In Response To A Comment

The previous post on the actions of conservative legislators attacking the fundamentals of democracy brought the following reader comment that I wish to address in more detail.

The comment itself reads as follows: 

In the case of Scotland's Gender Recognition Act, it should be up to the national government to protect the rights of women, and not simply throw them under the bus to satisfy a smaller, vocal group. Canada, on the other hand, simply threw women under the bus while claiming to be feminist. You might find that reading the Cass Report would be helpful in understanding the situation in the UK. You might also notice that in the UK, Stonewall had free rein for years mis-informing businesses and governments about what the law actually said. Housing male rapists in female prisons (generally the rapists are white, and the overwhelming number of women in Canada's prisons are aboriginal) should be considered outrageous. Having women forced to share spaces like change rooms and hospital rooms with men is definitely a loss of women's rights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2xhZm9f8t4 Gender Ideology Destroying Women's Prisons with Heather Mason - Life Through a Distorted Linds - YouTube. Article 25, fourth paragraph, and Article 29, second paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention III provide that in any camps in which men and women prisoners are accommodated together, separate dormitories and conveniences shall be provided for women. In Scotland, men then "detransition" after serving time in women's prisons https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-prisoners-switch-gender-again-once-freed-from-womens-units-qjjsd0nlx The left SHOULD be outraged, but will not look at any of the details of the idea of self-ID.

This is broadly off-topic relative to the point of the post, but it warrants being addressed in its own right.  If you're feeling brave, read on. 

Conservatives Are Dismantling Western Democracies

It's been a bit of a whirlwind lately, but there are some very disturbing patterns emerging in the politics of western democracy these days. At the top of the list, is what appears to be a steady effort on the part of conservative politicians to dismantle western democracies, and in particular the concept of individual rights.  

This is happening on numerous levels, and because each country is slightly different, the specific attacks are distinct.  The pattern, however, is what matters. In general, the attacks are either aimed at the judiciary, or at the rights of individuals, with a general approach of fomenting what will become constitutional crises. 

Although not the first occurrence of this, the UK government's decision to exercise rarely used powers to deny royal assent to the Scottish Parliament's recently passed Gender Recognition Reform Act.  My first thought on this was "that's an odd move - exercising those powers in the UK is going to provoke a constitutional crisis.  Then I thought about it a bit further, and a few months ago, when Alberta's newly minted Premier Danielle  Smith was musing about an "Alberta Sovereignty Act", the topic of whether the Federal Government could exercise an equally obscure power called "Refusal".  

In both cases, the exercise of the power in question would trigger a political and constitutional crisis in both countries. Such a crisis would call into question both the division of powers, the role of the Federal level of government to intervene in the affairs of a lower level of government, and in fact with the judiciary had any power at all to mediate such a dispute. Such a crisis could in fact be serious enough to break the political consensus that had led to the constitutions of the respective nations being formed as they are. 

Let's consider for a moment that the objective in both cases is not in fact to assert novel powers, nor to overrule the legislation of an errant lower level of government, but rather it is to provoke the crisis that would allow the conservatives to dismantle the much more liberal constitutions - especially the civil rights aspects of those documents - which conservatives have for some time seen as an obstacle to their legislative agendas. 

Looking a little further, in Israel, a recently elected hard right government under Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to massively overhaul the role of the state's court system.  Conservatives have long argued that courts had become "activist" - usually in the context of the fact that much of their legislative agenda runs at odds with the concepts of individual rights. Here in Canada, Harper feuded with the SCC over matters like mandatory minimum sentencing, and lost on fundamental matters associated with the court's interpretation of the Charter. 

In the United States, the politicization of the courts by the GOP took hold under GWB, and during the Obama years, the GOP refused to allow any of Obama's nominees to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to be affirmed. This set the stage for a series of GOP candidates to be appointed under Trump, and then for the now-conservative aligned court to reverse course on abortion.  

Both of these moves are designed to ultimately place the courts firmly under the yoke of political masters, and to roll back much of the legislative and case law decisions that conservatives don't like.

Then in both Canada and the US, we are seeing provinces and states teeing up legislation designed to create conflict with their respective Federal governments. This isn't merely a case of "the usual grievances", as demonstrated in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, the provinces are attempted to assert unique powers to ignore Federal laws - not a good thing.  Ontario's conservative government has threatened to use the S33 "Notwithstanding" clause multiple times on matters where it seems capricious and unnecessary to do so. 

