https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mbAKQrClN8A
Earlier today, Conrad Black wrote an article in Canada’s National Post, and the article was called Jordan Peterson Speaks for Those of Us Who Refuse to Follow the Great Liberal Death Wish Now for those of you who don’t know who Conrad Black is, I’ll read you a little bit from his Wikipedia profile Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Cross Harbor, was born on the 25th of August 1944 He’s a Canadian-born British former newspaper publisher and author He’s a non-affiliated life peer Black controlled Hollinger International, once the world’s third largest English language newspaper empire which published The Daily Telegraph in the UK, The Chicago Sun Times in the US, and the Jerusalem Post, Israel as well as in the National Post, the newspaper that he published this article in in Canada and hundreds of community newspapers in North America I’d like to start this by thanking Lord Black for his support, but I would also like to point out that despite his supportive stance, there are things that are important that he didn’t get right and I think it’s reasonable to draw people’s attention to them So the first thing I’m going to do is just read what he wrote, and then I’m going to comment on it a little bit and I’m going to do so in a manner that I hope does indicate that I do appreciate his support and I’m not trying to be frivolously critical in any sense and then I want to read a response that a lawyer has prepared as well just so that you understand, all of you who are listening, understand this a little bit more clearly Conrad Black writes I have just endured the sobering experience of watching the always very intelligent and professional Steve Paikin chair a panel about the transgender controversy that centers on University of Toronto professor Dr. Jordan Peterson I had an appearance on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin a couple of weeks ago where the pronoun issue was discussed Black states I had vaguely followed the story as it percolated up in the press much of the frothings in which must usually be taken lightly It was, I fear, a piercing glimpse into what great and venerable statesmen of my youth such as Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Louis Saint Laurent called days that I shall not see I did not until now grasp the fine balance between gratitude and wistfulness in their invocation of that phrase As a young person I thought it the license of the great to engage in histrionics and I now claim it as the right of lesser yet aging people such as myself Black states of being male or female and I think this is where Mr. Black makes an error in his column Yes, it’s absurd That’s why he says that people have sagely ducked it or otherwise been spared exposure to it because it’s been a ridiculous controversy and I think there’s no question about that It’s surreal, I found the whole thing surreal But, you know, back in the 1930s when the Nazis first made their appearance on the scene everyone thought they were absurd too and I concluded that that meant that they were trivial and they were not trivial despite their absurdity and this is not trivial despite its absurdity In fact, its absurdity I think in some sense points precisely to the fact that it is anything but trivial because something that is on the surface of it so absurd is being made so much as being made of it It’s being classified, the refusal to use pronouns for example is being classified as a hate crime That’s not trivial, although it is absurd Now, Z for he or she and Zer in place of his or him are the sticking points but what is accumulating behind these imbecilic distinctions is quite sinister The tape Steve Paikin ran of Dr. Peterson being reviled and shouted down and physically intimidated at the University of Toronto was distressing and we may be on the edge of a defining moment in our jolly and progressive Canadian civilization Dr. Peterson sees it as a matter of freedom of expression and believes that others do not have the authority to require him to address them in a newly hatched vocabulary devised to oppress the quote gender binary conventional practice while his opponents profess to believe that in refusing to do so he is committing a hate crime punishable by human rights commissions or tribunals These hoary headed monsters, and Black is referring to the human rights tribunals whose egregious trespasses on freedom of expression in the name of despotic political correctness has been heroically and successfully contested by my friends Mark Stein and Ezra Levant and others does not prescribe imprisonment under the articles invoked by Dr. Peterson’s assailants but a fine is possible Yes, and we might also point out that it’s a very large fine that is possible In New York State, for example, failure to use the requisite pronouns brings with it a maximum fine of $250,000 In any case, Conrad goes on to say Now, this is another place where Black confuses absurdity with triviality He believes that my response to this is an overreaction and that’s part of my refusal to bring this preposterous issue to a quiet end He’s suggesting that I’m exaggerating and that as a consequence he’s implying that I’m at least in part responsible for blowing up something that’s merely absurd into something I’m blowing up the importance of something that’s merely absurd Anyways, he says Yes, well, we’ll see about that Okay, so the first thing that I want to tell you, listeners, is here’s the powers of the social justice tribunals I pulled this from their own statement about their powers So this is 1.6, this is section 1.6, powers of the social justice tribunals in the relevant Ontario legislative document 1.6, you have to listen to this very carefully The tribunal will determine how a matter will be dealt with That’s a matter brought before them, say a matter of discrimination or harassment defined by their policies Their appalling policies and may use procedures other than traditional