commissions and tribunals, I sat on a tribunal for a while. They look like sort of courts. If you go into the room, it looks like it's set up like a court room. You got a bench and somebody making a decision and witnesses and so on. But they're not courts because, well, for various reasons, they're created by governments, first of all. They're basically a part of the executive branch of government, even though they look like a court. But they don't adhere to normal rules of evidence. And to what extent they do on any particular occasion might vary.

It depends upon the rules of that particular tribunal. So, you know, people have called them kangaroo courts. Sometimes that's deserved. So, you know, people have called them kangaroo courts. Sometimes that's deserved. But it's part of the trend of taking decisions away from courts and giving them to the executive branch of government. But mind you, the courts haven't been all that good

in recent years either. You know, as I've been saying, we are losing the law. Let me put it this way. We've been talking, you've been saying, we are losing the law. Let me put it this way. We've been talking, you've been talking especially for a long time about how institutions in society have been compromised, been taken over by wokeism, by social justice, by critical theory, so on. Well, the law is an institution. It's one of these social institutions, one of is an institution. It's one of these social institutions, one of these public institutions. There's no reason why the law should be immune from all those factors as any other institution

like government, like universities, like public schools, like media. It's happening to the law too. It's happening. Now, don't get me wrong. In Canada, we have some terrific judges, and we have cases that go the way they're supposed to, and they're heard the way they're supposed to with the proper rules of evidence and the proper analysis. And so this is not a black and white thing.

But more and more, you are seeing from the courts evidence that the paradigm has changed or is changing from what a lot of people think in their heads is the way the laws work to what actually is the case now. And what's the case now? So let me give you an example. Yeah. So we have a section in our charter

that says that everybody is equal under the law. They're entitled to equal protection under the law, which is what the US Constitution says as well. But over the past 40 years of charter jurisprudence by the Supreme Court of Canada, that section now means that people are not entitled to equal protection, that is equal treatment by the law. They're entitled to equal or equivalent outcomes between groups.

So let me give you an example of the, perhaps the most recent important Supreme Court of Canada case on this idea. Many years ago, the RCMP created a job sharing plan wherein full-time members could combine with two or three other members to decide to work part-time. It was voluntary. People who work part-time, if you want to work part-time and you're working full-time, then we're going to allow you to do that. And we're going to give you a pension as well. And the pension, if you're part-time, will be calculated in the same way that the pension

is calculated for the full-time people, which is proportionate to the hours that you work. Okay? Voluntary. Over time, what happens? More women than men voluntarily sign up. Yeah. For the part-time work. Right, of course. And then at the end of the day,

that means that more women than men have lower pensions than the men who are working full-time. Yeah. The program is challenged under section 15.1 of the charter. Supreme Court of Canada says unconstitutional. By definition. By definition.

By definition. You can't have a voluntary equal program that results in different results for women than men. It's a little hard on the whole notion of voluntary there, isn't it? Exactly. Equal rules, voluntary program, open to everybody, treats everybody the same way, not constitutional. Oh boy. When was that ruling? 2019, I believe.

Oh yeah, that's a rough one. Okay, so how did we get from protecting vulnerable children from online sexual exploitation with a gigantic, unnamed bureaucracy with indefinite rights and virtually no responsibility to whatever the hell hateful speech is. I mean, first of all, we might ask ourselves, Constantine, you can weigh in here too, is like the whole notion of hateful speech, that's troublesome one for me because there's an obvious element of subjective judgment in it, that's troublesome one for me because there's a obvious element of subjective judgment in it, like a clearly obvious one. And the problem for me is always,

as soon as someone talks about hateful speech, isn't so much whether or not there are forms of speech that are detestable because you haven't lived, if you haven't listened to somebody say something detestable, perhaps sometimes ingest, which is a very interesting variation of that possibility. But who decides that it's hateful on what grounds? And why do you decide the people who are making that judgment? And then that problem's very much amplified, like very much amplified. If you open the door, as this bill does,

to anonymous denunciations. Right now, everybody, including every school child who's like older than three, and maybe even at three, understands that there's almost nothing worse than a snitch. And all children are wise enough to know that even if you are being bullied at school, let's say, it has to get pretty damn brutal and bad before going to report it to the authorities is acceptable or justifiable.

Now, you know, you can debate about the conditions under which that should or shouldn't occur. My point is that even kids know that even under dire circumstances, there's almost nothing worse than a snitch. And yet these bills, and we certainly know from places like the Soviet Union, just exactly what happens, or East Germany, what happens when one-third of the citizens, which was the case in East Germany, become government informers. It's like, trust's gone, the worst people have the upper hand, it's a complete bloody catastrophe. Now, in Bill C-63, you have a concatenation

of these problems, like, okay, now you, now hate speech is going to be constrained and it can be identified by anonymous informants. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit, if I got that right first of all. Well, yes, but let's get back up to your children point. Yeah. Right, so part of the problem is the premise.

And the premise is widely accepted because we accept this premise generally now in society because this is where we're at. But the premise is that the government is responsible for keeping people safe, including the children. And that's ignoring the best mechanism we already have to keep children safe, which is their parents.

Right? It's assuming that this is what the state is for. If you went up to somebody on the street, anybody, at random, and you said, you know, do you think we should have an expansive administrative state? And by that I mean, you know, all these government people who do all these things. They probably look at you like, I don't know what you're talking about.

That's what government is. That's what government's for. What do you mean? What does government do other than solve problems for society by making these rules and doing policy and so on. And we've lost the proposition that we've made a choice to have this large, overwhelming government tell us what to do in place of all of the other things

we used to have, individual decisions, families, communities, churches, all of the non-public institutions, and I mean government institutions. Government just rules the day now. And we're debating about whether or not the government has done this job properly or not well. Well, the problem is the government's doing the job. The government, for my money, shouldn't be in this business.

They shouldn't be in the business of regulating speech for hateful impact. Why not? Well, because if we think we live in a free country, if the government's in this business, then we're wrong. So your point is something like that the cost of having the government offer all potential services, say, in relationship to desire and safety is that you lose all your autonomy and your freedom. Well, let's back up. What rights should we have is where we should start.

What rights do you have? If you're a free person, what does that mean? I think it means that other people can't coerce you, can't interfere with you, can't take your stuff, can't use force against you. That means you're free. That means other people can't do it. That means the state can't do it. It means the state can't do

That's the the sphere of freedom that you have That means that the government needs to do one job Which is to make sure other people don't coerce you and use force against you and take your stuff job done if Somebody says something you don't like and causes you psychological angst, too bad. The person is free and so are you. Put up with it, it's part of the world. As soon as you get governments overstepping that zone

that I just described, you start to move away from that conception of freedom into a different kind of society altogether. And we are so far along that path that, I don't know how we can call ourselves a free country or free people with a straight face. It's just transparently- Bill C63 certainly is one of the pieces of legislation

that make you question that. Oh, absolutely, but Bill C63 is just one step along the way. So let's go back to the courts, because part of the fault of C-63, it's a government bill, so it's a legislative problem. But the courts, the Supreme Court of Canada, already said essentially that this kind of restriction on speech is constitutional.