In both Canada and the US following their 2020 and 2021 elections respectively, extreme elements fostered by increasingly radical conservative politicians attempted to overturn the results of elections - in both cases by launching attacks on the seat of government itself, claiming in one form or another that the government was unjustly elected, or that it was acting against the people. This is no coincidence - the specifics of talking points differ, but the tactics of both were strikingly similar, with the Canadian Convoy occupation clearly drawing from the organizing and funding efforts around the US Capitol riots of 2021, and the Convoy shifting towards almost a siege model, instead of direct attack - clearly based on "lessons learned".  Mysteriously in both cases, the public backing of these events by conservative politicians is both prominent and not actively discussed in the news. 

How does this all tie together, you might ask? The same way it always does of late. Conservatives have been increasingly organizing with each other internationally through organizations like the IDU. I do not think it is a coincidence that there are direct and indirect connections to the IDU where these various activities are taking place.

Any one of these could be viewed as nothing more than a spat between levels of government, it comes at a time when political divisions are running high, and the far right has become increasingly emboldened. However, it seems increasingly unlikely when conservative politicians around the world are expressing suspiciously similar sentiments, and are making disturbingly parallel moves to address long standing conservative grievances. 

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. 

So Jordan Peterson Is Being Disciplined?

Jordan Peterson is running about making a big fuss because his social media antics have garnered the attention of the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO).  "I won't comply!", he cries into the void; "I'm going to mount a Charter Challenge!", he declares to his followers.  

To be clear, I am not privy to the content of the specific allegations in the complaints the CPO is currently processing. So, what follows is equal parts speculation, inference, and my own thoughts on the matter.  

[Update:  January 6, 2023]  It seems that Dr. Peterson has made a copy of the complaints public on his Twitter feed, and Rachel Gilmore took the time to go through them.  It’s worse than what I discuss below - far far worse.  Link:  https://twitter.com/atrachelgilmore/status/1611405636931141632  

/Update] 

As a mental health practitioner myself, I have found plenty of Mr. Peterson's declarations to be deeply troubling from an ethical perspective.  The ethical concerns that come up for me are twofold.  First, he has a nasty tendency of posting what are arguably diagnostic statements about people, and backing that up with his experience as a psychologist.  The second area of concern has been his commentary on matters related to gender identity which have consistently drawn absolute positions that are at odds with the broader themes of the research literature in the area.  

I am not going to say something like "he's not entitled to his opinions" - that's not the issue here. It is more about making authoritative statements about matters where he is the "perceived expert" - which is deeply problematic with some of Peterson's commentary. 

Relevant Documents: 

For the purposes of this discussion, 2 documents are particularly relevant:  

The CPO document "Standards of Professional Conduct" (CPO, 2017).  I will refer to this as the SPC in this discussion.

 The Canadian Psychologists Association (CPA) "Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists (4th Edition)".  This will be referred to as "CPA Code of Ethics" in this discussion. 

Tougher Laws = More Justice … Or Do They?

So, yesterday, a police officer in Ontario was killed.  Inevitably, we get cries of “this could have been prevented”, largely on the basis that one of the accused in the murder was out on bail awaiting trial for a series of charges.  

There’s a problem here:  the claim that this could have been prevented implies that the accused should have been in prison already. Yet, it’s relatively rare for a bench warrant to trigger a manhunt unless the charges are such that the accused is assumed to be a danger to the public - which most accused aren’t.  The police generally seem to sit back and wait for the person to turn up either of their own volition, or in a more mundane incident like a traffic stop. 

However, I’m not here to blame the police for not being aggressive in enforcing the bench warrant.  Just enforcing those could chew up a lot of resources that regional police forces probably don’t have. 

So what are the likely alternatives?  

Do Away With Bail? 

Doing away with bail - even in situations where the accused has convictions for similar charges in their past - could be enormously problematic. First, it violates the fundamental presumption of our legal system that the accused is innocent.  You are effectively “pre-punishing” someone by keeping them in remand in advance of any trial.  Generally we have sought not to do so because that detention is really for the “worst of the worst” cases. (Serial killers, extremely violent offenders, etc.)

Also, doing away with bail would have multiple knock-on effects in our justice system.  It would drive up the costs associated with Remand detention.  Keeping someone in remand is expensive, and taxpayers generally are going to be antsy about those costs. 

Given the often lengthy amount of time to get to trial, the time served could easily exceed any prison sentence that would be handed down.  That would almost inevitably result in a lot of people being released “for time already served” the day sentences are handed down. Not only does this miss the point of a justice system entirely, but it renders any notion of “punishment” academic at best. It also likely as not is going to turn the remand facilities into “criminal colleges”, whose graduates will go on to commit more crimes. (Remand is already bad enough for that effect due to a lack of rehabilitative programming)

Shorten The Time To Trial

Getting a criminal case to trial has been a problem for years now. To some extent, this is a matter of resourcing the justice system better.  The courts have also ruled that there is in fact a window of time that is allowable for a case coming to trial, after which the rights of the accused are deemed to have been violated. 

