442. BILL C-63 - Everything You Need to Know | Bruce Pardy & Konstantin Kisin
01:46:13 Share

Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world. Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career, so you can apply what you learn right away. Learn how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu. Hello, everybody.

I have the opportunity today to speak with two guests, Konstantin Kizin, who is co-host of the podcast Trigonometry in the UK, a popular podcast. He is a speaker and a thinker who deals with culture war issues, mostly political, insofar as the cultural war issues are political. My other guest is Bruce Party. Bruce is a

at Queen's University, a professor of law at Queen's University in Canada. Recently, the Trudeau woke mob has managed to extend themselves even further into the legal Netherlands with a new bill called C-63, which isn't law in Canada yet, but is soon likely to be. And it is the most totalitarian Western law

bill I've ever seen by quite a large margin and in multiple dimensions. And that was my conclusion upon reading it, and then my conclusion upon rereading it and rereading it again, because I like to make sure I have these things right. And I thought I'd talk to Bruce about it today, along with Constantine, to see if my understanding of the bill is actually correct.

with regard to Constantine, how he sees what's happening in Canada reflected in, say, Scotland and in Ireland in particular, in the UK, but also in England. And, well, that's the terrain that we're exploring. So join us. It'll be quite a ride. So, Dr. Pardee, I think we got in touch with each other again most recently because I was...

obsessing neurotically about a new Canadian bill, C-63, which seemed to me to be a real masterpiece of right-thinking, utopian, resentful foolishness. And I thought it would be real useful to talk to you about that to make sure that I understood it. But I thought I'd start our discussion, or we could start a discussion today by going back into the past eight years into the legal domain in Canada.

to discuss Bill C-16, because that's now eight years ago. And in some ways, the bill that was at the origin of the current rat's nest of pathological legislation in Canada. And so do you want to bring everybody up to date just to begin with, or remind them or educate them about what Bill C-16 was and

what the fears were at the time and whether or not those have been realized? Yes, sure. Thanks, Jordan. Well, C-16 is when you and I met, and you were concerned, as I was and as others were, not very many others, mind you, but a few others, concerned that these proposed amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act, the inclusion of gender identity and gender expression, would have an effect upon speech.

essentially to require people to use the preferred pronouns of other people. And frankly, the establishment types pooh-poohed the idea and called us fearmongers. And of course, that's turned out to be entirely untrue. You were exactly right in your concerns. That kind of amendment had been made before in provincial human rights codes, but this was the federal version.

But that's in there now, and we have all kinds of pronoun trouble. But the present bill that you're referred to, C-63, is C-16 on steroids. It's got three categories of bad in it. One's an administrative bad, one is a criminal code bad, criminal law bad, and the other one is, again, like C-16, a Canadian Human Rights Act amendment.

So let me do the last one first. And so what's the purported purpose of the law? Well, the purported purpose, it starts with the cover of protecting children from online harm. That's the first administrative law. And who could possibly oppose that? This is part of the beauty of the way they go about these things. It's got great cover. And nobody in their right mind would want to come out and say, well, that's not a good idea. Mm-hmm.

But what that kind of cover enables is basically a crackdown on the very idea of free speech.

So let's just take the human rights aspect first. They are returning to the Canadian Human Rights Act, an old section that got thrown out, got repealed during the era of Stephen Harper, when Harper was the prime minister. And it was causing all kinds of nuisance. It was the kind of section, and these kinds of sections also appear in the provincial codes. Every province and the federal government has their own

human rights code and these codes not all of them but but typically include this kind of of Restriction on speech you're not allowed to discriminate in your speech is what some of them say and this this Section basically says that if you are if you use hateful speech that can be taken to vilify an individual or group and

then you will be acting discriminatorily and therefore in breach of the code and therefore potentially liable to any of the perceived victims and also potentially to the government itself. And one of the problems with the human rights regime is that complaints can be made very, very easily without a lawyer, without any cost. And because the Canadian federal government has jurisdiction over the internet,

This section is going to authorize complaints of all kinds to be made against people who are speaking their minds online about any and everything. So it's going to have a chilling effect upon speech, no question about it. You put that together with the criminal code amendments, those criminal code amendments make it, well, they do several things. Here's one extraordinary thing that it does.

It makes the sentence, the maximum sentence, for any violation of an offense, like any offense, any offense in the criminal code or under federal legislation, any offense that is motivated by hatred will carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Right. Now, the defenders of the bill say, well, don't worry. The judge isn't actually going to give you life. Right.

That's not likely to happen. And that may be true, but that's not the point. If you don't mean it in legislation, then don't give the judge the power. If it's in the law, it's likely to happen. If it's in the law, it is going to happen sooner or later. And it is a signal about what is lawful and what is not and what the proper punishment should be and what is not. So C63 is a reflection of how

Just one more reflection of how we are losing the law. We are losing, in C63, the idea of free speech itself. You know that old quote that people always refer to from Voltaire's biographer? The one that goes, I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say. I think the reason that that quote is trotted out so often is that when you come right down to it,

Most people don't agree with that. Everybody says they believe in free speech. Justin Trudeau has said he believes in free speech. There's a guarantee of free speech in the Chinese constitution. It's very easy to say. And what they really mean is, yes, I believe in free speech, but... And it's within the but where you can find out whether or not they really do believe in free speech. So for my money, we shouldn't have...

a law that prohibits hate speech. Hate speech is ugly, but people hate each other. And if they're not allowed to say that they do, well, then their speech is not free. So... It's also a very difficult and challenging thing to make an emotion illegal.

No doubt. And of course, the definition of what they mean by hate speech is impossible to tell. And it's going to be under the purview of the judge to decide in any particular case whether or not you cross that threshold. Okay, so let's talk about the devil in the details. Because the angel lurking over all of this is fundamentally we're protecting children from being exploited online. Okay, so...

Well, there are children and they are exploited online and they deserve protection, so that's all and good.

What steps are taken in the bill to actually protect children who are being exploited online? And then how do we segue from that to hate? Because those aren't the same universe. As I said, there are three bits in the bill and they're in the same bill, but they're distinct. So there's the human rights aspect, there's the criminal code aspect, and then this third aspect, which is primarily one that's aimed at protecting kids, is an administrative regime

that gives an agency the power, essentially, to supervise the online platforms. But it also gives them the power to make the rules. So we don't even know what the rules are going to be. Basically, it just gives the whole control of the thing to a government agency, to the bureaucrats, to do as they think best. Right, so they're establishing an entirely new bureaucracy with an unspecified range of power

with a non-specific purview that purports to protect children from online exploitation, but has the possibility of turning into a policing state for the internet per se. And this is often how the administrative work, administrative state works, right? So this agency will not be policing children

citizens themselves directly, but they'll be policing the online platforms and the platforms will thereby censor the people who are using them.

So we're not doing it. We're hands off. We're two steps removed situation. But in effect, it is the government pulling the strings of the... Okay, so to what degree do you think that even the setup of that new administrative bureaucracy, which has very extensive powers and very poorly defined powers, as far as I could tell when I read the bill, how much of that do you think is actually defunct?

devoted genuinely, I know this is a judgment call obviously, but you have to infer that from the legislation. If the legislation was honest and well-written, it would very specifically target the target of its purported reason for existence. If it was designed, for example, to produce a more general regime for online policing,

To me, that's what it looks like. And if so, is that a consequence of poor legislative design? Is it a consequence of intent? Like, what do you think is going on there? Well, what's going on there is what's been going on inside our law with respect to empowering the administrative state for a long, long time. So standard legislation now at either the federal or provincial level

is authorizing legislation, meaning you pass a bill about a certain subject and it might contain some rules in it, but it also contains the authority, the delegation of authority to the bureaucrats, to an agency of some kind, to the minister or to whoever, to a human rights commission, to make policies or guidelines or regulations about certain things. And you can't tell by reading the statute what the rules are.

And so you've transferred legislative authority, essentially, from the legislature to the bureaucracy. And this is not the bureaucracy stealing it. This is the legislature giving it because they don't want the responsibility of doing it. And they don't want to have to go through the minutiae of figuring out what the right rules are. So they just shove it off into the back rooms.

And this is the way the administrative state works. Now, it's like, if I can stay, it's a kind of collusion between the legislature and the courts. So the courts, okay, we have these three branches of government. Yes, we have the legislature, we have the courts, and we have the administrative state. And, you know, the division between them is cleanest in the American version of things. But in Canada and the UK, we have them as well. And the legislature and the courts are together supposed to be supervising

what the executive branch, the administrative state, is doing. Because the general rule is supposed to be the administration, which used to be the king after all, can't do anything that's not authorized by the legislature. So these three things are checks and balances on each other. But now they're all on the same page. And the courts and the legislature are convinced about the need for this expansive legislation

overwhelming administrative state. And so instead of supervising the administrative branch and the courts, instead of making sure that they stick within their powers, the legislature's delegating to it and the courts are deferring to it. And so what we end up with- And the legislators don't have to take responsibility. Exactly. In any, in either way. Because we don't, and we can't find who's responsible anymore. Yeah. Right? It's all sort of a mystery. It's a moving ball. And this is the way

administrative agencies and government departments and ministries can be, quote, agile. They want to be agile. They want to be able to respond to societal problems quickly, right? Well, if you're able to respond quickly, that means you have the legislative power in your hands and that nobody else knows exactly what's going on until it happens, and sometimes not until after the fact even, right? So that principle of the rule of law that said the rule applies to everybody,

both the ruled and the ruler. If you have an agile government making rules up as they go along, well, that means by definition, the rules can't apply to them because they have the power to change them whenever they want to.