And in fact, in C63, they've used some of the language, the Supreme Court of Canada said, was okay. So the Supreme Court of Canada took this charter we have, which says everybody has the right to free speech, and said, well, sure, everyone has the right to free speech, but not this. Well, they used that against me. Of course they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course they did. I'm a direct beneficiary of that line of reasoning. I have freedom of speech,

but it's subject to reasonable limitations. And what are those? Well, they're whatever any reasonably constituted bureaucracy deem they might be. That's right. That's basically what they hold me to. But that makes a mockery of the whole idea of having a constitutional right. Yeah, yeah, of course. I think that was kind of the point. This is the point. The point is that our charter of, people think of our charter of rights as the beginning,

as the foundation of our legal system. And it's not. It's a mere gloss on legislative supremacy and now judicial supremacy. Because the court can decide what those rights mean however it wants. Yeah. And more and more, they are less robust individual rights and more and more justifications for the administrative state

to do things in the public good. So people are putting much too much faith, weight on the fact that we have a charter. They think it works in the same way as the American Bill of Rights, which has fared much better over time than ours has as much older as well, of course. And much more foundational. Well, yes, but even in the US, though, I think we've all made a mistake. In the Anglo world, we've made a mistake. And it's a very, very old mistake. To go back even to the time of the Magna Carta.

So the original problem was the king. And the king, depending upon the king, of course, but kings were tyrants. Their word was the law. And then over time, with great difficulty, Magna Carta and then the Civil Rights Act of 1688 and the American Declaration of Independence and so on, over time, what we did was take power away from the king and give it to the legislature. And that's good, right? Because the monarch is hereditary

and the legislature is elected. So power to the people, great. Except that over time, legislatures showed that they can be tyrants too. C63 and all kinds of other things that have happened through the ages. And so the Americans first came along and said, we're going to try and fix that too. So they created a bill of rights, which limits what legislatures can do. But to do that, they had to give power

to the courts. So from the king to legislature, from legislature to courts, and now the courts are screwing it up. And the courts are giving power back to the administrative state, which is the king. So here's the mistake we made. We've been just moving power around from king to legislature, to courts, to administrative state.

We've been moving it around from place to place instead of taking power away. And if you take power away. How about instead of adopting responsibility for? The problem is that in order for that to work and in order for the rule of law to work the people in power have to adhere to the idea. So the rule of law worked work, the people in power have to adhere to the idea. So the rule of law worked for quite a while.

Like there were some periods when it was great. Yeah. Right? So the rule of law is a restraint on people with power, on legislatures, on executive branch and even on courts. And as long as the people who occupy those positions believe in the idea, it works. But our people in those positions do not believe in the idea anymore. They have thrown the idea out because it prevents them from doing what they think their job

now is, which is to manage stuff. Because management requires agility, it requires responsiveness, it requires you to get in there and muck about with your hands. And that is not the way the rule of law works. The rule of law is this idea that the legislature makes these grand rules based upon important principles that defines the relationship between state and individual.

And we can all tell what it is, we can all go read what they are, it's in the books, the law is there for everybody to know. That is not the way it works now. Now the law is just for the people in power to control and understand and issue by edict whenever it suits them to make sure that the little people are doing what they're supposed to do. So the rule of law is in direct conflict with what all our rulers think their job now is.

Well, there's no glory and virtue to be obtained in applying the law that someone else passed, right? Exactly so. But coming back to your point, Jordan, as well about who decides what hate speech is. I mean, we have this in the UK where for certain offences the evidence that a, the languages are well in, but a non-crime hate incident, which is when you haven't committed any crime, but nonetheless this will be recorded by the police on your record and potentially used against you in employment

interviews and so on, is based on your self-perception of what motivated your offender who afflicted you in some way to do what they did. So if you were to make some sort of joke at my expense and I concluded that it was to do with my immigration status or ethnicity or whatever, I could then say, well, this is clearly a hate incident that you've committed. Right, and the rationale for that would be, well, who would know better than the person who was directly affected and who's to question that? Than the victim, you might say. Well, and the answer to that, if you have any sense, is, well, what if the purported victim is a manipulative psychopath? And the general response to that is, well, all those people are just victims too.

Right? And so, well, so this will get us back into the hate discussion. How do you define hate? Well, you just said, you allow the purported target of the hate to define it. And what they do is they say that they feel hated. So it's a second order of hate. And what they do is they say that they feel hated.

So it's a second order form of evidence. The primary evidence in principle is their subjective emotion, but you don't have access to that. So you have to accept their record of their subjective emotion. And you accept that in a manner that isn't questionable. There's no higher authority than their say so. And the problem with that,

it's a variant of the problem with the informants, is that that only works, well, it would never work. Let's get that clear. But that only works in the ideal situation where people have perfect understanding of the motivation of others, which they don't, and also they're not lying. The problem with that definition of subjective harm

is it lays the gates wide open to the Machiavellians and the psychopaths. Yes, yes, and you're also touching on two other important things, right? So number one, unlike most criminal offenses, which require intent of some kind, the intent is not on whether the speaker meant to be hateful. Yeah, it's not relevant. Intent is not relevant.

Right. That's terrifying. And also the other thing that's not relevant is truth. If you speak a true fact that is interpreted as a hateful fact and has this effect on somebody, well that's not going to be a defense either. So you are essentially one of the effects of this kind of legislation is to say you are not allowed to speak the truth because that truth. Regardless of intent. Regardless of intent and regardless

of historical fact. We are outlawing an effect. Yeah, right, right, right. Absolutely. Okay. And to expand that even further, with comedy, it's interesting because of course Scotland where some of the most ridiculous legislation is being passed, is the place which hosts the biggest arts and comedy festival in the world, the Edinburgh Fringe. And to your point about truth, well, you don't even have to be saying something true. At this point now, they've passed a bill, which means that comedians could be investigated

for jokes they make. Now, that is a level of detachment from context and reality that is even a level above simply or someone made a true comment. What if I said something sarcastically on stage as a comedian? And what's interesting is comedy seems to be being very particularly targeted, but nobody goes to Macbeth at the theatre and says, oh, I went to the theater and then this guy went crazy and stabbed his friend. No one says that, but with comedy for some reason,

the character on stage is increasingly being perceived as having the opinions that he's jokingly saying. And so that's another level. So what- That's right, there's no distinction between the role and the actor. Quite. And what's interesting if you abstract even further

from that, if you've watched Game of Thrones, the scene where you really truly discover that King Joffrey's gone mad is when he cuts off the tongue of the jester in his court. Yeah. And this symbolism is- Yeah, it's perfect. It's been used throughout history to portray the final conversion into tyranny of a ruler.

That's why there was gestures in court. That was one of the ways everybody could tell that the king wasn't a tyrant. Is that he could tolerate his own gesture, his own fool, or welcome him, or find him amusing. That would be best. And this is something that happened when Vladimir Putin first came to power in Russia. Under Boris Yeltsin, there was a kind of liberalization.

