Conrad Black
National Post, Jan. 7, 2023
“I will leave it to others to determine the extent to which Justin Trudeau is responsible for this repressive and ignorant climate and the totalitarian muzzling and stifling of dissent in places that have traditionally been among society’s most reliable centres of independent policy discussion — universities and learned professions.”
The latest of a dismal sequence of outrages and oppressive acts officiously imposed upon the very distinguished and widely admired academic, clinical psychologist and public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, is an intervention by the College of Psychologists of Ontario purporting to require Peterson to undergo a lengthy course of “media training,” in order that he might conduct his online communications “more appropriately.”
This is a stupefying insolence from a professional body intent on pettifogging and harassing an extraordinarily successful colleague. Jordan Peterson has had an impeccable professional reputation throughout his 20 years as a research psychologist at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. He has immense clinical experience and his pioneering work in bringing psychology to a vast worldwide internet audience, including 15-million people all over the world who follow him on three different social media platforms, has made serious psychology much more accessible.
Peterson has very correctly rejected this request that he submit to re-education and will be required to appear at a disciplinary hearing where coercive measures will doubtless be invoked against him under threat of the revocation of his clinical licence in Ontario, with the resulting damage to his reputation, as well as a suspension of his right to practise as a psychologist within Ontario.