And so we have agile governments who are managing us, managing society, solving social problems. We are in a managerial era in the law. Management, I would put it this way. Management, the ethos of managerialism has supplanted the rule of law as the basic idea. Instead of the rule of law, we have rule by law now, which means that the law is nothing more than a tool.

for the government to use to create at at on a whim uh whenever they need it to make you do this and there was no better example of all of this than during coban yeah had people standing behind microphones on a tuesday afternoon saying well the rule tomorrow is going to be this that's agile government it means the legislature is not taking on its role of making the rules and the the executive branch

has taken over making the rules, applying the rules, and enforcing the rules all on its own. And that is not the way the Western legal system used to work. We have managerialism instead of the rule of law. Constantine, is there anything so far in Bruce's discussion that triggered any echoes about similar situations in the UK?

Well, there's a couple of pieces that I would pick up on that I think are relevant. And the first one is what you mentioned about the fact that the bill is quite expansive, yet only a small part of it appears to be dealing with the core issue.

which is the protection of children. We had the online harms bill, which was ostensibly about the same thing, but in its original drafting included all sorts of other things completely unrelated to any of that. And it's not a surprise because what we have seen over and over in the UK is that quite often the attempt to protect

protect people from hate or whatever has actually nothing to do with the trigger that causes. So give you an example. Sir David Ames was an MP who was murdered by a terrorist.

And the next day, all his colleagues went into parliament and started talking in parliament about how this shows that we need to tackle online hate. David Ames wasn't killed by online hate. He was killed by an Islamist. Likewise, more recently, parliament actually, to cut a very long story short, suspended its own rules of procedure because Labour Party MPs feared

what would happen to them if they did not vote the correct way on the Israel-Palestine conversation. And again, following the ferrari that broke out from that, the argument was, well, MPs need to be nicer to each other instead of dealing with the fact that there was a mob outside parliament who was intimidating the parliamentarians. So very often,

It seems to me that a lot of the time the mind has been made up that we need to deal with online hate, whatever that means. And then whatever happens is then used as an excuse to do that. Secondly, it's got to be kind of in the nature of, I think, how tyranny unfolds in the real world. It's something like

There's a pre-commitment to a set of ideological axioms. And then whatever crisis comes along is just assimilated to that and used as a shoehorn to move it forward. And so has there ever been a tyranny that's emerged spontaneously that didn't present itself to begin with as fostering security and improving civic health or public health for that matter? The Nazis were

improving public health like mad throughout the 1930s. I mean, some of that public health improvement was genuine. There's a fair bit of it that wasn't, but the cover story was really solid, right? And it was often compassion, even with the whole Nazi, the catastrophic Nazi policies of euthanasia that culminated in the Holocaust began with the language of compassion, right? So,

Well, quite. And actually, the thing that really revealed to me how much of this is ideological was I was on a British program called Question Time, which you've been on. And what they do is they have a panel of guests at

And before the main show starts, they do one question for discussion that is a warm-up that's not recorded. So people are a little bit more loose in that part of it. And the question at the time was, Donald Trump had just been unbanned from Facebook. You know, was this the right thing to do, whatever? And, you know, they came to me. I made the deeply controversial point that I think the president of

the most powerful country in the world should be allowed to speak in public. This didn't go down well. But what happened afterwards, they went to the left-wing politician on the panel

the Labour politician on the panel, and she, without missing a beat when they went to her, she went, we must have the safest internet in the world. And to a round of applause, and what that signaled to me, I think, gentlemen, is that we have completely lost the battle over the way the conversation is being had in being able and willing to say,

some harm is a consequence of freedom and that's a price that we're willing to pay. And I believe that until we get the conversation onto that footing, we're never going to win this argument because if the argument is about, well, we must make people safe,

then that will always necessitate more tyranny by default. Of course. And so I see, certainly in the UK, I wouldn't speak for Canada or the United States, a complete failure of, quote-unquote, our side to make that argument that we are willing to sacrifice some, whatever safety means in the context of words, and that's a whole bunch of BS in my opinion anyway, whatever that means,

That has a price. And there comes a point where too much safety means too much giving up of freedom and we're not prepared to do that. We haven't been able to make that argument. I agree with you. And I think one of the problems is that we approach that argument from the wrong end. And what I mean by that is,

I think we should start with the presumption that you're allowed to say anything you want, like anything you want. Now, what might the exceptions to that be? Well, here's one. If I go up to somebody on the sidewalk and say, give me your wallet or I'll stab you. Okay, well, that crosses a line because now I'm threatening imminent violence. That's an assault. And it's okay for us to say, no, that's not allowed because it's violence. But

If you start from that end, then you can say, well, are there any other exceptions? And maybe yes and maybe no. If you start at the harm end, I mean, there's all kinds of harm you do just by speaking in ways that are clearly... Anything serious. Anything serious. About anything serious. If you're campaigning to be elected to something, then you are trying to do harm to your opponents. You want to make them lose. Or if you are running a commercial enterprise...

and you want to outsell your neighboring competitor, you're trying to do them harm. And if you succeed, you will do them harm. Maybe they'll go out of business. That's legit. You're allowed to cause people harm by your speech. Harm is not something that's prohibited.

We have to get back to the idea that we live in the world and people succeed and they fail. And sometimes they fail because of what other people do and too bad because they're free. It's a free world, in a free world, you are going to be hurt

Starting a business can be tough, especially knowing how to run your online storefront. Thanks to Shopify, it's easier than ever. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is there to help you grow. Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.

Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading commerce platforms. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp. Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're at. That's shopify.com slash jbp.

Other people. Too bad. So let's go back here now to why, how we get from protecting children against online exploitation, which apparently necessitates, as you pointed out, the construction of a very ill-defined, expensive system.

An highly autonomous new administrative system, not bound, if I remember correctly, by normal rules of evidence. Well, so, yeah, so, well, number one, that's absolutely true in the administrative realm, but it's also true in the human rights realm, right? So these commissions and tribunals, I sat on a tribunal for a while. Yeah. They look like sort of courts. Yeah.

If you go into the room, it looks like it's set up like a courtroom. You've got a bench and somebody making a decision and witnesses and so on. But they're not courts because, well, for various reasons, they're created by governments, first of all. They're basically a part of the executive branch of government, even though they look like a court. Yes.

But they don't adhere to normal rules of evidence. Right. And to what extent they do on any particular occasion might vary. It depends upon the rules of that particular tribunal. So, you know, people have called them kangaroo courts. Sometimes that's deserved. But it's part of the trend of taking decisions away from courts and giving them to the executive branch of government. But mind you,

The courts haven't been all that good in recent years either. You know, as I've been saying, we are losing the law. Let me put it this way. We've been talking, you've been talking especially for a long time about how institutions in society have been compromised, been taken over by wokeism, by social justice, by critical theory, and so on. Well,

The law is an institution. It's one of these social institutions, one of these public institutions. There's no reason why the law should be immune from all those factors as any other institution like government, like universities, like public schools, like media. It's happening to the law too. It's happening. Now, don't get me wrong. In Canada, we have some terrific judges.

And we have cases that go the way they're supposed to. And they're heard the way they're supposed to with the proper rules of evidence and the proper analysis. And so this is not a black and white thing. But more and more, you are seeing from the courts evidence that the paradigm has changed or is changing from what a lot of people think in their heads is the way the laws work to what actually is the case now. And what's the case now? So let me give you an example. Yeah.

So we have a section in our charter that says that everybody is equal under the law. They're entitled to equal protection under the law, which is what the U.S. Constitution says as well. But over the past 40 years of charter jurisprudence by the Supreme Court of Canada, that section now means that

that people are not entitled to equal protection, that is equal treatment by the law. They're entitled to equal or equivalent outcomes between groups. So let me give you an example of perhaps the most recent important Supreme Court of Canada case on this idea. Many years ago, the RCMP created a job sharing plan wherein full-time members could combine with two or three other members to decide to work part-time.