There was an opening up of, because in the Soviet Union, you didn't make fun of the political leaders. Nothing was funny in the Soviet Union. Nothing, quite. And that was true. The jokes that people told at the kitchen table were funny, but not in public, of course. But under Boris Yeltsinilton there was an opening up,

and we had this amazing TV show, which was the equivalent of the British spitting image. I don't know if you had the similar thing. Did you have spitting? No, no, no, I know of it. Yeah. And it was basically puppets portraying the different political characters. And the first thing Vladimir Putin did when he came to power was to shut that down. So historically throughout literature and

other things if you're looking for symptoms of tyranny the shutting down of jokes and humor is right at the top of that list. Comedians and canaries in the coal mine. Comedians and automobiles, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, yeah, well they're so emblematic of personal autonomy. Every tyrant hates the automobile, so even though they all want to have one. Okay, so let's delve into the hate issue a bit more too, because in Canada, we have protected categories of hate. Right? So it's a hate crime if it's,

I want to make sure I've got this definition right. It's a hate crime if it can be shown, if your utterance can be shown to be discriminate against a protected class. Well, yes. So, so. It's not merely that you hurt people's feelings, right? It's that you have to hurt them for a particular reason. Well, it's a discriminatory, sorry.

So we have these two realms. We have the human rights realm and we have the criminal realm. And we've had hate speech restrictions in our criminal law for a good while. So we have these two realms. We have the human rights realm and we have the criminal realm. And we've had hate speech restrictions in our criminal law for a good while. And they're rarely used. The human rights provisions are much more frequently used because they're much less serious and much easier to trigger, much easier to complain about, and they don't go to a court,

they go to one of these tribunals, right? But one of the problems is the dovetailing of this hate speech discriminatory practice idea, along with the equality problem that I was just describing before, right? So as with any rule, this rule is going to be applied and interpreted in one direction and not the other. What I mean by that is, if you go around saying that

white people are hateful or privileged or colonists or whatever the case may be, that's pretty hateful. If you say that all, you know, if you're white, you are X, you're being stereotypical, and you're making a blanket statement about all these people who are white. That's not going to be entertained as hate speech because of the way that our equality law has been interpreted, which is, and this is one thing that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal said fairly recently. They said, people who are white cannot be discriminated against.

Yeah, yeah, I really... But you're not a protected group. They are not a protected group. Some animals are more equal than others. Exactly so. So this kind of law, the hate speech law, is likely to be interpreted in that way, which is, oh, you can only utter hate speech against protected groups.

If you utter hate speech against those other people who are not in one of those groups. There's no hate speech against the oppressor classes. It doesn't qualify. And by the way, this isn't theory. No, no. This is, so in Scotland, for example, they passed this bill on the 1st of April. Of course they did recently. And in the first week of it being passed, there were more reports of hate speech

than there had been in the previous several years. And the reason was that many, many people reported a speech given by Hamza Youssef, the first minister of Scotland, in which he was being openly racist against white people. Right. And of course, this which he was being openly racist against white people. Right. And of course, this isn't considered a hate crime. And you know, it was the BBC interview, Hamza Yousaf, where the interviewer and he himself

laughed sort of, you know, almost gratuitously. Oh, how silly. You know, people would say, of course, this is complete nonsense. And frankly, he said, I'm not aware of anyone who's not on the far right who would report this as hate speech. It's an absolute case of some animals are more equal than others. And the law is, I'm sure you would agree, is written specifically to create that situation. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, not originally written, but now interpreted. And now this idea has taken off. Well, look, once you create the idea of protected groups, then some animals are

inevitably more equal than others, right? Okay, so now we have a dynamic where in order for there to be hate, there has to be an oppressor-oppressor dimension. Yes. And so you identify the dimension. It could be sex, it could be race, it could be ethnicity, it could be gender expression, could be gender identity, because those were added. Then you have a situation where the oppressed end

of that distribution can accuse the oppressor end of that distribution of hate speech, but not the reverse. So that's basically the game that's being played here. Okay, so how does Bill C-16 tie into Bill C-63 then? Well, one way is this as far as I'm concerned. So one of the things I was very concerned about back in 2016 was that I looked into gender expression because that became a new category of grouphood, essentially in Canada,

insofar as that was a protected class. So a protected class is a reality that's now got legal protection. So that's pretty damn real as far as the law goes. But I couldn't distinguish, find any distinction whatsoever between gender expression and fashion. In fact, most of the definitions that I found, mostly from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, because a lot of this mess came out of them, was the explicit insistence that gender expression

was fashion because, well, because gender is, because gender is nothing but fashion. It's a social construct anyways. It's a role that you play. It's a disguise that you put on. It doesn't reflect any deeper underlying reality. Well, okay, that's complete nonsense, but that's okay. Why is that a problem in this case?

Well, if fashion criticism, there's no limit to what constitutes a hate crime if fashion criticism is one of its valid Manifestations right clearly there's almost nothing I could do to you that would be less Harmful than you know having a good laugh about your trousers sure What you but one thing that you're referring to they're alluding to is the weaponization of human rights Yes, so so if you go to an earlier conception of human rights, you can describe them as the right not to be abused by your government, you know, not to be thrown in jail without

due process, not to be censored for this and that, not to be tortured. Those are human rights. to be tortured. Those are human rights. But today, human rights consist of the rights of some people in groups to insist that other people in groups embrace their own decisions. Yes. Right? Or else. So if I decide that I'm a man and you don't call me by my pronouns, then you are guilty of a violation of my human rights. That's a very new idea. That is not where we started with this.

That's a weaponization because it means that human rights are a zero sum game. If I have human rights, that means you have less because I can insist that you behave in a certain way. This is about individuals now being able to determine how other individuals will behave. It's incredible. Okay, so now we have another conjunction

of pathological enabling here that I'd like to dwell on for a moment. So one of the things we alluded to earlier was the fact that Bill C-63 also opens up the door, it facilitates, enables, and the out rate encourages anonymous denunciations. Now, the good thinkers would say, well, you want to put as few barriers

in the way of the oppressed seeking redress for their victimization as possible. But that omits one very important detail, which is that if you can denounce for zero cost, then you weaponize denunciation, and you put an immense, you put immense, you put the entire power of the state in the hands of anyone who wants it, right? And it's anonymous. And so to what degree in Bill C-63 do you get to face your accuser, right?

You don't even know who it is. So they can, you can be accused, regardless of your intent, regardless of the factual reality of your utterance by people who do not have to identify themselves or take any responsibility whatsoever if their denunciation turns out to be false, who are rewarded for doing so, who you do not get to confront.

Well, at that point, I don, who you do not get to confront. Well, at that point, I don't see you have a loss system at all, you have rule, you don't even have rule by mob, you have rule by the worst elements of the mob, and the worst elements are gonna be those who will come crawling out of the woodwork like mad to weaponize their resentment by using the state's power they now have at their disposal, right, and rub their hands in glee at every opportunity to do that. There will be specialists

in denunciation in no time flat. Okay, so that goes along with that. So that goes along with that. Well, the anonymity of the informant and the pathology of the... When you divide the world into oppressed and oppressor, you fail to notice that in the hypothetically oppressed class, there are going to be those who use that narrative as a way of justifying their vengeance. They're not good people who are victims.

