2017/02/11: An incendiary discussion at Ryerson U

[Music] So I've been talking about your cause, I guess, since you started your videos and since you started having troubles with, uh, you know, with human rights tribunals or threats by UFT. I just think it's common sense, as I said, that I think that U promoting CR, you know, critical thinking, is helping people to be able to tolerate subjects that they may not feel comfortable about but that they should be able to hear and process—not based on emotions but based on an actual analysis of the facts, the evidence, the reality versus some agenda being shut down their throat.

Whether it's through the media, through the professors, and anyone teaching in Academia knows that there are professors who have no problem with basically teaching their truths as fact. So I've been promoting this. I've been promoting it within my own organization, the Ontario Psychological Association. I got a lot of flack from um, other psychologists who thought, no, we can't allow this type of speech to happen. That discussion that you're supposed to have had was a travesty, really.

Um, it was October, I believe, when you had those other professors coming in and talking about, you know, the issue. Some psychologists wrote pieces in National media Publications saying this kind of discussion should not happen. Yeah, okay. So, and this is from psychologists—the ones who are supposed to be best trained to be able to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with, you know, discussing uncomfortable topics.

So I was hoping for you to be able to share with, uh, you know, the audience your experience in the last few months in trying to promote this— you know what you're basically trying to promote—which I think I'll let you describe in your own words.

Okay, so let me think about those videos for a minute. Well, I think there were two things that—oh, I should give you some background on the videos, I guess. I mean, I just made them in my office at home. I wasn't, uh, I had no idea what the consequences would be. I was just trying to sort out my thoughts about, partly about, not so much Bill C-16 as the background policies that surrounded it, especially on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, because the bill itself looks rather innocuous. It's only about two paragraphs long.

The only part of it that isn't innocuous is the insistence on transforming the hate speech codes, including harassment and discrimination based on gender—what was it? Gender identity and gender expression—in the hate speech codes. I thought, that's weird, that there's something up there.

Anyways, I started digging more into the background on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website and the policies surrounding Bill C-16. To call them appalling is barely to scratch the surface; they're unbelievably badly written and contain internally contradictory and over-inclusive and dangerous.

I mean, they do things, for example, like make employers responsible for all the speech acts of their employees, whether they have intended or unintended consequences. That's completely... the only reason you would write a law like that is to get as many employers in trouble as you could possibly manage because there's no other reason for formulating the legislation that way.

I've also... a colleague of mine came in recently at the University, and he's starting to teach a little bit about the background for this sort of thing in one of his classes. He showed me the developmental progression of the policies surrounding Bill C-16, and originally they were written in a much tighter format. But then they were farmed out for what they called public consultation, which basically meant they ran them by a variety of people who I would say are very strongly on the activist end of the political spectrum.

They basically, in order to not bother anyone who they had consulted with, decided for example that gender identity should be nothing but subjective choice—which is, I don't even know what to say about that. If you're a psychologist and you have any sense at all, that's a completely insane proposition.