What Jordan Peterson, Campus Protests and the Freedom Convoy Share in Common: Ignorance of the Law

Where the far right and far left meet: great self confidence, righteous indignation, and a complete ignorance of the way the law actually works.

The point of this piece - while people talk about rights and freedoms all the time, they don’t actually understand the laws that refine their rights, their limits, or how the law is applied. In fact, many people are completely ignorant of the law, and one of them is Jordan Peterson. In this, he is not alone.

Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse

Jordan Peterson’s lack of understanding of the law is well documented. As I wrote earlier, he briefly tried to create a career for himself as an expert witness. His testimony was tossed by the courts for glaring errors in fact, logic, law, and as “junk science” because it didn’t meet the basic criteria for what can be considered legal or scientific evidence.

This lack of connection between theory and practise is longstanding. In “Maps of Meaning,” one of Jordan Peterson’s early books, he tells a truly remarkable story directly related to criminal law in the introduction. He explains that he was obsessed with fear of nuclear war and wanted to understand human evil.

Peterson tells of his visit to a maximum security prison near Edmonton, Alberta, where he finds himself stranded in the weight room surrounded by hardened criminals. Peterson’s choice of costume that day was tall boots and a 1890s woolen cape from Portugal he had bought on vacation.

The result is something straight out of a prison comedy.

“I returned to university and began to study psychology. I visited a maximum security prison on the outskirts of Edmonton, under the supervision of an eccentric adjunct professor at the University of Alberta.

His primary job was the psychological care of convicts. The prison was full of murderers, rapists, and armed robbers. I ended up in the gym, near the weight room, on my first reconnaissance. I was wearing a long wool cape, circa 1890, which I had bought in Portugal, and a pair of tall leather boots. The psychologist who was accompanying me disappeared, unexpectedly, and left me alone. Soon I was surrounded by shoddy men, some of whom were extremely large and tough-looking. One in particular stands out in my memory. He was exceptionally muscular, and tattooed over his bare chest. He had vicious scar running down the middle of his body, from his collarbone to his midsection. Maybe he had survived open-heart surgery. Or maybe it was an ax wound. The injury would have killed a lesser man, anyway – someone like me.

Some of the prisoners, who weren’t dressed particularly well, offered to trade their clothes for mine. This did not strike me as a great bargain, but I wasn’t sure how to refuse. Fate rescued me, in the form of a short, skinny, bearded man. He came up to me – said that the psychologist had sent him – and asked me to accompany him. He was only one person, and many others (much larger) currently surrounded me and my cape. So I took him at his word. He led me outside the gym doors, and out into the prison yard, talking quietly but reasonably about something innocuous (I don’t recall what) all the while. I kept glancing back hopefully at the open doors behind us as we got further and further away. Finally my supervisor appeared, and motioned me back. We left the bearded prisoner, and went to a private office. The psychologist told me that the harmless-appearing little man who had escorted me out of the gym had murdered two policemen, in cold blood, after he had forced them to dig their own graves. One of the policemen had little children, and had begged for his life, on their behalf, while he was digging – at least according to the murderer’s own testimony.

This really shocked me.”

Now, whether it was true or just a story the prison staff were making up to put one over on the college kid who showed up dressed like Puss’n’Boots to maximum security prison in Edmonton, Alberta, Peterson believed it.

Peterson has not studied, nor does he understand history, literature, philosophy, relgion, evolution, science, health, medicine, politics, policy, finance and the law. He has opinions on all of them, but actual historians, biologists, lawyers, academics have all pointed out that his accounts aren’t valid, not because of any political views he has, but because these disciplines and schools of thought are all underpinned by basic requirements of logic and evidence that are absent from Peterson’s work.

It’s significant that Peterson’s claim to fame and supposed victimization by government was, once again, based on ignorance of the law. To be fair to Peterson, it’s ignorance that is widely shared across the country by experts of all political stripes.

Peterson rose to celebrity after he got his knickers in the twist when he claimed that that two new sets of regulations, combined, would result in government “compelling speech.” Peterson presented himself as a free-speech martyr, claiming government was forcing him to say something he didn’t want to say.

One was a new Federal Government bill about hate speech. The other, separately, was the fact that his home University, the University of Toronto, was asking faculty to to refer to students by their preferred pronouns. Peterson’s non-expert legal opinon was that these rules together would somehow combine so government would force him to say something he didn’t want to say.