They're people who are using that story to get exactly what the hell they want from you right now or else. And certainly the Human Rights Commissions in Canada have been weaponized to that degree. I mean, in my situation, since we'll make it personal, I suppose, for a moment, anybody in the world can bring out a complaint against me for any reason, right? And it's at the complaint doesn't have to proceed,

that's at the decision, judgment. It's the judgment of the Ontario College of Psychologists, the regulatory board that determines whether or not that complaint can proceed. But that's like it's an entirely political decision. But this is part and parcel though of those trends I was describing earlier, which is to give these administrative bodies,

the professional regulator being one, the human rights tribunal being another, the deference to do as they think best. And yes, you can take, as you know, you can take them for review in front of a court, but the court tends to defer to them and they have the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court about the charter anyway. And so you put those two things together and it basically means that these administrative bodies

have a great deal of latitude to do basically whatever they think is right in the public good. Yeah. Right? And so that means you don't have a rule of law. Well, you certainly don't have any, if you're a professional in Canada and you think your charter rights to free speech mean anything, you're sadly deluded

because they certainly don't. Okay, so let's go to the next most fun thing about Bill C-63. This is the part where it moves from sort of jaw-droppingly incomprehensible to absolute theater of the absurd. I had to reread this section like three times before I could believe it was true.

I thought I must be misunderstanding this. I had this same experience with Bill C-16, I guess, when I read about gender expression. I thought, surely this can't mean fashion. Because it certainly looks like it means fashion. There's no way it means fashion. It's like, nope, definitely means fashion. And purpose means fashion. It's like, nope, definitely means fashion. And purposefully so.

It's like, okay, fair enough. Okay, so what have we got on the absolutely absurd side of things? Okay, so this is my understanding and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe you can help me weed out any inaccuracies in my representation. So my understanding is that I can go to a provincial magistrate and I can say that I have,

I fear that someone I know may commit a hate crime, let's say this year. I have good reason, the good reason would be my fear. So that would be my proclamation that my emotional reaction to this person's possible misbehavior is real. Not even that the threat is real, but that I'm afraid that it might be real. And that magistrate can act on that by,

well, the penalty laid out in the bill, as far as I can tell was, well, if you're the person who is eliciting the fear, then you get to have an ankle bracelet on for a year, and you can be essentially confined to your house, and the court can determine who you can talk to and who you can't talk to and they can also require you to have your bodily fluids monitored. This is one of the elements of the bill I didn't understand at all. It's like where the hell did that come from? So they could

put restrictions on your right to consume alcohol, for example, I suppose marijuana will probably still be okay as long as the liberals are in power. But anything that would in principle heighten the probability that you might commit to hate speech. And so, and the penalties, well, that's basically that. That's basically that part of the bill. Now that doesn't seem, that's a pre-crime, right?

It's a pre-crime. It's a pre-crime, right? It's a pre-crime. It's pre-crime. Now, it's not like this is a brand new idea. So there are already provisions in the code that allow for pre-crime solutions before a crime happens in some circumstances for some crimes if a court is satisfied that there is a threat.

But what's happening here is they've taken that idea and they've combined it with this speech idea to create the scenario you're describing, which is, you've got to be kidding me. It is now possible for a magistrate to put me under house arrest because of something that he thinks I might say. That's where we're at.

Right, right. So the other circumstances you're referring to, I presume would be something like someone has made repeated threats of domestic violence that appear credible. Correct. That's right. A credible threat of actual violence, for example.

Which in itself though constitutes a crime, doesn't it? Well, if you committed it. But if I threaten you directly with a crime. If you make the threat, that's a crime. Yes, correct. Right, okay. Okay, so that's right. So in that situation, the threat itself is also a crime.

Well, it could be, so you could have an actual prosecution for the threat, but if there are circumstances where for some reason that there hasn't been a threat, but there's still a danger that the evidence shows exists, maybe because there have been previous crimes committed by that individual against that individual, and the victim of those crimes is concerned because it looks like it's gonna happen again.

There are circumstances under which the court can do this kind of thing. But the combination of that power with this kind of... of action. Bastard child of those two laws. Exactly. Yeah. Very well put.

Yeah. Okay, so I've got that right. That is how this... Oh yes, yeah. And these can also be brought forward anonymously. Well, well, see that's the, the anonymous power is most noticeable in the bill under the human rights part. So the criminal code aspect is the way it's always done.

And sometimes in that situation, I'm not a criminal lawyer, but as I understand it, there are circumstances in which complainants can be protected from exposure to the alleged perpetrator. But the real anonymity problem lies within the human rights tribunal part of the statute. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. But so, if I can step back for a moment. Part of the lesson in this, I think, is that the people who have put this together

and are supporting it have an entirely different vision of what they think the law is for and how it's supposed to work. Like, this seems outrageous to us because we still have an idea about the old paradigm, like how this is supposed to work. And they don't have that idea anymore. This is a project to make certain kinds of behavior illegitimate, like actually illegitimate. And the fact that it happens to be speech, no concern of theirs because it's illegitimate.

Speaking a true fact, it was going to have an effect on people, is illegitimate. They are changing the paradigm. They are changing the, they're reframing the whole enterprise of the law. Yeah, this is a very fundamental transformation. This is something surface. Not surface. It goes to the root of the way the law works.

And those of us who are clinging to the old idea and thinking, well, this is an aberration. It's an outrageous aberration, but it's an aberration. It's not an aberration anymore. This is becoming the disease that the law is now subject to. Everything is, the law is shifting beneath our feet. Claudine Gay wasn't an aberration of universities. No, she's emblematic of the universities.

That's right, and in the same way that she was president of Harvard. In the same way that she was emblematic of the university. That's right. And in the same way that she was president of Harvard. In the same way that she was emblematic of the universities, this is becoming emblematic of the law. Okay, so you speak about this. Where's the rest of the lawyers? Well, I'm not alone. Yeah, right.

I'm not alone. Right. Our good friend Jared Brown has been speaking out on this ever since. No, that's two. I know. And I have handfuls of friends that do the same, but it's only a handful.

And it's pretty small. If you compare that handful and the numbers of people who are on this page to the numbers of lawyers overall. I mean, it's a tiny wee slice. Okay, so the same problem obtains on the psychological end of things. Except maybe there are fewer of us, even. Yeah, there aren't nearly as many as there ought to be.

Right, and there's almost none who've stood up against so-called gender-affirming care, even though I know perfectly well that all of them who are even remotely educated know that every single bit of that is a lie. Yes. Okay, so, but the logical suspicion that might arise in the mind of anybody watching this is,

well, if it's like you and two other people on the legal side and it's Dr. Peterson on the clinical side, and maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Why do you think you're not the aberration? I mean, the problem I've always had with you fundamentally, so I met Bruce under very interesting circumstances, so I went, I offered to go to Queens University and debate anyone at the law school about Bill C-16,

which I thought was a pretty good offer on my part, because I'm not a lawyer, and I thought there must be some lawyer at the law school who'll jump chance to give me a good savaging, because what the hell do I know? And the only one who stepped forward was Bruce. And I don't think I knew at the beginning of that. Maybe I knew.