It was voluntary. People who worked part-time, if you want to work part-time and you're working full-time, then we're going to allow you to do that. And we're going to give you a pension as well. And the pension, if you're part-time, will be calculated in the same way that the pension is calculated for the full-time people, which is proportionate to the hours that you work. Okay? Voluntary. Over time, what happens? More women than men

voluntarily sign up for the part-time work. And then at the end of the day, that means that more women than men have lower pensions than the men who are working full-time. The program is challenged under Section 15.1 of the Charter. Supreme Court of Canada says unconstitutional. By definition. You can't have a voluntary equal program that results in different

results for women than men. It's a little hard on the whole notion of voluntary there, isn't it? Exactly. Equal rules, voluntary program, open to everybody, treats everybody the same way, not constitutional. Oh boy. When was that ruling? 2019, I believe. Oh yeah, that's a rough one. Okay, so how did we get from protecting vulnerable children

from online sexual exploitation with a gigantic, unnamed bureaucracy with indefinite rights and virtually no responsibility to whatever the hell hateful speech is. I mean, first of all, we might ask ourselves, Constantine, you can weigh in here too, is like the whole notion of hateful speech is

That's a troublesome one for me because there's an obvious element of subjective judgment in it, like a clearly obvious one. And the problem for me is always, as soon as someone talks about hateful speech, isn't so much whether or not there are forms of speech that are detestable, because you haven't lived if you haven't listened to somebody say something detestable, perhaps sometimes in jest, which is a very interesting variation of that possibility. But

Like, who decides that it's hateful? On what grounds? And why do you decide the people who are making that judgment? And then that problem is very much amplified, like very much amplified.

if you open the door, as this bill does, to anonymous denunciations. Right now, everybody, including every school child who's like older than three, and maybe even at three, understands that there's almost nothing worse than a snitch. And all children are wise enough to know that even if you are being bullied at school, let's say, it has to get pretty damn brutal and bad before...

going to report it to the authorities is acceptable or justifiable. Now, you know, you can debate about the conditions under which that should or shouldn't occur. My point is that even kids know that even under dire circumstances, there's almost nothing worse than a snitch.

And yet these bills, and we certainly know from places like the Soviet Union just exactly what happens, or East Germany, what happens when one third of the citizens, which was the case in East Germany, become government informers. It's like trust's gone, the worst people have the upper hand, it's a complete bloody catastrophe. Now, in Bill C-63, you have a concatenation of these problems. Like, okay, now hate speech is going to be constrained, right?

and it can be identified by anonymous informants. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit, if I got that right, first of all. Well, yes, but let's just back up to your children point, right? So part of the problem is the premise, and the premise is widely accepted because we accept this premise generally now in society because this is where we're at. But the premise is...

That the government is responsible for keeping people safe, including the children. And that's ignoring the best mechanism we already have to keep children safe, which is their parents. Right? It's assuming that this is what this state is for. If you went up to somebody on the street, anybody at random, and you said, you know, do you think we should have an expansive administrative state? And by that I mean, you know, all these government people who do all these things.

They'll probably look at you like, I don't know what you're talking about. That's what government is. That's what government's for. What do you mean? What does government do other than solve problems for society by making these rules and doing policy and so on? And we've lost the proposition that we've made a choice to have

this large, overwhelming government tell us what to do in place of all of the other things we used to have? Individual decisions, families, communities, churches, all of the non-public institutions, and I mean government institutions. Mm-hmm.

Government just rules the day now and we're debating about whether or not the government has done this job properly or not Well, well the problem is the government's doing the job the government for my money shouldn't be in this business They shouldn't be in the business of regulating speech for people impact. What why not? Be well because if we think we live in a free country if the government's in this business, then we're wrong and

So your point is something like that the cost of having the government offer all potential services, say, in relationship to desire and safety is that you lose all your autonomy and your freedom. Well, let's back up. What rights should we have is where we should start. What rights do you have? If you're a free person, what does that mean? I think it means that other people can't coerce you.

Can't interfere with you. You know, can't take your stuff. Can't use force against you. That means you're free. That means other people can't do it. That means the state can't do it. That's the sphere of freedom that you have. That means that the government needs to do one job, which is to make sure other people don't coerce you and use force against you and take your stuff. Job done. If somebody says something you don't like and causes you psychological angst, too bad.

The person is free and so are you. Put up with it. It's part of the world. As soon as you get governments overstepping that zone that I just described, you start to move away

from that conception of freedom into a different kind of society altogether. And we are so far along that path that I don't know how we can call ourselves a free country or free people with a straight face. It's just transparently uncertain. Bill C-63 certainly is one of the pieces of legislation that make you question that. Oh, absolutely. But Bill C-63 is just one step along the way. And we... So...

Let's go back to the courts, because part of the fault of C-63, it's a government bill, so it's a legislative problem. But the courts, the Supreme Court of Canada already said, essentially, that this kind of restriction on speech is constitutional. And in fact, in C-63, they've used some of the language the Supreme Court of Canada said was okay. So the Supreme Court of Canada took this charter we have,

which says everybody has the right to free speech. And said, well, sure, everyone has the right to free speech, but not this. Well, they used that against me. Of course they did. Yeah, yeah. Of course they did. I'm a direct beneficiary of that line of reasoning. I have freedom of speech, but it's subject to reasonable...

Limitations, and what are those? Well, they're whatever any reasonably constituted bureaucracy deem they might be. That's basically what they hold me in. But that makes a mockery of the whole idea of having a constitutional right. Yeah, yeah, of course. I think that was kind of the point. That is the point. The point is that our charter, people think of our charter of rights as the beginning, as the foundation of our legal system. And it's not. It's a mere gloss, right?

On legislative supremacy and now judicial supremacy. Because the court can decide what those rights mean however it wants. Yeah. And more and more, they are less robust individual rights. And more and more justifications for the administrative state to do things in the public good. So people are putting much too much pressure.

faith, weight on the fact that we have a charter. They think it works in the same way as the American Bill of Rights, which has fared much better over time than ours has, it's much older as well, of course. And much more foundational. Well, yes, but even in the US, though, I think we've all made a mistake. In the Anglo world, we've made a mistake. And it's a very, very old mistake.

if you go back even to the time of the Magna Carta. So the original problem was the king. And the king, depending upon the king, of course, but kings were tyrants. Their word was the law. And then over time, with great difficulty, Magna Carta and then the Civil Rights Act of 1688 and the American Declaration of Independence and so on, over time, what we did was take power away from the king and give it to the legislature.

And that's good, right? Because the monarch is hereditary and the legislature is elected. So power to the people. Great. Except that over time, legislatures showed that they can be tyrants too. C-63 and all kinds of other things that have happened through the ages. And so the Americans first came along and said, we're going to try and fix that too. So they created a Bill of Rights, which limits what legislatures can do. But to do that, they had to give power to the courts.

So from the king to legislature, from legislature to courts, and now the courts are screwing it up. And the courts are giving power back to the administrative state, which is the king. So here's the mistake we made. We've been just moving power around from king to legislature, to courts, to administrative state. We've been moving it around from place to place instead of taking power away.

And if you take power away... How about instead of adopting responsibility for? The problem is that in order for that to work, and in order for the rule of law to work, the people in power have to adhere to the idea. So the rule of law worked for quite a while. Like, there were some periods when it was great. Yeah. Right? So the rule of law is restraint on people with power. On legislatures, on executive branch, and even on courts. Right.

And as long as the people who occupy those positions believe in the idea, it works. But our people in those positions do not believe in the idea anymore. They have thrown the idea out because it prevents them from doing what they think their job now is, which is to manage stuff. Because management requires people.

It requires agility. It requires responsiveness. It requires you to get in there and muck about with your hands. And that is not the way the rule of law works. The rule of law is this idea that the legislature makes these grand rules based upon

important principles that defines the relationship between state and individual. And we can all tell what it is. We can all go read what they are. It's in the books. The law is there for everybody to know. That is not the way it works now. Now, the law is just for the people in power to control and understand and issue by edict whenever it suits them to make sure that the little people are doing what they're supposed to do.

So the rule of law is in direct conflict with what all our rulers think their job now is. Well, there's no glory and virtue to be obtained in applying the law that someone else passed, right? Exactly. Coming back to your point, Jordan, as well about who decides what hate speech is. I mean, we have this in the UK where for certain offenses, the evidence that the languages are well in, but a non-crime hate incident happens

which is when you haven't committed any crime, but nonetheless, this will be recorded by the police on your record and potentially used against you in employment interviews and so on, is based on your self-perception of what motivated your action.

offender who afflicted you in some way to do what they did. So if you were to make some sort of joke at my expense and I concluded that it was to do with my immigration status or ethnicity or whatever, I could then say, well, this is clearly a hate incident that you've committed. Right, and the rationale for that would be, well, who would know better than the person who was directly affected and who's to question that? Than the victim.

Yeah, well, and the answer to that, if you have any sense, is, well, what if the purported victim is a manipulative psychopath? And the general response to that is, well, all those people are just victims too, right? And so, well, so this will get us back into the hate discussion.

How do you define hate? Well, you just said you allow the purported target of the hate to define it. And what they do is they say that they feel hated. So it's a second-order form of evidence.