The problem is that, legally speaking, it was a pile of horseshit. Peterson was able to get away with this nonsense because no one pointed out the legal fact that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply on university campuses in Canada, except in limited fashion in Alberta. In Alberta, pro-life protestors were granted the right by the Alberta Court of Appeal. Courts in other provinces have found the Charter does not apply to universities.

People are sometimes shocked to hear this, which is really just a reflection that people do not understand how the law and rights work in Canada, but it’s for a simple reason. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies to the Federal Government, and universities are not government.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply to the private sector. Your employer does not give you freedom of expression, and can fire you for saying the wrong thing. While univerities are not the private sector, there is no question that they are not government either.

There is an important distinction in the law between what is a right and what is a privilege. You get rights because you are a citizen or resident of Canada, and the test of whether you have those rights is whether you are legally considered to be a “person” under the law. Some things that are not rights are “privileges,” and you only get to do them so long as you are a “member in good standing” of a group that defines its own membership.

Universities are communities that have the legally mandated right to determine who becomes a student, faculty, or member, and the rights, privileges and obligations people have to meet to maintain membership in the community. That includes having disciplinary measures including the authority to expel people from the commmunity, students and employees alike, including having the authority to ask people to leave the property.

Anyone’s position in university is supported by various kinds of rights and laws, but there is no right to be a university student or right to be a faculty member that grants you immunity and impunity. There’s a really obvious way in which you don’t have “freedom of expression” on campus, and that is that you can be removed as a student or an faculty member for plagiarism. Those are not covered by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Government of Canada won’t go after you for not adequately citing a source.

The other reason is that universities, have something else that’s supposed to be really important when it comes to learning existing knowledge and developing new ideas: quality control. It’s not the wall of a gas station toilet, or social media.

Now, that’s something that people may simply take for granted. Of course universities have standards of evidence and argument - that is the whole point. Even fiction and fantasy have conventions, and every discipline has standards for ensuring that the information is reliable and meaningful, and not just invented and baseless.

These are all examples of the kind of enforcement of university standards that strictly limit your freedom of expression in specific ways. There are expectations of honesty and academic integrity that are demanded of the community, because those are foundational to credible knowledge.

Specifically in the case of universities, these set requirements for what is considered new and true knowledge. That is not the standard set by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - it’s higher and stricter.

As a society, we have been pushed to a default, and legally incorrect libertarian or anarchist position where any form of regulation is considered to be impinging on freedom.

There is a difference between the chaotic free-for-all that people seem to think exists, on campus, and freedom of inquiry, and academic freedom, which are actually created and protected because university speech codes and policies prevail, instead of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s not that it’s violating the Charter - the Charter does not apply, because this is not the public square. It’s not government telling you what to do.

The reason it’s not the public square is that what matters is the accuracy of the information that’s being researched and taught. That includes correct information about physics, chemistry, nursing, the law, medicine and engineering, because when professionals make mistakes, people can die.

Universities are also an employer, and they set HR and other policies. If you don’t follow these policies as an employee, you can be suspended or lose your job, and as a student you can be failed or expelled. These are the consequences people face for their actions as adults in the real world, and that literally every other worker in the world has to live with.

Peterson’s claim was an HR gripe between a histrionic professor and his employer. The Federal Government had nothing to do with it.

Peterson’s claim that he was going to be “forced” to refer to students by the pronoun they preferred was always odd, simply because there is arguably no need to refer to students in the third person, in a classroom environment, ever.

Just like you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can be expressing yourself while also breaking the law

Jordan Peterson is certainly not alone in not understanding the law, or how the Charter of Rights and Freedom of Expression have always existed in Canada.

There have been two “occupation protests” in Canada recently, where there have been arguments around freedom of speech, the role of authorities and accusations that particular opinions or speech are being discouraged or “criminalized.” One was the Freedom Convoy in January and February 2022, which have generally had the support of the right (and sometimes far right) in Canada, and the other are “pro-Palestinian” protests, which have generally had the support of of the left (and sometimes far left) in Canada.

There are a number of things the two protests had, and have, in common. One is that the protestors themselves are extremely devoted to their cause and their belief that governments are acting in an unethical or illegitimate way. Part of their argument is that the protests themselves are justified, and are even without reproach, because of the wickedness of their opponents and their actions. There are also people who, for a variety of reasons, take issue with the content of their protests.

However, no matter whether you agree or disagree with the statements protestors are trying to make, the reality is that here in Canada, there are ways to protest where you aren’t breaking any laws, and there are ways to protest where you are breaking the law.