I leaned over to you before we started, and introduced myself, because we hadn't met before. Yeah. And I said, I just want you to know, I agree with you. Yeah, right, that's how it happened. I'm playing the devil. So there was one who stepped forward, and he was playing devil's head.

And I always stepped forward because nobody else would do it. Right. Right. And I wanted to give you a platform to say what you wanted it to say. Yeah, more indication of your unreliability. So I played the part. Yeah.

And it was good fun. But that's where we're at. Okay, so let's go back to the same issue. So why the hell aren't the more people in the legal community cognizant of this danger and willing to speak about it if it's so fundamental, which it seems fundamental. So like, what the hell, what's going on here?

So there's lots of reasons, but let me just talk about a couple. The problem is fundamental, and it's been around for a long time, much longer than it seems. I mean, CIL 63 is not a long time. C16 is not a long time. But in the big scheme of things, these trends have been going on for a long time. C-16 is not a long time. But in the big scheme of things, these trends have been

going on for a long time. So for example, so we have a huge access to justice problem, meaning that if you are involved in a dispute of some kind, that the cost involved in getting a lawyer and then getting access to a court within a certain period of time, numbered in years, almost impossible. Unless you're very rich or very poor. Access to the courts is very unlikely. Now, why is that? Well, partly because that in order to get a dispute resolved, you have to go to a court.

And what I mean by that is, if we had laws that were clear, right, then you wouldn't need to go to a court because everybody would know what the law was and you would know what would happen when to go to a court, because everybody would know what the law was, and you would know what would happen when you went to a court. Every time you go to a court, it's a crap shoot. You don't know what's gonna happen.

So you have to go to the court to find out what's gonna happen, which means we need more courts, and more judges, and more time, and more lawyers. And it's not clear because of all of the things I alluded to earlier, which is we don't just have broad principles in our law, we don't have statutes with rules in them,

we don't have cases that are consistent from case to case to case to case, we have one-offs, we have regulations, we have guidelines, we have lots and lots of rules about everything, and you still don't know what the story is, because the laws move over time, and they won't tell know what the story is because the laws move over time and they won't tell you what the law is right now and you don't know where the law is and who's making it.

This whole thing's a mess. And this state of things has existed for quite a while, quite a while. It's the ocean in which lawyers swim. They're the fish in the water. They don't see the water. It's just the life that they are used to. They think their job is to make their way through that ocean for that client.

So that's sort of the run-of-the-mill lawyers. Well, it's not just the run-of-the-mill lawyers. It's even, I mean, look, we have a lot of good lawyers who are very skilled at what they do, but they're skilled within a certain system, the system that we have. And questioning that system is not part of the job of being a lawyer in the normal sense. Yeah, fair enough. Right?

Yeah. So it's not about competence. It's about having the time and energy and perception and caring to- How many experts in constitutional law, the history of constitutional law are there in Canada? Oh, dozens, hundreds. So what's up with them? Well, they largely embrace the growing story. The narrative...

How did that happen? Well, it has partly to do with legal education. The law schools, for the most part, have become captured, like all other institutions, by a certain kind of ideology, critical theory, social justice, and so on, that we know very well. Right. So really, once that's got the universities, that's pretty much game over. A lot of this trouble can be traced back to the universities.

That's where the social justice critical theory stuff began. When it came over from Germany, you know, where it started between the two world wars, and then you can trace that back to Marxism. I mean, it's a whole long story, and I'm not a sociologist, but you know the story better than I do. But yeah, the universities are a main source of all the trouble. And they've been graduating generations of students

who have these ideas in their heads. And not just lawyers, but people of all kinds. Who now occupy the professions and the governments and the public schools. They certainly make up the managerial class. Exactly so. And the managerial class is our elite. People think that our elite are the widely successful entrepreneurs, and there are a

few of those. But our actual elite is the managerial class. The ones who decide- The ones who don't like getting honked out in Ottawa. Exactly. The ones who decide how society is going to run. And those people are, and their interests, the interest of those individual people are in having this system carry on.

And that includes a lot of lawyers. So I was talking, I mentioned the problem I had with you, and the problem I had with you is that you don't make a very convincing right-wing crackpot. Well, I mean that, like, You mentioned the problem I had with you, and the problem I had with you is that you don't make a very convincing right-wing crackpot. Well, I mean that, like, you don't fit the mold. Because the logical thing to do, to assume, if someone is standing up against the consensus,

generally speaking, is that they're wrong. Now, sometimes they're right, right? And that's're wrong. Now, sometimes they're right, right? And that's the problem. And you know, you've always struck me as, let's say, suspiciously reasonable, right? In the way that the demagogue types just aren't. And so, and you've already explained why your view on such things, which you did make evident, and in a really minority fashion, I'm trying to

think of other lawyers that I knew, certainly university lawyers, there was no university lawyers, no members of faculties of law at universities had anything to do with me in Canada. It was you and that was it. You know, and you played devil's advocate, which I thought was very funny once I figured out what was going on. But okay, so why do you think you can see this?

Why are you willing to see this? And yeah, yeah, what distinguishes you in your training, your outlook from the other lawyers who apparently aren't or won't? Oh, I don't know. I can't tell you that. I'm not inside their heads. I don't really know. I've always been suspicious of government. I was suspicious of government authority

ever since I can remember. I think when I was in public school, I thought how awful to have this person at the front of the class who's not that smart and yet has power over me. So some underlying suspicion of authority as such. Sure. Right, right, but you still went off through university.

Well, I wanted to go to law school, not first and foremost to be a lawyer. I wanted to go to law school to find out what the rules were so that I could tell people who wanted to interfere with me what the rules are, they had to back off. Right, I see. And what I discovered was, there are no such rules.

There are no such rules, as it turns out, that prevents government authorities from backing off, because the whole system is designed to give them authority to do that. So how did you manage with that attitude to have a successful career in academia in faculty of law? I mean you've had a very successful career. You have a very, you're actually not cancelled even. That's true. Yeah. So how do you survive at Queen's or even thrive? And how did you manage to have this attitude and also manage a career in that environment? You have to, I think you have to enjoy the exercise

of trying to figure things out and then point it out, even if the people you're pointing it out to aren't listening. I know that doesn't sound like very much. Well, yeah, but that usually just gets people canceled. Well, not if you do it in a certain way. Yeah, that's what I'm asking. What's the way?

You can never make it personal. It's not about that person over there who thinks X. They can think whatever they want. See, I'm an actual libertarian. I think it's fine if people believe what they believe and they wanna do what they wanna do. I'm totally fine with that. If their opinion is diametrically opposed to mine, I'm totally fine with that.

The only moments when I have trouble with it is when they start to step on my toes. But as long as they're not doing that, I'm cool. I'm cool, right? And this is one of the things I think that distinguishes. And you know what? Libertarian has become a bad label because Libertarians did very, very badly during COVID.