The primary evidence in principle is their subjective emotion, but you don't have access to that. So you have to accept their record of their subjective emotion. And you accept that in a manner that isn't questionable. There's no higher authority than their say-so. And the problem with that, it's a variant of the problem with the informants, is that

That only works, well, it would never work. Let's get that clear. But that only works in the ideal situation where people have perfect understanding of the motivation of others, which they don't, and also they're not lying. The problem with that definition of subjective harm is it lays the gates wide open to the Machiavellians and the psychopaths. Yes, yes. And you're also touching on two other important things, right? So number one, unlike...

most criminal offenses, which require intent of some kind. The intent is not on whether the speaker meant to be hit for. Yeah, it's not relevant. Intent is not relevant. Right. That's terrifying. And also, the other thing that's not relevant is truth. If you speak a true fact...

That is interpreted as a hateful fact and has this effect on somebody well, that's not going to be a defense either right, right? So you aren't Essentially one of the effects of this kind of legislation is to say you are not allowed to speak the truth Right because that truth regardless of intent regardless of intent but also intent and regardless of historical fact Yeah, we are we are outlawing an effect. I

Yeah, right, right, right. Absolutely. Okay. And to expand that even further, with comedy, it's interesting because, of course, Scotland, where some of the most ridiculous legislation is being passed, is the place which hosts the biggest arts and comedy festival in the world, the Edinburgh Fringe. Right. And...

And to your point about truth, well, you don't even have to be saying something true at this point now. They've passed a bill, which means that comedians could be investigated for jokes they make.

Now, that is a level of detachment from context and reality that is even a level above simply or someone made a true comment. What if I said something sarcastically on stage as a comedian? And what's interesting is comedy seems to be being very particularly targeted, but nobody goes to Macbeth at the theater and says, oh, I went to the theater and then this guy went crazy and stabbed his friend. Right.

No one says that, but with comedy, for some reason, the character on stage is increasingly being perceived as having the opinions that he's jokingly saying. And so that's another level. That's right, there's no distinction between the role and the actor. Quite. And what's interesting, if you abstract even further from that, if you've watched Game of Thrones, the scene where you really, truly discover that King Joffrey's gone mad

is when he cuts off the tongue of the jester in his court. And this symbolism is... It's perfect. It's been used throughout history to portray the final conversion into tyranny of a ruler. That's why there was gestures in court. It's like that was one of the ways everybody could tell that the king wasn't a tyrant. Right. Is that...

He could tolerate his own gesture, his own fool, or welcome him, or find him amusing. That would be best. And this is something that happened when Vladimir Putin first came to power in Russia. Under Boris Yeltsin, there was a kind of liberalization. There was an opening up of... Because in the Soviet Union, you didn't make fun of the political leaders. Nothing was funny in the Soviet Union. Nothing, nothing quite. And that was sure true. Well, the jokes that people told at the kitchen table were funny, but not in public, of course. And

But under Boris Yeltsin, there was an opening up and we had this amazing TV show, which was the equivalent of the British spitting image. I don't know if you had a similar thing. Did you have spitting? No, no, no, I know of it. Yeah. And it was basically puppets portraying the different political characters. And the first thing Vladimir Putin did when he came to power was to shut that down.

So historically throughout literature and other things, if you're looking for symptoms of tyranny, the shutting down of jokes and humor is right at the top of that list. Comedians and automobiles, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, yeah. Well, they're so emblematic of personal autonomy. Every tyrant hates the automobile. So even though they all want to have one. Okay, so...

Let's delve into the hate issue a bit more, too, because in Canada we have protected categories of hate, right? So it's a hate crime if it's—I want to make sure I've got this definition right—it's a hate crime if it is—

can be shown, if your utterance can be shown to be discriminate against a protected class? Well, yes. It's not merely that you hurt people's feelings, right? Correct. They have to hurt them for a particular reason. Well, it's a discriminatory, sorry. So we have these two realms. We have the human rights realm and we have the criminal realm. And we've had hate speech restrictions in our criminal law for a good while. And they're rarely used.

the human rights provisions are much more frequently used because they're much less serious and much easier to trigger, much easier to complain about, and they don't go to a court. They go to one of these tribunals. But one of the problems is the dovetailing of this hate speech discriminatory practice idea along with the equality problem that I was just describing before. So,

As with any rule, this rule is going to be applied and interpreted in one direction and not the other. What I mean by that is, if you go around saying that white people are hateful or privileged or colonists or whatever the case may be, that's pretty hateful. If you say that, you know, if you're white, you are X. You're being stereotypical and you're making a blanket statement about all these people who are white. That's not going to be entertained as hate speech.

because of the way that our equality law has been interpreted, which is, and this is one thing that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal said fairly recently. They said, people who are white cannot be discriminated against. Yeah, yeah. Right? They are not a protected group. They are not a protected group. Some animals are more equal than others. Exactly so. So this kind of law, the hate speech law, is likely to be interpreted in that way, which is, oh, you can only...

utter hate speech against protected groups, if you utter hate speech against those other people who are not in one of those groups. - There's no hate speech against the oppressor classes. - It doesn't qualify. - And by the way, this isn't theory. - No, no. - So in Scotland, for example, they passed this bill on the 1st of April. Of course they did recently. And in the first week of it being passed, there were more reports of hate speech than there had been in the previous several years.

And the reason was that many, many people reported a speech given by Hamza Yousaf, the First Minister of Scotland, in which he was being openly racist against white people. And of course, this isn't considered a hate crime and

You know, it was the BBC interview with Hamza Yusuf where the interviewer and he himself laughed sort of, you know, almost gratuitously. Oh, how silly. You know, people would say, of course, this is complete nonsense. And frankly, he said, I'm not aware of anyone who's not on the far right who would report this as hate speech. It's an absolute case of some animals are more equal than others. And the law is, I'm sure you would agree, written specifically to create that situation. Absolutely.

Ever heard of a data broker? They're the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital footprints you leave online. They can stitch together detailed profiles which include your browsing history, online searches, and location data.

The data broker then sells your profile off to a company who delivers you a really targeted ad. No biggie, right? Well, you might be surprised to learn that these same data brokers are also selling your information to the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS.

I, for one, don't want the tax man showing up at my door because of some search I did on my phone. So, to mask my digital footprints, I protect myself with ExpressVPN. One of the easiest ways for data brokers to track you is through your device's unique IP address, which also reveals information about your location. ExpressVPN hides your IP address, which makes it much more difficult for data brokers to monitor, track, and monetize your private online activity.

ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your network traffic to keep your data safe from hackers when you're on public Wi-Fi. ExpressVPN works on all your devices: phone, laptop, tablet, you name it. Just tap one button to turn it on and you're protected. It's that easy. I use ExpressVPN because I don't like the idea of some big tech company profiting off my personal data. Talk about a violation of privacy.

Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan. That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s vpn.com slash jordan and you can get an extra three months free. Expressvpn.com slash jordan. Some animals are inevitably more equal than others, right? Okay, so now we have a dynamic where in order for there to be hate, there has to be

an oppressor-oppressor dimension. And so you identify the dimension. It could be sex, could be race, could be ethnicity, could be gender expression, could be gender identity because those were added. Then you have a situation where

the oppressed end of that distribution can accuse the oppressor end of that distribution of hate speech, but not the reverse, right? So that's basically the game that's being played here. Okay, so how does Bill C-16 tie into Bill C-63 then?

well, one way is this as far as I'm concerned. So one of the things I was very concerned about back in 2016 was that I looked into gender expression because that became a new category of grouphood essentially in Canada insofar as that was a protected class. So a protected class is a reality that's now got legal protections. That's pretty damn real as far as the law goes. But I couldn't

distinguish, find any distinction whatsoever between gender expression and fashion. In fact, most of the definitions that I found, mostly from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, because a lot of this mess came out of them, was the explicit insistence that gender expression was fashion because, well, because gender is fashion.

And because gender is nothing but fashion, it's a social construct anyways. It's a role that you play. It's a disguise that you put on. It doesn't reflect any deeper underlying reality. Well, okay, that's complete nonsense, but that's okay. Why is that a problem in this case? Well, if fashion criticism, there's no limit to what constitutes a hate crime if fashion criticism prevails.

is one of its valid manifestations, right? Clearly. There's almost nothing I could do to you that would be less harmful than, you know, having a good laugh about your trousers. Sure. But one thing that you're referring to there, alluding to, is the weaponization of human rights. Yes. So if you go to an earlier conception of human rights—

You can describe them as the right not to be abused by your government, not to be thrown in jail without due process, not to be censored for this and that, not to be tortured. Those are human rights. But today, human rights consist of the rights of some people in groups to insist that other people in groups

embrace their own decisions. Yes. Right? Or else. So if I decide that I'm a man,

and you don't call me by my pronouns, then you are guilty of a violation of my human rights. That's a very new idea. That is not where we started with this. That's a weaponization because it means that human rights are a zero-sum game. If I have human rights, that means you have less because I can insist that you behave in a certain way. This is about individuals now

being able to determine how other individuals will behave.