adjudicative or adversarial procedures Okay, so I’m going to repeat that The tribunal will determine how a matter will be dealt with and may use procedures other than traditional adjudicative or adversarial procedures Okay, that’s 1.6 1.7, in order to provide for the fair, just, and expeditious resolution of any matter before it The tribunal may a. Limit the evidence or submissions on any issue So you can consider that for a while And I’m going to skip to w. Take any other action that the tribunal determines is appropriate Now you’ve got that They’ve actually written a clause into the policy documents that describe their powers that states they can take any other action they determine as appropriate Well then I would say that’s gone beyond absurd Or I would say that’s still absurd, but it’s by no means trivial and my sense that this is extraordinarily dangerous legislation is correct whereas Mr. Block’s insistence that I’m exaggerating the seriousness of the situation is incorrect Here’s 3.13 from the same document Where a party has been notified of a hearing and fails to attend, the tribunal may e. Take any other action it considers appropriate So that’s a duplication of the previous statement, roughly speaking where the Human Rights Tribunal takes to itself the power to do whatever it wants, fundamentally Now, there are some other things to consider Notice that these tribunals, including the Ontario Human Rights Tribunals, there’s 8 different tribunals They’re called Social Justice Tribunals Now that’s not an accident Consider what that means The term social justice is a code for political correctness and equity oriented political philosophy People know that, this is why the radical left activists are parodied as social justice warriors Now the Social Justice Tribunals operating in Ontario are quasi-judicial instantiations of the politically correct authoritarian creed and they’re designed by their designers to operate outside of the normal parameters of the law This is why they attribute to themselves the powers to use, quote, procedures other than traditional adjudicative or adversarial procedures Think about that It means that the standard British common law approach to the issues brought before the tribunal can be suspended Now why would they do that? Well, it’s rooted in politically correct, the underlying politically correct Marxist and post-modernist philosophy You can consider it this way If the fundamental presupposition is that the Canadian civilization, as well as Western civilization in general, is a corrupt patriarchy then what’s the problem with suspending its rules of procedure when you’re pursuing a justice that’s higher than anything that’s represented inside that tradition? Well, that’s exactly what they’ve written into the laws attributing to themselves power So you can think for yourself and decide just exactly how dangerous that is Now, back to black Dr. Peterson’s approach is so inflexible and so entirely righteous without much using the powerful weapon of ridicule that is available to him he may not attract the full range of support the virtue of his arguments and his personal courage deserve It’s a funny sentence because I can’t tell exactly The terminology that my approach is so inflexible that I may not attract the full range of support the virtue of my arguments and my personal courage deserve I don’t really think that I’m being inflexible I’m merely refusing to use the language that’s made up by politically correct, radical, left-wing authoritarians and that’s not inflexible, it’s reasonable Why would I use that language? I don’t agree with the philosophy I think the principles upon which it’s predicated are not only factually incorrect, scientifically incorrect but malevolently motivated and extraordinarily dangerous That doesn’t make me inflexible And so the terminology there is wrong It makes me committed to not using that language But on the substance of the issue, black continues, he is of course correct We must always be wary of the majoritarian tyranny which has preoccupied many civil libertarians including the principal authors of the Constitution of the United States especially James Madison and Alexander Hamilton who agreed on little else But the transgender community is less than 1% of the population as I have written many times in many contexts over many tiers Rights do not exist only for the numerous and a litmus test of legitimacy of a society is its observance of the rights of minorities including especially minorities of one The jurisprudence of all great democratic nations is replete with famous cases to this effect Captain Dreyfus, Dr. Samuel Mudd who was prosecuted for treating the assassin of Abraham Lincoln though there was no evidence that he was involved in the plot and even the British Archer-Shea affair made famous in the drama The Winslow Boy The Peterson affair is threatening to cross the double white line All people must be treated with respect equally But there are only two genders, two sexes Our species and all other mammals are gender binary Well I would like to point out to Mr. Black that that’s now illegal under Bill C-16 and its associated sister legislation and that might be absurd as I mentioned before but it’s not trivial Idiocy written into the law unfolds into the idiocy of enforcement and obedience and that’s not trivial and as we will soon find out Black continues All people may state their sex and if that is contrary to physical appearances that remains their right but no individual or group has the right to invent a new vocabulary and a new co-equal gender because of a state of ambivalence or confusion about which sex they are Yes Mr. Black, they do have that right That’s precisely what Bill C-16 instantiates and it’s already written into the human rights codes of the majority of Canadian provinces It’s also an act of hate speech to dispute it So individuals and groups have precisely the right to invent new vocabularies and not one but many co-equal genders up to 70 in