Very badly. They dropped the ball horribly. And it turns out they have a lot of strange ideas. So I tend not to use that label anymore, but I understand what I mean. But there's a huge divide between the Libertarianminded people or the liberals, I can use that word, liberals, the original classical liberals, and the conservatives. And in a sense, you're standing astride the chasm between these two groups, right?

Because the conservatives have a very, a lot of them have a very clear idea about what they think is right. Fair enough. People should have an idea about what they think is right. And the classical liberals know what they think about the law. And the mistake, for my money, that the conservatives make is that they fail to distinguish

between two different questions. The first question, which is entirely legitimate, which is, what should people do? How should people behave? Okay, let's hear how you think people should behave. Totally fine with that. The next question is not the same question, which is, how must people behave? There's a conservative inclination to want to take their philosophy and make it into law and to make people do what they think is right.

Now. Right, and that's often what made the conservatives, what would you say, Yes. undesirable to the more classic liberal types. That was the place that put those two camps at odds. Yes, and it's one reason why I think the progressives today, the ones who are now in power, why they carry such an animus against conservatives. Because there is some kind of a memory there. Of force. Of force when the conservatives were ascendant. Here's the kinds of things that you did.

You outlawed gay sex. You centered us about pornography and obscenity and heresy and sedition and you prohibited alcohol and the conservative record on freedom is not very good. And so from a libertarian or a classical liberal point of view, they're missing the boat. And yet the conservatives and the liberals, the original liberals are the two forces trying to work together to push back on the woke.

Yeah, trying to figure out how to do that. But their analysis of what's wrong is completely different, right? So if I can put it this way, and I'm sure you've heard conservatives say this too. So from a classical liberal point of view, the problem that the woke has created is too little freedom. You know, they have us under their thumb.

They want us to do this and do that, use pronouns, not to say this, hate speech, yada yada yada. Okay, not enough freedom. I've heard lots of conservatives say, no, no, no, the problem under the woke is too much freedom. You have the freedom to change your gender. You have the freedom to say you're this and not that. You're the freedom to do this.

That freedom should not exist. So we agree about the fact that the woke is a problem, but we disagree about what the problem is. And our solution is divergingly- Well, that's gonna make us weak too as- Absolutely. Okay, so let me offer two contradictory responses to that conundrum.

Yeah. So for a long time, I, by temperament, have this libertarian twist, which is you can go to hell in a handbasket your particular way if you so desire, and that's, you know, that's within your bailiwick. Have at her. Yeah. But I've rethought that to some degree in the aftermath of the gender affirming debacle. Uh-huh, yes, right.

So for a while I was thinking with regards to so-called gender affirming care, I'm not exactly sure even what terminology to use. It's, it's what? It's surgical mutilation essentially. Hormonal manipulation and surgical mutilation. Okay, should you have the right to do that to yourself as an adult? Yes. I thought, sure, why not? Knock yourself out. But you know, I'm starting to wonder about that.

There's two ways you can approach that. One would be, well, you might be able to request it, but that doesn't mean the surgeon should be allowed to provide it. And I think they've actually showed their absolute inability and unwillingness to police themselves in that regard. That's just clear.

And then it's also the case that you don't know the limits to what people are willing to do to themselves to stand out. And that is, there are no limits. So you saw the recent case in Canada, I presume, where we have a diaper fetishist, because that's a fun class of people, who's just pursuing his own thing after all,

who wants to have a neo-vagina created somewhere down below, while maintaining his penis intact. And he couldn't find anyone skillful enough to perform that particular act of butchery on him in Canada, found someone in Texas, and then sued the Canadian government for paying for it.

Right. That's the key. And they're going to. That's the key. That's the key for me. So, alright, so at some point I'm sort of thinking, no, we're done with all this. We're just not doing sex reassignment. I don't care if you're 90. There's no surgeons that have the right to do that to another person. So now, and is it a slippery soap argument?

Well, for me, it's sort of, for me, it's more like I've just had enough of this argument. I saw where this went. We started with this in 1960, something or other, with the first sex change operation, which I think was a dubious enterprise back then. And the cascading consequence of this has been like the worst medical practice in maybe ever?

Probably not, you know, because ever is a long time and there's been some dark things done. But in terms of mass assault on children, it's certainly in the top two. But children are different. Right, right. But that's the thing is that,

at what point does the perversity of your desire to go to hell in a handbasket, your own particular way, start to actually become in and of itself a social threat? Okay, well, yeah, but let's put the kids aside because the kids are a special case, right? And then you got the problem of, you know, who gets to decide, the parents or the state. The easiest case to resolve and find agreement on are with adults. Let's ask this question. Is there anything that an of age adult, full adult, competent, should not be allowed to do to themselves if they're not imposing upon other people, not coercing them, not interfering

with them, not taking their stuff? And my answer is nothing. I can't think of anything. Now that does not mean that I think the state should be involved as in running the healthcare system. I don't think they should be funding it. I don't think they should be providing services. I mean, we shouldn't have, from my mind, we shouldn't have a public healthcare system. But so if you take that away, it's like, in other words, you should be allowed to go,

if you can find a doctor to do this strange thing that you want done to yourself, and the doctor agrees of his own free will, and you agree of your own free will, and you're willing to pay the doctor, as far as I'm concerned, the fact that I think it's weird and strange and wrong and harmful, I'm not the king.

So I don't think my opinion about it has any relevance to it. And that applies to gender surgery, it applies to suicide, it applies to prostitution, it applies to drugs, it applies to anything. Because it's not my life. It's their life and I don't want to impose my. There's also the danger there of deciding

who's going to make the judgment. It's not like it's a risk-free prohibition. There's no prohibition that's risk-free. Right. See the problem I'm having with that more and more, Bruce, is that there's kind of no end to the number of monsters who are going to crawl out from underneath the woodwork. Sure, I'm sure that's true.

As we've seen, that's going to get worse. And so, you know, you say, if you can find a doctor who will do that, I mean, I could, I would respond if I was making the contrary case is that there are things that if they were actually doctors, they wouldn't do. Right.

Right. And so we already saw in Canada, I think the removal of two fingers. That was a month ago. Could be. Right, because the person had a form of body dysmorphia and claimed to be at suicide risk unless the fingers were removed.

Well, let's take an easier one, then. How about assisted suicide? Now, there are three models of assisted suicide. The conservative one is no, can't do that. It's not moral. Can't. Outlawed. No assisted suicide. The progressive version is the one we have in Canada, which is it's publicly funded. The government provides it, directs it, supports it, promotes it, pays for it. And it comes with a free rainbow unicorn. Kill yourself, we'll help you.

And they encourage it by not giving you timely service on other things that you really need so that your life becomes miserable. And so the best way out is to kill yourself. That's untenable, okay? I am not advocating that at all. The third version is the government has nothing to do with it. If you want to kill yourself with the help of a doctor,

that is your business. And I might not approve, but it's got nothing to do with me. Well, that's kind of where we were before the assisted suicide. Sure. Practically, that's kind of where it landed. But the conservatives will not put up with it. Well, that's kind of where we were before the assisted suicide. Sure. Practically that's kind of where it landed. Right, but the conservatives will not put up with it.