It's incredible. Okay, so now we have another conjunction of pathological enabling here that I'd like to dwell on for a moment. So one of the things we alluded to earlier was the fact that Bill C-63 also opens up the door, it facilitates, enables, and outright encourages anonymous denunciations. Now, the good thinkers would say, well, you want to put as few barriers...

in the way of the oppressed seeking redress for their victimization as possible. But that omits one very important detail, which is that if you can denounce for zero cost, then you weaponize denunciation and you put the entire power of the state in the hands of anyone who wants it. And it's anonymous.

And so to what degree in Bill C-63 do you get to face your accuser, right? You don't even know who it is. So you can be accused regardless of your intent, regardless of the factual evidence.

reality of your utterance by people who do not have to identify themselves or take any responsibility whatsoever if their denunciation turns out to be false, who are rewarded for doing so, who you do not get to confront. Well, at that point, I don't see you have a law system at all. You have rule. You don't even have rule by law.

You have ruled by the worst elements of the mob, and the worst elements are going to be those who will come crawling out of the woodwork like mad to weaponize their resentment by using the state's power they now have at their disposal, right? And rub their hands in glee at every opportunity to do that. There will be specialists in denunciation in no time flat. Okay, so that goes along with that. Well, the...

the anonymity of the informant and the pathology of the... When you divide the world into oppressed and oppressor, you fail to notice that in the hypothetically oppressed class, there are going to be those who use that narrative

as a way of justifying their vengeance. They're not good people who are victims. They're people who are using that story to get exactly what the hell they want from you right now or else. And certainly the human rights commissions in Canada have been weaponized to that degree. I mean, in my situation, since we'll make it personal, I suppose, for a moment, anybody in the world can bring out a complaint against me for any reason, right? And it's at the

The complaint doesn't have to proceed. That's at the decision judgment. It's the judgment of the Ontario College of Psychologists, the regulatory board that determines whether or not that complaint can proceed. But that's...

Like, it's an entirely political decision. But this is part and parcel, though, of those trends I was describing earlier, which is to give these administrative bodies, the professional regulator being one, the human rights tribunal being another, the deference to do as they think best. And yes, you can take, as you know... They can take my rights. You can take them for review in front of a court, but the court...

tends to defer to them and they have the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court about the charter anyway. And so you put those two things together and it basically means that these administrative bodies have a great deal of latitude to do basically whatever they think is right in the public good. Yeah. Right? And so that means you don't have a rule of law. Well, you certainly don't have any. If you're a professional in Canada and you think your charter rights to free speech mean anything, you're sadly deluded because they certainly don't.

Right. Okay, so let's go to the next most fun thing about Bill C-63. This is the part where it moves from sort of jaw-droppingly incomprehensible to absolute theater of the absurd. I had to reread this section like three times. Yeah.

before I could believe it was true. I thought I must be misunderstanding this. I had the same experience with Bill C-16, I guess, when I read about gender expression. I thought, surely this can't mean fashion because it certainly looks like it means fashion. There's no way it means fashion. It's like, nope.

definitely means fashion and purposefully so. It's like, okay, fair enough. Okay, so what have we got on the absolutely absurd side of things? Okay, so this is my understanding and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe you can help me weed out any inaccuracies in my representation. So my understanding is that I can go to a provincial magistrate and I can say that I fear that someone I know

may commit a hate crime, let's say this year. I have good reason, the good reason would be my fear. So that would be my proclamation that my emotional reaction to this person's possible misbehavior is real. Not even that the threat is real, but that I'm afraid that it might be real. And that magistrate can act on that by, well, the penalty laid out in the bill, as far as I can tell, was...

Well, if you're the person who is eliciting the fear, then you get to have an ankle bracelet on for a year and you can be essentially confined to your house and the court can determine who you can talk to and who you can't talk to. And they can also require you to have your bodily fluids monitored. This is one of the elements of the bill I didn't understand at all. It's like, where the hell did that come from?

So they could put restrictions on your right to consume alcohol, for example. I suppose marijuana would probably still be okay as long as the liberals are in power. But anything that would, in principle, heighten the probability that you might commit the hate speech. And the penalties...

Well, that's basically that. That's basically that part of the bill. Now, that doesn't seem, that's a pre-crime, right? It's a pre-crime. It's a pre-crime. Right. Now, it's not like this is a brand new idea. So there are already provisions in the code that allow for pre-crime solutions before a crime happens in some circumstances for some crimes if a court is satisfied that there is a threat.

But what's happening here is they've taken that idea and they've combined it with this speech idea to create the scenario you're describing, which is, you've got to be kidding me. It is now possible for a magistrate to put me under house arrest because of something that he thinks I might say.

That's where we're at. Right, right. So the other circumstances you're referring to, I presume, would be something like someone has made repeated threats of domestic violence that appear credible. Correct. That's right. A credible threat of actual violence, for example. Which in itself, though, constitutes a crime, doesn't it? Well, if you commit it is. But if I threaten you directly with a crime. If you make the threat, that's a crime. Yes, correct.

Right, okay, okay. So that's right. So in that situation, the threat itself is also a crime. Well, it could be. So you could have an actual...

prosecution for the threat. But if there are circumstances where, for some reason, that there hasn't been a threat, but there's still a danger that the evidence shows exists, maybe because there have been previous crimes committed by that individual against that individual, and the victim of those crimes is concerned because it looks like it's going to happen again, there are circumstances under which the court can do this kind of thing.

But the combination of that power with this kind of... Right. Bastard child of those two laws. Exactly. Very well put. Yeah. Okay, so I've got that right. That is how this... Oh, yes. And these can also be brought forward anonymously. Well, see, the anonymous power is most...

noticeable in the bill under the human rights part. So the criminal code aspect is the way it's always done. And sometimes in that situation, I'm not a criminal lawyer, but as I understand it, there are circumstances in which complainants can be protected from exposure to the alleged perpetrator. But the real anonymity problem lies within the human rights tribunal

part of the statute. Okay. Okay. Okay. But so, if I can step back for a moment. Part of the lesson in this, I think, is that the people who have put this together and are supporting it have an entirely different vision

of what they think the law is for and how it's supposed to work. Like, this seems outrageous to us because we still have an idea about the old paradigm, like how this is supposed to, how this is supposed to work. And they don't have that idea anymore. This is a project to make certain kinds of behavior illegitimate, like actually illegitimate. And the fact that it happens to be speech, no concern of theirs because it's illegitimate. Speaking a true fact,

if it's going to have an effect on people, is illegitimate. They are changing the paradigm. They are changing the... They're reframing the whole enterprise of the law. Yeah, this is a very fundamental transformation. This is something surface. Not surface. It goes to the root of the way the law works. And...

And those of us who are clinging to the old idea and thinking, well, this is an aberration. It's an outrageous aberration, but it's an aberration. It's not an aberration anymore. This is becoming the disease that the law is now subject to. Everything is, the law is shifting beneath our feet. Claudine Gay wasn't an aberration in the universities. No, she's emblematic of the universities. That's right. Which is why she was president of Harvard. In the same way that she was emblematic of the universities...

this is becoming emblematic of the law. Okay, so you speak about this. Where's the rest of the lawyers? Well, I'm not alone. Yeah, right. I'm not alone. Right. Our good friend, Jared Brown, has been speaking out on this ever since. Oh, that's two. I know. And I have handfuls of friends that do the same, but it's only a handful.

And it's pretty small. If you compare that handful and the numbers of people who are on this page to the numbers of lawyers overall, I mean, it's a tiny wee slice. Okay, so the same problem obtains on the psychological end of things. Right. Except maybe there are fewer of us, even. Right.

Yeah, there aren't nearly as many as there ought to be. Right, and there's almost none who've stood up against so-called gender-affirming care, even though I know perfectly well that all of them who are even remotely educated know that every single bit of that is a lie. Yes. Okay, so, but the logical suspicion that might arise in the mind of anybody watching this is, well, if it's like you and two other people on the legal side and it's Dr. Peterson on the legal side,

on the clinical side, and maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Why do you think you're not the aberration? I mean, the problem I've always had with you, fundamentally, so I met Bruce under very interesting circumstances. So I went, I offered...

to go to Queen's University and debate anyone at the law school about Bill C-16, which I thought was a pretty good offer on my part because I'm not a lawyer. And I thought there must be some lawyer at the law school who'll jump a chance to give me a good savaging because what the hell do I know?

And the only one who stepped forward was Bruce. And I don't think I knew at the beginning of that. Maybe I knew. I leaned over to you before we started and introduced myself because we hadn't met before. Yeah. And I said, I just want you to know

I agree with you. Yeah, right. That's how it happened. I'm playing the devil. So there was one who stepped forward and he was playing devil's advocate. And I only stepped forward because nobody else would do it. Right. And I wanted to give you a platform to say what you wanted to say. Yeah. More indication of your unreliability. So I played the part. Yeah. And it was good fun. But...