New York state for example Black continues Every legally competent individual has a perfect and absolute right to declare their sex but not to create a new legal status and legally require the use of a new vocabulary for those in flux between the only two sexes we have to be mercilessly binary throughout their finite number maybe Well, the same argument applies there They do have the right to create a new legal status or many new legal statuses and to legally require the use of a new vocabulary that’s already written into the law, they have that right and I would say as well that Conrad Black’s comments on that are also now illegal The individuals in that condition may change their registered sex each day if they wish I will not treat anyone who declines to address them in terms that debunk the gender binary world as guilty of a hate crime punishable by imposable fines About six months ago I wrote a column in this space about the acceptance by the Supreme Court of Canada to hear an appeal of judgments from well-reasoned local courts A request from a British Columbia band of native people numbering 900 who claimed that 25 years of consultation was constitutionally inadequate over a proposed ski area that an elder of their band was supernaturally advised and after a lapse of some years told his people would drive off the spirit of the grizzly bear that was central to the religion of that band I concluded the column with a shabby polemical device that I only rarely employ, a rhetorical question In this case, are we all mad? Of course we are not, and we still live in a country where people can self-identify as they wish, even if it diverges from apparent realities But we are almost at the point where people who decline to be legally forced to acknowledge the more implausible applications of this right are subject to persecution by social justice warriors and quite conceivably the government We’re not almost at that point, Mr. Black, it’s already written into law We are terrifyingly reluctant to impose normal rules of free discourse over the agitations of people who are using an imagined unlimited latitude on sexual self-description to gag, dictate to, and prosecute reasonable people exercising their rights to free expression It is another manifestation of which the hypocritically respectful lamentations about the Stalinist despot Fidel Castro are another end parentheses of what my late friend Malcolm Muggeridge called the great liberal death wish The great majority do not want to go long for that right and this time the great majority must be heard and obeyed Alright, so I told you what I thought about Mr. Black’s comments and now I’m going to read a legal opinion about them Mr. Black, I regularly read your articles with interest I have interest in many of the subjects that you seem to devote attention to including US history and presidential politics and behaviour I have further enjoyed your recent appearances on CNN with respect to the Trump phenomenon I was motivated to write to you in this instance with respect to your article in the National Post today mentioned in the subject line of this email I would like to ask you to consider a right not to detract from your main thesis regarding Mr. Peterson and those aligned against him but rather to identify a potentially missed point of importance In your article you call into question the volume of Mr. Peterson’s rhetoric my words, not yours, as being disproportionate by identifying that imprisonment is not the punishment that he faces by disregarding the gender neutral ideology and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and as being disproportionate by the gender neutral ideology and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal and any resultant orders from a human rights tribunal were to issue its standard order, it would necessarily include some variation of the following or anti-biased training. If Mr. Peterson were to breach these orders for example, by refusing to participate in the training and guess what, I would do the typical recourse of the tribunal is to pursue a contempt of court which inevitably results in prison Section 19 of the Statutory Powers Procedures Act Ontario states that an order of the tribunal is an order of the superior court Section 13 of the Statutory Powers Procedures Act says that the tribunal can pursue a breach of its own order by bringing an application to the divisional court superior court. On that application, the divisional court employs rule 60.11 of the Rules of Civil Procedure which states that when faced with contempt of a non-monetary order of the superior court the court can order imprisonment for an indefinite period and fines. The civil courts send people to prison for breaches of non-monetary injunctions non-defamation orders with some regularity Furthermore, human rights tribunals have a history of imprisoning persons for breaches of non-monetary tribunal orders. This happened most notoriously under the recently repealed Section 13 hate speech provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Code of which Mr. Levant and Mr. Stein quietly performed yeoman service for all Canadian citizens in having repealed While the likelihood of prison remains highly contingent and remote, it does depend to a great extent on the benevolence of the public servants that staff the tribunal and the courts. Keep up the good work. D. Jared Brown Lead Counsel. D. Jared Brown Professional Corporation. Toronto, Ontario www.brownlaw.ca Well, so there you have it. That’s the pathway to imprisonment for failure to use the proper pronouns. And so let’s not be confusing absurdity with triviality. And I appreciate your support, Mr. Black, but I’m afraid that you’re treating this issue in some regard as if it’s… as if at least elements of it are beneath contempt and that it’s being blown out of proportion. And I’d like to say as clearly as I possibly can, that this is not being blown out of proportion. This is the state of… current state of Canadian law.