Yeah, yeah. Right? So if I'm in my old age, and I have some kind of difficulty, and I'm not having any fun anymore, I want to be able to kill myself, and I do not want to be under the thumb of conservatives any more than I want to be under the thumb of the woke.

And this is the problem that we have between these two philosophies. The conservatives portray themselves sometimes as virtue people, I've called them that, virtue people in the sense that they put virtue before freedom. And there's something to be said for that. So here's the way the argument goes.

In order to be truly free in your own heart or your own mind, you have to be virtuous in your own heart. You have to understand things. You have to have discipline. You have to understand the good or some notion of it. You have to have faith in something in order to- Change the purpose of freedom. Exactly.

You have to have meaning so that you don't give into your base desires and your animal instincts. Okay. But that's not about the law. And the conservatives, a lot of them anyway, say, no, the law should make you behave virtuous. Yeah, enforced virtue. Enforced virtue.

And my answer to that is, enforced virtue is not virtuous, it's obedience. In order to be virtuous, you have to decide, you have to have free will to decide between dark and light. And if you don't have the choice, then the fact that you are made to behave in this way. Right, so part of the reading of your more libertarian argument there would be,

I guess part of the reason that I've often always believed that people should be allowed to go to hell in a handbasket in their own particular manner is because you're gonna learn. You are gonna learn. That's right. And then you'll know. Absolutely, and that's the libertarian version

of responsibility. Yes, right. Right? Well, the state's not gonna come in and rescue you. This is really your choice. Well, and then you actually have the knowledge. Absolutely. There is perhaps, and by the way going to come in and rescue you. This is really your choice. Well, I think you actually have the knowledge. Absolutely. There is perhaps, and by the way, I come, I think, as closely from the, as much from the classical liberal position as possible on this. But I think there is a test case that's currently happening on the streets of every major city, and it certainly feels like the United States.

Right. Where I don't know if this is necessarily accurate exactly, but it sort of feels like the libertarian argument has been taken to its logical conclusion, ignoring elements of reality. So that's why you have mentally ill people on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York and elsewhere, because they've got to be free.

We can't put them in a mental health hospital, because that, and those hospitals used to be terrible, objectively, right? So getting people in a mental health hospital because that, and those hospitals used to be terrible objectively, right? So getting people out of the tyranny of that institution, I guess, was a good thing, but now they're on the street taking drugs. And the question is, is that freedom? Because I don't know that you are free when you're hooked on friends and— Well, define freedom for us, though. Well, it feels to me like part of the conversation around freedom has to involve an element of agency.

And then the question is, do you have agency if you're so, let's say, traumatized or so addicted, or whatever that is, that's causing you to effectively be unable to live a human life, right? If you're living in Skid Row, I don't think that's what freedom looks like. I'm not sure that's true. What are they learning exactly? See, that's what sparked my thought. What are they learning? Well, I would suppose that they are learning that the choices that they made didn't work very well.

Well, and some people do hit bottom and bounce up. Yes, they do. You know, I mean, many people, even though we don't know how to help people recover from alcoholism, really, many people do. And they often do after having their, after rubbing their face along a very rough sidewalk for a very long period of time.

It's certainly not a pleasant form of freedom. I mean, I'm also not suggesting that, you know, there's a simple solution to the problem of having deinstitutionalized. Well, see, this is my point is I think that... There may just not, there may not be any, that the thing is, the question is whether there's a better solution. If you have an IQ of 50, do you have freedom?

Yes. Sure you do. If you are not being opposed to Bombay, other people or the state, then by definition you have freedom. The fact that you are not able to exercise it in the same way as the next guy doesn't mean you're not free. It means you're free to make mistakes. Listen, free freedom has good and bad. It enables you to sometimes be successful and sometimes fail. And that's part of the package. You can't make it just one way and not the other way because that's not what it is.

Well there's another dimension to the conversation about homelessness and drug addiction and so on, which is I think it's very difficult to argue that that is consequence-free for the rest of society. So we recognize that there are limits to our freedom when we start to impact on others. And that's a very good example, I think, where that trade-off seems to me to be being got wrong.

But there is a progressive idea that has become mainstream and mainstream, especially amongst conservatives. And that is this, that the state is the saviour. That is, if you want to solve a problem, it has to be the state to come in to fix it. I mean, this is an idea, a professor at Hillsdale College put it this way when he was talking about Woodrow Wilson, who was the first progressive American president. Woodrow Wilson, he says, changed the idea from the government as servant to government as savior. As in, if we're gonna fix our problems, it's gotta be the government as servant to government as savior.

As in, if we're gonna fix our problems, it's gotta be the government who does it. Well, yeah, with the corresponding assumption that if there's a problem, that's evidence of government inadequacy. Right, right, right, exactly so. And part of the reason we think that so thoroughly now is that all those other institutions

that used to exist are gone because the government came in and pushed them all out, right? So when you have people on the streets, the only place to turn to is the state. And that doesn't mean it's a good call. I think it's a terrible idea. Because everything the government touches goes to rot. Even stuff that's already rotting. I mean, part of the reason those people are there, to start with, is because we have an overwhelming and expansive administrative state.

And so to suggest that that's going to fix it, no, it's not going to happen. No, I certainly wasn't suggesting that. But I do think it's an interesting case for the libertarian argument where it starts to break down. I used to be pro-decriminalizing all drugs. I think increasingly that conversation about how certain things impact your agency is important. Try that with alcohol though.

Because alcohol, alcohol, so part of the rationale claimed for prohibition was that alcohol, you know, can lead to very bad societal effects. Which it can. Which it can, for sure. For some people it can be devastating. And yet for a lot of people, not so. So are we going to ban alcohol so as to avoid the catastrophic effects on some people? No.

No. No. No. Same with prostitution. Right? Now, sometimes people who are in favor, again, tend to be conservatives, say, you know, we should ban prostitution, make it illegal, because sometimes prostitution happens without consent and people get into dangerous situations and there's sexual assault. And that's true.

But that is also true with just plain old sex. Where there's no transaction going on financially, it's just an encounter. You get sexual assault in that situation too. Are we going to extrapolate and say, well, because that happens just in ordinary sex, we're gonna outlaw that too, so as to avoid the downside scenarios. No, no.

If you have two people who have agency and consent to a transaction, who is gonna come in and say, sorry, you can't do that? Not me. So one of the things that I've been trying to do in my lecture tour that's germane to the point that you raised about,

if there's a problem, it's indicative of the insufficiency of the state. Yeah. Right, sort of as an axiomatic presumption is, well, if that's not the case, then what's the proper replacement presumption? If there's a problem, who should be doing something about it?

I'd like you to tell me what you think about this. Because this isn't exactly a libertarian freedom from argument. It's more of a responsibility argument. I'm never sure where the libertarians sit on that side. If you can see a problem, that's your problem. And you might say, well, how do you know that? And the answer is something like, well, it bothers you.