It’s not about what you are saying - and the fact that you are expressing an important political opinion does not get you a get out of jail free card.

As an example: if you are driving drunk while delivering an important political address via your cellphone and you are arrested, it’s because you were breaking drunk driving laws, not because of what you are saying.

You can exercise your freedom of expression, but you can’t also be breaking the law.

The other argument that has been deployed by both the Freedom Convoy and Palestinian campus protestors is that their protests are “peaceful” by which they apparently mean there hasn’t been violence directed at other people. They are, however unlawful.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides rights, and laws and regulations create responsibilities, for which people are held to account. There are many, many ways to break the law that do not involve violence that still carry the risk of real harm, and are crimes under the Canadian Criminal code.

This is obvious in the example of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, Manitoba, Windsor and other locations across the country. Trucks blocked roads, highways and border crossings. This may be called a “peaceful” protest but it’s not remotely legal, for obvious reasons - it’s a crime.

It is not violent to park a car on a roadway or to drive slowly to block traffic as part of a protest, but it is a crime, because it’s incredibly unsafe. It places people at risk of real and imminent harm or death in event of a car accident. Blocking borders slows the flow of essential goods and services, and can block access for people seeking medical care. It’s “disturbing the peace” because you’re breaking the law in ways that put other people at risk.

The same is true of charges of “mischief” which is a general term. Jordan Peterson has minimized these charges, because again, people have a layman’s understanding of what the word is. It doesn’t mean kids “getting up to some mischief” and being naughty - it’s a criminal charge, and in the case of the Convoy Protests, the supposedly “non-violent” and “peaceful” mischief consisted of people phoning 911 in Ottawa to jam the phone lines and and undermine the emergency response.

Here too, these are actions that could lead to someone dying, because they are having a health crisis, an accident, or are a victim of crime, and they can’t reach the police or the emergency services. Blocking 911 lines is not an accepted or legal form of protest.

This is laid out in the Canadian Chiefs of Police “NATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR
POLICE PREPAREDNESS FOR DEMONSTRATIONS AND ASSEMBLIES”

It even has a convenient handout, which states:

YOU CAN:

Gather to peacefully assert your rights Express your thoughts, beliefs and opinions Get your messaging out in a lawful way Have freedom of association

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees certain rights and fundamental freedoms. Section 2 of the Charter guarantees your right to believe what you choose, and to express your values. We recognize the importance of fundamental freedoms and all other protections in the Charter.

YOU CAN’T:

• Block or obstruct a highway

• Breach the peace

• Cause a disturbance, take part in a riot Wear a mask or disguise during an unlawful assembly, or, with intent to commit an indictable offence

• Disobey a court order

• Harm or injure anyone

• Possess weapons of any kind including substances such as tear gas

The Criminal Code of Canada and/or “Case Law” contains various provisions that act to limit or control certain activities related to public demonstrations.

IF YOU’RE NOT SURE, ASK:

Is this considered a peaceful/lawful event? Does this event require a permit?
Am I allowed to wear a mask?

Though all Canadians are entitled to rights and freedoms, Section 1 of the Charter calls for certain limitations. Rights and freedoms are not without responsibilities. The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that freedoms in the Charter cannot be extended to protect and justify threats or acts of violence like assault, destruction of property, or unlawful conduct.

KNOW THE CONSEQUENCES

There also may be provincial and municipal statutes that apply during demonstrations such as the Highway Traffic Act. Protesting unlawfully has the potential to affect your future in various ways.

Charges resulting in a criminal record, could result in things like:

• Travel limitations

• Possibility of limited employment prospects Impacts when obtaining insurance or renting housing

• Further legal consequences if breaching a court order

Generally speaking, this all refers to the way protests occur in public - on public property.

It also has to be emphasized that we give police and the judicial “discretion” in order to deal with offenders. People are let off with warnings, they have lesser charges, and that is an essential part of the judgment that is essential to the situation. That can include intent, the individual’s intentions and beliefs, whether they were capable of telling the difference between right and wrong, and the harm that was done. Generally speaking there is a matter of degree in the law, the more you knew and deliberately planned it ahead of time, the more seriously it is taken.

It’s not about the political content of the speech, it’s about other laws that are being broken. The fact that laws are being broken is a problem in and of itself.

That’s where the issue of court orders comes in, for both the Freedom Convoy as well as pro-Palestinian protestors on campus.

In the case of the Freedom Convoy, there is no right to block highways and streets in protest, and the fact that is goes on for days is an aggravating factor. There are matters of degree, and the same thing that starts as a temporary inconvenience which, if it does on long enough, becomes disruptive. It’s not violent, but it is certainly “unlawful” which is to say, that people are breaking the law.