That's where we're at. Okay, so let's go back to the same issue. So why the hell aren't more people in the legal community cognizant of this danger and willing to speak about it if it's so fundamental? Which it seems fundamental. So like, what the hell? What's going on here? So there's lots of reasons, but let me just talk about a couple. The problem is fundamental and fundamental.

It's been around for a long time, much longer than it seems. I mean, C-16-3 is not a long time. C-16 is not a long time. But in the big scheme of things, these trends have been going on for a long time. So we have a huge access to justice problem, meaning that if you are involved in a dispute of some kind, that the cost involved in getting a lawyer and then getting access to a court within a certain period of time, numbered in years,

Almost impossible. Unless you're very rich or very poor, access to the courts is very unlikely. Now, why is that? Well, partly because that in order to get a dispute resolved, you have to go to a court. And what I mean by that is if we had laws that were clear, then you wouldn't need to go to a court.

Because everybody would know what the law was and you would know what would happen when you went to a court. Every time you go to a court, it's a crapshoot. You don't know what's going to happen. So you have to go to the court to find out what's going to happen, which means we need more courts and more judges and more time and more lawyers.

And it's not clear because of all of the things I alluded to earlier, which is we don't just have broad principles in our law. We don't have statutes with rules in them. We don't have cases that are consistent from case to case to case to case. We have one-offs. We have regulations. We have guidelines. We have lots and lots of rules.

rules about everything, and you still don't know what the story is because the laws move over time, and they won't tell you what the law is right now, and you don't know where the law is or who's making it. The whole thing's a mess, and this state of things has existed for quite a while, quite a while. It's the ocean in which lawyers swim. They're the fish in the water. They don't

they don't see the water it's just the life that they are used to they think their job is to make their way through that ocean for that okay so that's sort of the run-of-the-mill lawyers well it's it's not just the run-of-the-mill lawyers it's it's even i mean the i

Look, we have a lot of good lawyers who are very skilled at what they do, but they're skilled within a certain system, the system that we have. And questioning that system is not part of the job of being a lawyer in the normal sense. Yeah, fair enough. Right? Yeah. So it's not about competence. It's about having the time and energy and perception and caring. How many experts in constitutional law, in the history of constitutional law, are there in Canada? Oh, dozens, hundreds.

So what's up with them? Well, they largely embrace the going story. How did that happen? Well, it has partly to do with legal education. The law schools, for the most part, have become captured, like all other institutions, by a certain kind of ideology, critical theory, social justice, and so on, that we know very well. Right.

So really, once that's got the universities, that's pretty much game over. A lot of this trouble can be traced back to the universities. That's where the social justice critical theory stuff began. When it came over from Germany, you know, where it started between the two world wars. And then you can trace that back to Marxism. I mean, it's a whole long story and I'm not a sociologist, but you know the story better than I do. But, yeah.

Yeah, the universities are a main source of all the trouble. And they've been graduating generations of students who have these ideas in their heads. And not just lawyers, but people of all kinds. Who now occupy the professions and the governments and the public schools. They certainly make up the managerial class. Exactly so. And the managerial class is our elite class.

People think that our elite are the widely successful entrepreneurs, and there are a few of those. But our actual elite is the managerial class, the ones who decide— The ones who don't like getting honked out in Ottawa. Exactly. The ones who decide how society is going to run. And those people are—and their interests, the interests of those individual people are in having this system carry on.

And that includes a lot of lawyers. I was talking, I mentioned the problem I had with you. And the problem I had with you is that you don't make a very convincing right-wing crackpot. Well, I mean that. Like, you know, you don't fit the mold. Because the logical thing to do to assume if someone is

standing up against the consensus, generally speaking, is that they're wrong. Now, sometimes they're right, right? And that's the problem. And, you know, you've always struck me as, let's say, suspiciously reasonable, right? In the way that the demagogue types just aren't. And so, and you've already explained why your view on such things is,

which you did make evident. And in a really minority fashion, I'm trying to think of other lawyers that I knew, certainly university lawyers. There was no university lawyers. No members of faculties of law at universities had anything to do with me in Canada. It was you, and that was it. And you played devil's advocate, which I thought was very funny once I figured out what was going on. But

Okay, so why do you think you can see this? Why are you willing to see this? And yeah, yeah, what distinguishes you in your training, your outlook from the other lawyers who apparently aren't or won't? Oh, I don't know. I can't tell you that. I'm not inside their heads. I don't really know. I've always been suspicious of government.

So I was suspicious of government authority ever since I can remember. I think when I was in public school, I thought, how awful to have this person at the front of the class who's not that smart and yet has power over me. So some underlying suspicion of authority as such. Sure. Right, right. But you still went off through university. See, I wanted to go to law school, not first and foremost to be a lawyer.

I wanted to go to law school to find out what the rules were so that I could tell people who wanted to interfere with me what the rules are and had to back off. Right. I see. That's a different motivation. What I discovered was there are no such rules. There are no such rules, as it turns out, that prevents government authorities from backing off because the whole system is designed to give them authority to do that.

So how did you manage with that attitude to have a successful career in academia in faculty of law? I mean, you've had a very successful career. You have a very, you're actually not canceled even. That's true. Yeah. So how do you survive at Queen's or even thrive? And how did you manage to have this attitude and also manage a career in that environment?

I think you have to enjoy the exercise of trying to figure things out and then point it out, even if the people you're pointing it out to aren't listening. I know that doesn't sound like very much. Well, yeah, but that usually just gets people canceled. Well, not if you do it in a certain way. Yeah, that's what I'm asking. What's the way? You can never make it personal. It's not about that person over there who thinks X. They can think whatever they want. See, I'm an actual libertarian.

I think it's fine if people believe what they believe and they want to do what they want to do. I'm totally fine with that. Hey, okay, I want to torture you about that. If their opinion is diametrically opposed to mine, I'm totally fine with that. The only moments when I have trouble with it is when they start to step on my toes. But as long as they're not doing that, I'm cool. I'm cool, right? And this is one of the things I think that

distinguishes and you know what libertarian has become a bad label because libertarians did very very badly during coven very bad yeah they they dropped the ball horribly and it turns out they have a lot of strange ideas so i tend not to use that label anymore but i understand what i mean but there's a huge divide between the libertarian minded people or the liberals i can use that word liberals the original classical liberals and the conservatives and in a sense

you're standing astride the chasm between these two groups, right? Because the conservatives have a very, a lot of them have a very clear idea about what they think is right. Fair enough. People should have an idea about what they think is right. And the classical liberals know what they think about the law. And the mistake, for my money, that the conservatives make is that they fail to distinguish between two different questions. The first question, which is entirely legitimate, which is,

What should people do? How should people behave? Okay, let's hear how you think people should behave. Totally fine with that. The next question is not the same question, which is how must people behave? There's a conservative inclination to want to take their philosophy and make it into law and to make people do what they think is right.

Right, and that's often what made the conservatives, what would you say, undesirable to the more classic liberal types. That was the place that put those two camps at odds. Yes, and it's one reason why I think the progressives today, the ones who are now in power, why they carry such an animus against conservatives.

Because there is some kind of a memory there. Of force. Of force. When the conservatives were ascendant, here's the kinds of things that you did. You know, you outlawed gay sex. You centered us about pornography and obscenity and heresy and sedition. And you prohibited alcohol. And the conservative record on freedom is not very good. And so from a libertarian or a classical liberal point of view,

They're missing the boat. And yet the conservatives and the liberals, the original liberals, are the two forces trying to work together to push back on the woke. Yeah, trying to figure out how to do that. But their analysis of what's wrong is completely different. So if I can put it this way, and I'm sure you've heard conservatives say this too. So from a classical liberal point of view, the problem that the woke has created is too little freedom. They have us under their thumb.

They want us to do this and do that, use pronouns, not to say this, hate speech, yada, yada, yada. Okay? Not enough freedom. I've heard lots of conservatives say, no, no, no. The problem under the woke is too much freedom. You have the freedom to change your gender. You have the freedom to say you're this and not that. You have the freedom to do this. That freedom should not exist. So we agree about the fact that the woke is a problem.