So there's a new Cardinal, Cardinal Newman, who is famous for his defense of the idea of God. And he, there's a long line of theological speculation that one of the ways that the spirit of the cosmos makes itself manifest is in the voice of conscience. It's a very old idea. It goes back to the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, who was the prophet who defeated the nature gods,

which is very interesting. He replaced the God of nature, which is back in full force now with the notion that the spirit, the ancestral God of the Israelites was the still small voice within, right? It was conscience. And if you see a problem in the world and it bothers you, that's a direct indication that you have something to do.

It's part of, I would say it's part of the landscape of meaning that reveals itself to you. It's part of your responsibility. You might say, well, what can I do about it? Which is a perfectly reasonable objection, but the right response to that is that's your problem. And you might say, well, why should it be my problem? And one answer to that is well, you need something to do. So you know, well, seriously, like,

because there's, but I think, but I think this has a very simple answer. My simple answer would be this. You know, you asked me, is that my responsibility? And my answer would be morally, maybe so. Legally, no, no, no, and I'm not saying that at all. And that's all I'm saying. All I'm saying is legally. I am not making a moral argument here at all about the drugs or anything else. I don't think it could legally be made your responsibility.

It could be made your obligation. Well, you could be, well, if you're talking illegal obligation, that's your responsibility. Yeah, okay, fine, fine, fine. But this is the conservative argument about the prostitution, right? It's that if you see a problem that not only should you do something about it,

you should make a law that does something about it. If you see prostitution going on, we can't have that. This is the finger wagon stuff, right? Yeah, and it's not effective. It's not effective. No, it's also, it's not even the most, it does push people away from conservatism, especially if they're young, and it's actually not the most. But it's also, it's not even the most, it does push people away from conservatism, especially if they're young,

and it's actually not the most. But it's also arrogant. It's arrogant in this sense. It assumes, it's a top-down thing. It's like, well, there's a few of us. It's the religious hypocrite. There's a few of us up here who understand what's best for everybody.

So we're going to make the rules for now. Which sounds a lot like the progressives. Exactly my point, Exactly my point. The progressives and the conservatives of this ilk anyway have a common idea. I mean, now. Yeah, right. The particular virtues they believe in are completely different. But the idea is the same.

If you give me enough power, I'll fix it. Exactly. Yeah. It's just that the right people have to have the power. Right. Whereas your argument, I think, one I'm very sympathetic to, is we should have laws that protect our basic rights and let's get on with it.

Yeah. Well, and then what I've been attempting to suggest to people is that it's in taking up that mantle of problem personally that you find the meaning of your life genuinely. That's actually where it lurks. But that's also what protects you against tyranny because if everyone did in their local environments what they're called upon to do,

there wouldn't be a lot of unsolved problems lying around for the tyrants to point to, freak out about, and mop up. Right. Right. So there's a real, in the Old Testament story, in the Exodus story, there's a dynamism between slave and tyrant, right?

Yeah. One needs the other. One produces the other. The slaves call for the tyrant to emerge, and the tyrant to emerge and the tyrant becomes contemptuous of the slaves and ever more tyrannical. It's a dance.

And the way that's technically solved in the Exodus story is it's solved by Moses' brother, father-in-law, who sees the Israelites trying to make Moses into a new Pharaoh, because they're all slaves and whining about and being victims and pining for the tyranny. And he basically tells them that,

he tells Moses to make a hierarchy of distributed responsibility, right? To break his people up into tens and hundreds and thousands and so forth, all the way up to the top. To allocate responsible decision-making down as far down that hierarchy as possible, right? And to only adjudicate, speaking to Moses, those disputes that can't be adjudicated lower.

Well, why? Well, Jethro says there's two reasons for that, is the first is, well, you'll stress yourself out because no one can take the responsibility for governing an entire people. So it's just not bearable and you'll turn into a tyrant and that's not good either. But worse, and this is the more subtle point, is that if you alleviate the people of that responsibility, They'll just stay slaves. Yes, absolutely. Well, I think that's exactly right.

And so, that's a more responsible libertarian argument. Well, you need to be able to learn from your mistakes, which is why you should be able to make them. You still have that problem of, well, how big a mistake till you start taking other people out. And that's something I think that's subject to continual negotiation, but I don't think there is a substitute

for a distributed hierarchy of responsibility. And so what that seems to imply is, well, as marriage decays, so people abdicate responsibility for that, as the nuclear family decays because people abdicate responsibility for that and local community organizations and the church. All of that abdicated responsibility

is vacuumed up by the state. Yes. Right. Yes. Exactly. Right. And in fact, I would say that the state is largely responsible for the disintegration of those things in the first place.

Yeah. Right? So you cause the problem and then you vacuum up with the left of it afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a, I wrote a paper with Jonathan Paujo for the Ark on the symbolism of the whore of Babylon and the scarlet beast in Revelation. And so it's an image of the end times, right?

And the end times has two archetypal elements. So the scarlet beast is a blood-colored beast. It's the blood-colored beast of the state, basically, multiple heads. So it's a degenerate state, because a unified state has one head. Like seven heads, all male, pointing in different directions, right?

So it's a degenerate patriarchy, all right? And on the back of the scarlet beast, which is the degenerate masculine spirit, is the Whore of Babylon, which is the degenerate feminine spirit, because, you know, one sex doesn't go wrong without the other sex going wrong. What happens?

Well, in the degenerate state, female sexuality is commodified. Right? Right, right. And so you get that dance. Right, right, right, right, right, right, sure. Yeah, but it's worse, you see, because the story has a particular ending.

The beast kills the prostitute. So what the implication there is that the state will, as it disintegrates, it offers more and more hedonistic gratification as enticement, but it ends up destroying all gratification whatsoever, because it can't sustain the promises that it offers. Which brings us all the way back to the very beginning. Until there's no bread.

Exactly. That's right. Exactly. And it brings us all the way back to the beginning because as all of these institutions that traditionally used to regulate relationships between human beings crumble, we need more and more laws. Whereas in the past, if Barry said something offensive, well, Barry's a bit of a dick, what's for dinner? Now, it's, well, Barry's a bit of a dick, what's for dinner.

Now it's well Barry's a bit of a dick, we've got to legislate because we can't have... Phone the hate crime unit. That's right. Because we are not self-regulating all of those relationships and now we need daddy to come in. We need departments of social work to come and be the worst possible foster parents imaginable. That's right. All right gentlemen, we should probably draw this to a halt. For those of you watching and listening,

most of you know that I generally continue these interviews for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side of things. And I think what we might turn to in this particular occasion is solutions, potential solutions, which we didn't have an opportunity to discuss, concentrating more on laying out the apocalyptic landscape, so to speak, particularly in Canada,

but in a manner that's like illustrative of what's happening, I would say generally in the West. So thank you, Dr. Pardee. Thank you for participating in that, Constantine. All those of you who are watching and listening, your time and attention is much appreciated to the Daily Wear Plus people for making this possible. That's also much appreciated.

Film crew here in Dallas, thank you for your help, guys. That went very well. And drop over to the Daily Wear Plus side if you wanna see this continue. Bye bye. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Bye bye.