While improving the throughput of the courts is certainly a laudable objective, it’s not going to solve the problem of an accused offender going on to commit other offences while awaiting trial.  

Make Punishments Harsher? 

We could enact laws that impose ever harsher sentences, but to me that’s a failed experiment in 19th Century thinking. The argument that “harsher sentences are a deterrent” is simply false when you are looking at crime and punishment.  There is a validity to there being a significant penalty associated with criminal acts.  I’m good with that. We should never make the assumption that a particular punishment is in any way a deterrent to a criminal. 

In general doing so assumes that the prospective criminal is even thinking about the potential consequences of their actions at the time of committing (or even planning) an offence.  If that were the case, then there are entire countries where crime should be all but non-existent, and yet those countries continue to have the same, or worse, problems with crime.  

To be clear, I don't think there is a singular solution to the problem at hand.  We already know that our prison systems are overburdened, and vastly under-resourced when it comes to inmates and programming to help inmates become productive members of society post-sentence.  Far too much emphasis has been placed on punishment, not enough on rehabilitation, with the result that prisons in some ways become "Universities for Crime", and parolees their graduates. 

There is a need for society to address issues like systemic oppression, poverty, etc in an effort to reduce the long term negative consequences of those issues that so often lead to people committing offences.  

On the other side of the coin, while punishment needs to be punishment, we also have to look at how we prepare prisoners to function in the real world. Simply kicking them out at the end of their sentences with little or no supports is practically begging for them to return to the life of crime they knew before. That means making skills training, psychological supports, and safe housing available. 

In terms of prison structure and management, I think we should take a much closer look at the approaches used in countries like Sweden and Norway - with the caveat that those approaches will need to be adapted carefully for the kind of cultural mosaic that exists in Canada. Simply trying to pivot to it will fail. 

I think some of the ideas around the aboriginal concepts of restorative justice warrant further exploration, as do more flexible approaches to managing justice in ways that are culturally sensitive for the variety of cultural groups that live here today. 

None of this is easy, and all of it costs money. We need to stop acting like there are simple solutions to matters of crime and punishment. There aren't, and there never will be. 

Musk's Twitter, Free Speech ... and Pronouns

It's been wild ride over on Twitter since Elon Musk took over.  

For a supposed "free speech absolutist", Musk is proving to be anything but. He has spent the last 6 weeks, firing everybody at Twitter, going after people who criticize him, and re-enabling the accounts of every right wing hate monger that Twitter had banned in the last 5 years.  

Oh - and on the side, he's been booting left wing accounts that he dubs "too woke" off the site arbitrarily.

Quite a time indeed.

The Alberta Sovereignty Act: A Pas a Deux With Danielle Smith and Stephen Harper

I’m not going to use the full title of that act - partly because it’s ridiculously long, and like many things out of the UCP, utterly devoid of real meaning. 

But, I do want to make some speculative comments.  Others have already pointed out that within the context of Canada, the fundamental assumption of the law is simply wrong-headed.  We already have mechanisms in place for examining whether a given Federal law is “overreach” or not - it’s called the courts, and those cases get very high priority in the first place. Smith, is of course playing on the fact that every case Alberta has brought in the last decade has ultimately failed at the SCC.

Is this law merely sour grapes?  The act of a populist legislator who wants to continue to feed on the simmering grievances of Alberta’s often civically illiterate population?  Pandering to those who prefer simplistic bromides about how things should work instead of the subtle complexities of actual law and politics of compromise that underpin confederation? I do not think it is so simple. 

Ever since Smith first uttered her promise of an “Alberta Sovereignty Act” during her campaign for the UCP leadership, there has been a steady stream of provincial conservatives adopting variations on the same line.  This is not a coincidence. 

Back in 2015 when the conservatives botched their campaign so monumentally, and Stephen Harper all but rage quit elected politics, I figured he was going to resurface with a different game plan.  If he couldn’t make conservatives “The Natural Governing Party” of Canada (especially with himself at the helm), then I figured that he was going to attempt to blow up Canada instead. 

I don’t think I was wrong in that speculation.  Bear with me while I spend a few minutes walking through the post-2015 timeline. 

Two major events occurred in 2015 that are important to this discussion:  

The first was Stephen Harper’s CPC losing the federal election.  The second was Rachel Notley’s NDP winning in Alberta - long considered “Fortress Alberta” by conservatives because of a decades-long dominance of that province’s politics both provincial and federal. 

That provoked one of the biggest “rage campaigns” that I’ve ever seen in my life. From 2015 onwards, the politics in Alberta were a constant barrage of attacks on Trudeau, and attacks on Notley.  Death threats became normal for Notley, and similar attitudes were often expressed towards Trudeau. 