But we disagree about what the problem is. And our solution is diametrically both. Well, that's going to make us weak too. Absolutely. Okay, so let me offer two contradictory responses to that conundrum. Yeah. So for a long time, I, by temperament, have this libertarian twist, which is,

you can go to hell in a handbasket your particular way if you so desire, and that's within your bailiwick. Have at her. But I've rethought that to some degree in the aftermath of the gender-affirming debacle. So for a while I was thinking with regards to so-called gender-affirming care, I'm not exactly sure even what terminology to use. It's

It's surgical mutilation, essentially. Hormonal manipulation and surgical mutilation. Should you have the right to do that to yourself as an adult? I thought, sure, why not? Knock yourself out. But, you know, I'm starting to wonder about that. There's two ways you can approach that. One would be

Well, you might be able to request it, but that doesn't mean the surgeon should be allowed to provide it. Oh, sure. Right. And I think they've actually showed their absolute inability and unwillingness to police themselves in that regard. That's just clear. And then it's also the case that

You don't know the limits to what people are willing to do to themselves to stand out. And the answer to that is there are no limits. So you saw the recent case in Canada, I presume, where we have a diaper fetishist, because that's a fun class of people, who's just pursuing his own thing, after all, who wants to have a neo-vagina created somewhere down below while maintaining his penis intact. And

He couldn't find anyone skillful enough to perform that particular act of butchery on him in Canada. Found someone in Texas and then sued the Canadian government for paying for it. Right. That's the key. And they're going to. That's the key. That's the key for me. All right. So...

At some point, I'm sort of thinking, no, we're done with all this. We're just not doing sex reassignment. I don't care if you're 90. There's no surgeons that have the right to do that to another person. So now, and is it a slippery slope argument? Well, for me, it's sort of,

For me, it's more like I've just had enough of this argument. I saw where this went. We started with this in 1960, something or other, with the first sex change operation, which I think was a dubious enterprise back then. And the cascading consequence of this has been like the worst medical practice in maybe ever? Mm-hmm.

Probably not, you know, because ever is a long time and there's been some dark things done. But in terms of mass assault on children, it's certainly in the top two. But children are different. Right, right. But that's the thing is that, you know, at what point does the perversity of your desire to go to hell in a handbasket your own particular way start to actually become in and of itself a social threat? Okay, well, well, well...

Yeah, but let's put the kids aside because the kids are a special case, right? And then you've got the problem of, you know, who gets to decide, the parents or the state. The easiest case to resolve and find agreement on are with adults. So let's ask this question. Is there anything that an of-age adult, full adult, competent, should not be allowed to do to themselves if they're not...

imposing upon other people, not coercing them, not interfering with them, not taking their stuff. And my answer is nothing. I can't think of anything. Now, that does not mean that I think the state should be involved

as in running the healthcare system. I don't think they should be funding it. I don't think they should be providing services. I mean, we shouldn't have, from my mind, we shouldn't have a public healthcare system. But, so if you take that away, it's like, in other words, you should be allowed to go, if you can find a doctor to do this strange thing that you want done to yourself, and the doctor agrees of his own free will, and you agree of your own free will, and you're willing to pay the doctor, as far as I'm concerned,

The fact that I think it's weird and strange and wrong and harmful, I'm not the king. So I don't think my opinion about it has any relevance to it. And that applies to

gender surgery, it applies to suicide, it applies to prostitution, it applies to drugs, it applies to anything. Because it's not my life. It's their life, and I don't want to impose my... There's also the danger there of deciding who's going to make the judgment. It's not like it's a risk-free prohibition. There's no prohibition that's risk-free. See, the problem I'm having with that more and more, Bruce, is that

There's kind of no end to the number of monsters who are going to crawl out from underneath the woodwork, as we've seen. I'm sure that's true. And that's going to get worse. Yes. And so, you know, you say if you can find a doctor who will do that. I mean, I would respond, if I was making the contrary cases, that there are things that if they were actually doctors, they wouldn't do. Right. Right. And so...

We already saw in Canada, I think, the removal of two fingers. That was a month ago. Could be. Right, because the person had a form of body dysmorphia and claimed to be at suicide risk unless the fingers were removed. Well, let's take an easier one then. How about assisted suicide? Now, there are three models of assisted suicide. The conservative one.

is no, can't do that. It's not moral. Can't, outlawed. No assisted suicide. The progressive version is the one we have in Canada, which is it's publicly funded. The government provides it, directs it, supports it, promotes it, pays for it.

And it comes with a free rainbow unicorn. Kill yourself, we'll help you. And they encourage it by not giving you timely service on other things that you really need so that your life becomes miserable. And so the best way out is to kill yourself. That's untenable, okay? I am not advocating that at all. The third version is the government has nothing to do with it. If you want to kill yourself with the help of a doctor, that is your business. And I might not approve this,

But it's got nothing to do with me. Well, that's kind of where we were before the assisted suicide law. Practically, that's kind of where it had landed. But the conservatives will not put up with it. Yeah, yeah. Right? So if I'm in my old age and I have some kind of difficulty and I'm not having any fun anymore, I want to be able to kill myself. And I do not want to be under the thumb of conservatives any more than I want to be under the thumb of the woke. And this is the problem that we have between these two groups.

The conservatives portray themselves sometimes as virtue people. I've called them that, virtue people, in the sense that they put virtue before freedom. And there's something to be said for that. So here's the way the argument goes. In order to be truly free...

in your own heart or your own mind. You have to be virtuous in your own heart. You have to understand things. You have to have discipline. You have to understand the good or some notion of it. You have to have faith in something in order to... To the purpose of freedom. Exactly. You have to have meaning so that you don't give in to your base desires and your animal instincts. Okay. But that's not about the law. And the conservatives...

a lot of them anyway, say, no, the law should make you behave virtuously. Enforce virtue. Enforce virtue. And my answer to that is enforced virtue is not virtuous. It's obedience. In order to be virtuous, you have to decide. You have to have free will to decide between dark and light. And if you don't have the choice, then the fact that you are made to behave in this way

Right. So part of the reading of your more libertarian argument there would be, I guess part of the reason that I've often always believed that people should be allowed to go to hell in a handbasket in their own particular manner is because

You're going to learn. You are going to learn. That's right. And then you'll know. Absolutely. And that's the libertarian version of responsibility. Yes, right. Right? Well, the state's not going to come in and rescue you. This is really your choice. Well, and then you actually have the knowledge. Absolutely. There is perhaps, and by the way, I come, I think, as closely from the, as much from the classical liberal position as possible on this. But I think there is a test case that's currently happening on the streets of every major city, and it certainly feels like the United States. Right. Where,

I don't know if this is necessarily accurate exactly, but it sort of feels like the libertarian argument has been taken to its logical conclusion, ignoring elements of reality. So that's why you have mentally ill people on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York and elsewhere, because they've got to be free, right? We can't put them in a mental health hospital because those hospitals used to be terrible, objectively, right? So getting people out of the tyranny of that institution, right?

I guess was a good thing, but now they're on the street taking drugs. And the question is, is that freedom? Because I don't know that you are free when you're hooked on fentanyl. Well, define freedom for us, though.

Well, it feels to me like part of the conversation around freedom has to involve an element of agency. And then the question is, do you have agency if you're so, let's say, traumatized or so addicted or whatever that is that's causing you to effectively be unable to live a human life, right? If you're living in Skid Row, I don't think that's what freedom looks like. I'm not sure that's true.

What are they learning exactly? See, that's what sparked my thought. What are they learning? Well, I would suppose that they are learning that the choices that they made didn't work very well. Well, and some people do hit bottom and bounce up. Yes, they do. You know, I mean, even though we don't know how to help people recover from alcoholism, really, many people do. And they often do after having their...

after rubbing their face along a very rough sidewalk for a very long period of time. It's certainly not a pleasant form of freedom. I mean, I'm also not suggesting that, you know, there's a simple solution to the problem of having deinstitutionalized. Well, see, this is my point is I think that... There may just not, there may not be any. The thing is, the question is whether there's a better solution. If you have an IQ of 50, do you have freedom? Yes.

Sure you do. If you are not being opposed upon by other people or the state,

then by definition you have freedom. The fact that you are not able to exercise it in the same way as the next guy doesn't mean you're not free. It means you're free to make mistakes. Listen, free freedom has good and bad. It enables you to sometimes be successful and sometimes to fail. And that's part of the package. You can't make it just one way and not the other way because that's not what it is. Well, there's another dimension to the conversation about homelessness and drug addiction and so on, which is

I think it's very difficult to argue that that is consequence-free for the rest of society. So, we recognize that there are limits to our freedom when we start to impact on others. And that's a very good example, I think, where that trade-off seems to me to be being got wrong. But there is a progressive idea that has become mainstream, and mainstream especially amongst conservatives. And that is this: that the state is the savior.

That is, if you want to solve a problem, it has to be the state to come in to fix it. I mean, this is an idea a professor at Hillsdale College put it this way when he was talking about Woodrow Wilson, who was the first progressive American president. Woodrow Wilson, he says...

Change the idea from the government as servant to government as savior. As in, if we're going to fix our problems, it's got to be the government who does it. Well, yeah, with the corresponding assumption that if there's a problem, that's evidence of government inadequacy. Right, right, right, exactly so. And part of the reason we think that so thoroughly now is that all those other institutions that used to exist are gone.

because the government came in and pushed them all out, right? So when you have people on the streets, the only place to turn to is the state. And that doesn't mean it's a good call. I think it's a terrible idea because everything the government touches goes to rot, even stuff that's already rotting. I mean, part of the reason those people are there to start with is because we have an overwhelming, expansive administrative state.

