No, Peterson is Not Being “Persecuted” For His Politics

Over at National Post, we have one of Peterson’s lawyers arguing that the Ontario College of Psychologists is “succumbing to the woke mob”, and persecuting him for his politics. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

A casual review of the complaints against Peterson reveals gems expressing clinical opinions about other people, invalidating trans people for their identity (and someone’s existence should never be “politics”), shaming people for their appearance, and so on. 

I’ve already spent some time explaining the ethical and code of conduct analysis that is likely going on here from the OPC perspective. That isn’t the purpose of this column.

Levitt and Marshall are trying to frame this as a “freedom of speech issue”.  (This is Canada, so technically the correct phrase is “Freedom of Expression”):

This would be a lovely case … were it even remotely true that his commentary was fundamentally political in nature. It isn’t, and it never has been. 

In order for it to be reasonably seen as “political”, it has to be based in some kind of reasonable analysis, and have nothing to do with his position as a psychologist. For example, to make a second hand diagnosis that Trudeau is “mentally 14 years old” would be fine - if Peterson wasn’t a licensed psychologist and didn’t buttress the comment by authoritatively stating something about his years of clinical experience.  That made it a ‘professional opinion’, and that’s a problem. 

Peterson knows full well that he has every right to criticize the government, and there are a thousand ways to express those opinions without straying into the realm of making clinical statements about a person’s mental health status.  

This case falls outside of normal employment law because Peterson is not an employee of anybody.  The College does not act as an employer. He is not “being fired” either, and in fact given that his current means of earning an income has little to do with being a registered psychologist, one has to wonder why he bothered to retain his licensure since he claims to have not seen any clients since 2017. 

The fact here is that the College is a regulating body with a defined code of conduct and the discipline of psychology in Canada has a well established code of ethics that the OCP Code of Conduct references.  The boundaries of behaviour are fairly well defined. Membership in the college is a requirement to practice psychology, not to be a public grifter. 

As I previously discussed, most of the complaints against Mr. Peterson in one form or another can be argued to violate either the Code of Conduct or the Code of Ethics.  I don’t think anybody cares what precisely Mr. Peterson believes politically, the concerns are much more about his apparent willingness to use his position AS A PSYCHOLOGIST to lend greater credibility to his stated opinions.

It isn’t about whether his opinions are “liberal” or “conservative” in their alignment, it’s about whether his expression of those opinions create an environment which is harmful to others.  Mr. Peterson loves to argue about the validity of transgender people, but it is the manner in which he goes about it which creates problems. He does so in a manner which I am only going to politely say violates the general principle of respect for others.

While Mr. Peterson is making a great deal of hay of the notion that he is being “persecuted for holding conservative beliefs”, there is no evidence whatsoever that supports this. The breadth of the complaints against him are related to how he has expressed himself and the potential harms that his various commentaries are potentially doing to people beyond his immediate audience. There isn’t a shred of evidence that, for example, the Federal Government is going after him for comments about the Prime Minister.

Mr. Peterson has done the one thing that long ago became a “cardinal sin” for a practitioner in any caregiving domain: He has demonstrated contempt for people that could come knocking at his door seeking professional help.  

While nobody has directly challenged the power of regulating colleges to hold members accountable for their public statements on various matters, I find it difficult to believe that the courts in Canada are going to hold that as an unreasonable limit on the exercise of Freedom of Expression in this case. 

The most that Peterson might achieve here is a ruling that changes the way in which complaints are adjusted within the regulatory college - but that also presumes that the OCP has acted in a manner which the courts find to be arbitrary and/or capricious. Not being personally familiar with the investigation and procedures of the OCP, that is not something I can do more than speculate on.