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Iconic Canadian Jordan Peterson has been sentenced to re-education camp, a punishment he must undergo if he wants to continue practising as a psychologist in Canada.

Jordan B. Peterson is a counter-revolutionary dissident who must undergo re-education.

That is the final ruling of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, the highest court in Canada’s most populous province. It leaves the clinical psychologist’s legal options exhausted.

The decision was handed down last Tuesday, forcing the University of Toronto Professor Emeritus to choose whether to keep his registration and career by sitting through designed-to-humiliate “social media” training — or keep his dignity intact and walk away from the profession.

The saga began in November 2022, when the College of Psychologists of Ontario responded to complaints about the political views Peterson had expressed on social media.

Among Peterson’s reported thought-crimes were operating out of the domain of his expertise by telling Joe Rogan his thoughts on Covid-19 vaccines; reminding those who believe the world is overpopulated that they are “free to leave at any point”; repeatedly hurting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s feelings on Twitter; stating that transgender activist Ellen Page “had her breasts removed by a criminal physician”; and offering his view that obesity — as depicted by a plus-size model on the cover of Sports Illustrated — was “not beautiful” and that “no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that”.

To be clear, none of the complaints made about Jordan Peterson were submitted by recipients of his professional services. They were lodged on the publicly-accessible Ontario College of Psychologist website — and apparently, mostly by activists located outside of Canada, many of whom lied about being his clients.

Having determined that his opinions were unbecoming of the profession, the board required Peterson to participate in — as he has described it — “a bout of mandatory re-education, of indeterminate duration, at my expense”.

Peterson sued the board in an effort to avoid the political reprogramming classes, arguing that his political commentary was not subject to the college’s authority.

His legal team argued that his fundamental freedoms, supposedly guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, had been violated — specifically Section 2, designed to protect his “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression”.

He lost the case in August of last year.

Peterson appealed the decision. But last week he learned that his appeal had been rejected. The court provided no reasons for its decision.

In a lengthy op-ed for the National Post, Peterson explained the choices now before him:

I can comply… confess the sins of my classic liberal/conservative or even Judeo-Christian political, philosophical and theological commitments, repent and silence myself — or even become a standard-bearer for the faux-compassionate woke cause, at least publicly. Alternatively, I can tell my would-be masters to go directly to the hell they are so rapidly gathering around themselves and everyone else, los[ing] my right to practice or even to describe myself as a psychologist.

As his colourful language indicates, Peterson remains defiant about his wrongthink:

I regret none of these actions. I would say exactly the same things again. Furthermore, I believe that time has been kind to my decisions: the reality of the idiocy that I pointed to then, whose reality was then denied by most, has become something increasingly apparent to an increasingly majority of people in the interim.

Moreover, Peterson has warned what his political persecution represents for the future of his country:

Canadians, mark my words: Your much-vaunted Charter of Rights isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on… Your right to free speech is essentially non-existent, as evidenced by the court decisions we are now considering. You have almost no real rights to property. Your rights to mobility can be taken away without consequence at any moment, as they were very recently. You can all-too-easily become the indentured servant of anyone you dare to hire. Your tax load is going to continue to increase, and rapidly. Your economy is predicted to be the worst performing of any developing country for the next three decades — and that failure will be trumpeted, positively, as the “degrowth” necessary to save the planet.

Whether he will attend re-education camp and make a public mockery of the process, or scorn the Ontario College of Psychologists and his career is a decision Peterson is still in the process of making.

What’s certain is how he feels towards his inquisitors.

“Congratulations, @CPOntario!” he tweeted on the day the decision was handed down. “You won this round.”

“Mark my words, however: the war has barely started. There is nothing you can take from me that I’m unwilling to lose.”

“So watch out. Seriously. You’ve been warned.”

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Republished with thanks to Mercator. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.