And so to suggest that that more of that is going to fix it, no, it's not going to happen. No, I certainly wasn't suggesting that. But I do think it's an interesting case for the libertarian argument where it starts to break down. I used to be pro decriminalizing all drugs. I think increasingly that conversation about how certain things impact your agency is interesting.

is important. Try that with alcohol though. Because alcohol, so part of the rationale claimed for prohibition was that alcohol can lead to very bad societal effects. Which it can. Which it can, for sure. For some people it can be devastating. And yet for a lot of people, not so. So are we going to ban alcohol so as to avoid the catastrophic effects on some people? No, no, no.

No, same with prostitution. Right now, sometimes people who are in favor, again, tend to be conservatives, say, you know, we should ban prostitution, make it illegal. Because sometimes prostitution happens without consent and people get into dangerous situations and there's sexual assault. And that's true. But that is also true with just plain old sex.

Well, there's no transaction going on financially. It's just an encounter. You get sexual assault in that situation too. Are we going to extrapolate and say, well, because that happens just in ordinary sex, we're going to outlaw that too so as to avoid the downside scenarios? No, no. If you have two people who have agency and consent to a transaction, who is going to come in and say, sorry, you can't do that?

Not me. So one of the things that I've been trying to do in my lecture tour that's germane to the point that you raised about, you know, if there's a problem, it's indicative of the insufficiency of the state. Yeah. Right? Sort of as an axiomatic presumption. Right. Well, if that's not the case, then what's the proper replacement presumption? If there's a problem, who should be doing something about it? I'd like you to tell me what you think about this. Okay.

because this isn't exactly a libertarian freedom from argument. It's more of a responsibility argument. I'm never sure where the libertarians sit on that side. If you can see a problem, that's your problem. And you might say, well, how do you know that? And the answer is something like, well, it bothers you. So there's a new cardinal, Cardinal Newman, who is famous for his...

his defense of the idea of God. And he, there's a long line of theological speculation that one of the ways that the spirit of the cosmos makes itself manifest is in

It's a very old idea. It goes back to the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, who was the prophet who defeated the nature gods, which is very interesting. He replaced the God of nature, which is back in full force now with the notion that

the spirit, the ancestral God of the Israelites was the still small voice within, right? It was conscience. And if you see a problem in the world and it bothers you, that's a direct indication that you have something to do. It's part of, I would say it's part of the landscape of meaning that reveals itself to you. It's part of your responsibility. You might say, well, what can I do about it? Which is a perfectly reasonable objection, but...

The right response to that is, that's your problem. And you might say, well, why should it be my problem? And one answer to that is, well, you need something to do. So, well, seriously, like, because there's... But I think this has a very simple answer. My simple answer would be this. You know, you ask me, is that my responsibility? And my answer would be, morally, maybe so.

Legally, no. No, no, I wouldn't, and I'm not saying that at all. And that's all I'm saying. All I'm saying is legally. I am not making a moral argument here at all about the drugs or anything else. I don't think it could legally be made your responsibility. It could be made your obligation. Well, you could be, well, if you're talking illegal obligation, that's your responsibility. Yeah, fine, fine, fine. But this is the conservative argument about the prostitution. Yeah. Right? It's that if you see a problem,

that not only should you do something about it, you should make a law that does something about it. If you see prostitution going on, we can't have that. This is a finger wagging stuff. Yeah. Right? Yeah, and it's not effective. It's not effective. No, but it's also, it's not even the most, it does push people away from conservatism, especially if they're young. And it's actually not the most effective.

But it's also arrogant. It's arrogant in this sense. It assumes, it's a top-down thing. It's like, well, there's a few of us. It's the religious hypocrite. There's a few of us up here who understand what's best for everybody. So we're going to make the rules from now on. Which sounds a lot like the progressives. Exactly my point. Exactly my point. The progressives and the conservatives of this ilk anyway. Yeah.

have a common idea. I mean, now, the particular virtues they believe in are completely different. But the idea is the same. If you give me enough power, I'll fix it. Exactly. It's just that the right people have to have the power, right? Whereas your argument, I think, one I'm very sympathetic to, is we should have laws that protect our basic rights and let's get on with it.

Well, and then what I've been attempting to suggest to people is that it's in taking up that mantle of problem personally that you find the meaning of your life. Genuinely, that's actually where it lurks. But that's also what protects you against tyranny. Because if everyone did in their local environments what they're called upon to do,

there wouldn't be a lot of unsolved problems lying around for the tyrants to point to, freak out about, and mop up. Right. So there's a real, in the Old Testament story, in the Exodus story,

There's a dynamism between slave and tyrant, right? One needs the other. One produces the other. The slaves call for the tyrant to emerge. The tyrant becomes contemptuous of the slaves and ever more tyrannical. It's a dance. And the way that's technically solved in the Exodus story is it's solved by Moses' father-in-law,

who sees the Israelites trying to make Moses into a new Pharaoh, because they're all slaves and whining about and being victims and, you know, pining for the tyranny. And he basically tells them that

He tells Moses to make a hierarchy of distributed responsibility, to break his people up into tens and hundreds and thousands and so forth, all the way up to the top, to allocate responsible decision-making down as far down that hierarchy as possible, and to only adjudicate, speaking to Moses,

Those disputes that can't be adjudicated lower. Well, why? Well, Jethro says there's two reasons for that. The first is, well, you'll stress yourself out because no one can take the responsibility for governing an entire people. So it's just not bearable and you'll turn into a tyrant and that's not good either. But worse, and this is the more subtle point, is that if you alleviate the people of that responsibility,

Yes. They'll just stay slaves. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Well, I think that's exactly right. And so that's a more responsible libertarian argument. It's like, well, you need to be able to learn from your mistakes, which is why you should be able to make them. Right. You still have that problem of, well, how big a mistake till you start taking other people out? And that's something I think that's subject to continual negotiation. But I don't think there is a substitute for

a distributed hierarchy of responsibility. And so what that seems to imply is, well, as marriage decays, so people abdicate responsibility for that. As the nuclear family decays because people abdicate responsibility for that and local community organizations and the church, all of that abdicated responsibility is vacuumed up by the state. Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Right. And in fact,

I would say that the state is largely responsible for the disintegration of those things in the first place. Yeah. Right? So you cause the problem, and then you vacuum up what's left of it afterwards. Yeah. Well, I wrote a paper with Jonathan Pazzo for The Ark on...

on the symbolism of the whore of Babylon and the scarlet beast in Revelation. And so it's an image of the end times, right? And the end times has two archetypal elements. So the scarlet beast is a

It's the blood colored beast of the state basically, multiple heads. So it's a degenerate state. 'Cause a unified state has one head. - Yes. - Like seven heads, all male. - Right. - Pointing in different directions, right? So it's a degenerate patriarchy, all right? And on the back of the scarlet beast, which is the degenerate masculine spirit, is the whore of Babylon, which is the degenerate feminine spirit because, you know,

No, one sex doesn't go wrong without the other sex going wrong. What happens? Well, in the degenerate state, female sexuality is commodified. Right, right, right. And so you get that dance. Right, right, right, right, right, sure. Yeah, but it's worse, you see, because the story has a particular ending. The beast kills the prostitute. So what the implication there is that the state will

As it disintegrates, it offers more and more hedonistic gratification as enticement, but it ends up destroying all gratification whatsoever because it can't sustain the promises. Right, right, right.

that it offers. Which brings us all the way back to the very beginning. Until there's no bread. Exactly. And it brings us all the way back to the beginning because as all of these institutions that traditionally used to regulate relationships between human beings crumble, we need more and more laws. Whereas in the past, if Barry said something offensive, well, Barry's a bit of a dick. Right, right.

what's for dinner. Now it's, well, Barry's a bit of a dick. We've got to legislate because we can't have... You've got to phone the hate crime unit. That's right. Because we are not self-regulating all of those relationships. And now we need daddy to come in. We need departments of social work to come and be the worst possible foster parents imaginable. That's right. All right, gentlemen, we should probably draw this to a halt.

for those of you watching and listening, most of you know that I generally continue these interviews for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side of things. And I think what we might turn to in this particular occasion is solutions, potential solutions, which we didn't have an opportunity to discuss, concentrating more on laying out the apocalyptic landscape, so to speak, particularly in Canada, but in a manner that's like illustrative of

what's happening, I would say, generally in the West. So thank you, Dr. Pardee. My pleasure. Thanks for participating in that, Constantine. All those of you who are watching and listening, your time and attention is much appreciated. To the Daily Wire Plus people for making this possible, that's also much appreciated. Film crew here in Dallas, thank you for your help, guys. That went very well. And drop over to the Daily Wire Plus side if you want to see this continue. Bye-bye.

♪♪♪

Going back to school is a big step, but having support at every step of your academic journey can make a big difference. Imagine your future differently at capella.edu.