By the end of 2015, Jason Kenney had stepped out of his job as MP in Ottawa, and began campaigning in Alberta to weld the PCAA and WRP together.  Kenney spent much of his time campaigning slagging Notley, and associating Notley with Trudeau by talking about the “Notley-Trudeau Alliance”.  Also, Kenney spent a lot of time whipping up “separatist sentiment” in Alberta - and while in power, he continued to foster so-called “western alienation”.  Whatever you say about Kenney, he’s a tireless campaigner - he clearly loves it when he’s got a room paying attention to what he says. 

Behind the scenes, Kenney and Harper were meeting with considerable regularity.  It’s no secret that both men were “old friends”, but I suspect Harper was playing a significant role in helping Kenney strategize the formation of the UCP.

The UCP represented a new brand of conservatism in Alberta. It was much more rooted in the individualist populism (“pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”) that were central to Western Canada Concept (WCC), Reform, and Wildrose Party politics than the Lougheed-era PCs. Add to that a significant portion of the party has strong connections to rural religiosity (which tends to be very fundamentalist), and you have much less negotiable form of politics. To put it mildly, the Kenney-led UCP spent a great deal of political capital playing the cities as the great rival to rural interests, and likewise also spent much of its time trying to drive a wedge between Alberta and confederation with constant attacks on Trudeau.  

Why the attacks on Trudeau?  Didn’t he rescue the TMX project when it was on the verge of collapse, and KXL remained very much up in the air?  Yes, he did.  You cannot underestimate the depth of the long fostered hatred for the Trudeau name that conservatives in Albertas have fostered. Since the 1980s they have continually banged on that drum to Alberta voters.  The spectre of Pierre Trudeau rising from the grave to implement another NEP had become standard fare whenever the people of Alberta might have started to talk even remotely favourably about Ottawa.  In fact, conservatives in Alberta have long equated the name Trudeau, and the NEP, with the identity of “Ottawa” as the capital of Canada. It’s a political tool for them. 

To put it mildly, anyone who was steeped in Alberta conservative politics for any length of time utterly loathes the fact that Canada has another Trudeau for a Prime Minister.  That’s why there is this constant stream of invective aimed at him from this province.  Harper’s dislike of Justin Trudeau is no surprise. Perhaps even more so than Kenney, Harper seems to view Justin Trudeau with a particular disdain. 

Elsewhere in Canada, we have seen a wave of increasingly “libertarian-right” conservative Premiers - Scott Moe in Saskatchewan, Brian Pallister in Manitoba, Doug Ford in Ontario, Tim Houston in Nova Scotia, and so on.  

Scott Moe in particular is interesting to this discussion.  About a year after he was elected, his government signed a contract with Harper and Associates for consulting services.  That contract appears to be the turning point. Up to there, Moe was a relatively quiet Premier on the federal stage, and while I disagree with much of his policies, he wasn’t actively working to undermine the federal government.  Once this contract with Harper and Associates appeared, he started working in concert with Jason Kenney, Doug Ford and so on - often copying Kenney’s lead, and more recently borrowing from Danielle Smith’s “sovereignty act”.  

If that isn’t enough to make you go “hmm”, it should be.  It ties together key facets of the picture, and connects things back to Harper.  Harper may not be in elected office any more, but that doesn’t mean he is less influential within conservative circles.  He remains a formidable force, and arguably has as much to do with why party leadership has been as shaky as it has these past few years - everybody is looking over their shoulders to see what Harper is up to. 

I'm fairly certain that after his 2015 defeat (to Justin Trudeau, no less), Harper decided that if he couldn't rule over Canada, he was going to find a way to blow it up.  Feeding Alberta's simmering separatist movement was an easy starting point, and frankly the COVID Pandemic proved a very fruitful opportunity to shove disinformation and foment anger in Alberta.  The fact that he had access to several other conservative premiers who would follow Jason Kenney's lead in undermining the Federal Government's attempts to manage the situation. 

Which brings us to Danielle Smith.  I'm not certain how close Smith and Harper are, but Smith's actions continue to be consistent with a larger overall push to isolate "conservative Canada" from the "rest of Canada".  There's no question that the "Sovereignty Act" is clearly designed to be divisive, and it contains a veritable wish list of asserted powers that sounds an awful lot like those demanded in the infamous "Firewall Letter" of so many years ago. 

That isn't to say that Harper is controlling the whole show - I think he's directing it though.  His goal has always been to eradicate the Liberals, and failing doing that successfully after a decade as Prime Minister clearly stings.  I think he's now decided that failing that, he's going to isolate the Prairies politically, and he's now pushing to break Canada by undermining the institutions of government.  It won't hurt his feelings to do so - again, partisan conservatives in Canada have long chafed at the 1983 Constitution not only because it is the work of a Trudeau, but because the way it is written is basically antithetical to how they look at power and governance.