When authorities then get an a court order or injunction for people to leave, it’s illegal to ignore it. The court has ruled that you cannot keep doing what you are doing, because the actions are not legal.

When police show up with a court order and tell you to clear out, it’s not like you were just walking along and minding your own business, and the police came out of nowhere. The police provided evidence to the court in order to obtain a court ruling that you are breaking the law. They are telling you that you are breaking the law. They are giving you the benefit of the doubt that you did not know until now. Now that you have been told you are breaking the law, you have the opportunity to leave, or if you choose to disobey a court order, you can be charged.

And this is the thing - just as the Convoy did not have the right to park trucks blocking traffic on public roads and highways, and have an obligation to follow court orders, campus protestors do not have the right to occupy campus property, because they not on public property.

There is no right to set up a camp on a campus, and except in Alberta, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply. In other provinces, courts have ruled that they do not, and the Supreme Court has not yet made a decisive ruling.

If the administration requests that you leave, rules and legislation give them that authority. There have been demands in support of protestors’ freedom of expression, sometimes paired with requests that police not be called.

It has to be said, that while no one wants to see an escalation, it’s not legal to ignore a court order to leave. It means you’re ignoring the law. If individuals refuse to obey what are perfectly lawful requests from university officials and security, because they are breaking the law, the police and the courts are quite literally the only option to ensure that the law is enforced.

This is not about criminalizing free speech, or suppression of particular voices - it is that people are breaking the law while also protesting. It may be their sincere belief that they are not breaking the law, but they are, not by saying the wrong thing, but because their actions are against the law.

There is an important point to make here about civil disobedience. The distinction here is one that was drawn by Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, as he spelled out in his letter from Birmingham Jail. He was in favour of direct action and civil disobedience by having people be willing to be arrested and jailed, and face the consequences and punishment, because the unjust law they broke was asking for service at a segregated coffee shop, or sitting at the front of the bus. They actively discouraged and called out anyone who broke other laws as undermining the cause.

“One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all… An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.”

They recognized which unjust laws they were choosing to break in the name of challenging the law, and also realized they would be arrested for it, and arrested for any other law they might break.

King and others knew the law, and expected to be arrested. They did not expect to be able to break the law and not be arrested. He was harshly critical of the treatment of non-violent protestors.

This difference is critically important to the cases of Peterson, convoy occupation protests on the right and campus occupation protests on the left.

Campus protestors and their supporters (including many university professors) are making exactly the same legal mistake that the Freedom Convoy and its supporters did, based on faulty arguments from the Canadian Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.

You can be expressing your opinion while you are also doing something that is breaking a law. It’s the breaking of just laws that’s the problem, not the opinion.

In every case, the opinion has been attached to some cause that people believe to be so important that they must speak out - but saying that it is so important that you no longer have to follow the law is a different matter.

People are not being charged with exercising freedom of expression. They are being charged with trespass, vandalism, mischief and ignoring court orders that are directing them to stop breaking the law and to start following it. That is not authoritarian, that is not tyranny, that is the most basic form of law enforcement for the purpose of public order.

Those are not threats and intimidation from an oppressive government, it is because they are breaking laws that anyone else would also be charged with if they committed trespass, vandalism, mischief or disobeying court orders.

What people are expect is to be able to speak with immunity for their actions - a belief that the law should not apply to them, because their cause justifies it. That is not freedom, because it claims that people are able to free to break the law without consequence.

This is not to pretend there aren’t problems with justice and enforcement in Canada and around the world. But the idea that a select group of people are justified in breaking just laws makes freedom impossible.

The idea that people are entitled to break laws that are just because their cause justifies it doing so really is a form of both moral and legal corruption, and understanding that is really important. It’s being driven in part by today’s divided and polarized environment, where the idea is that the opponent is so terrible, that the ends will justify the means, and that one’s own side is beyond reproach.

This framing of the world and the people in it tends to treat individuals as inflexible “types” based on ideology - as either entirely good or entirely bad. When I say that what we are seeing is a form of moral and legal corruption, it is because basic principles of justice are being eroded by individuals and supported with arguments because people believe their cause to be just.

There is a term for this, because it happens in police work - “Noble cause corruption,” which is when police bend or break rules in order to secure a conviction. The moral calculus may seem clear - that compared to the risk of a dangerous offender going unpunished, or going free and committing another heinous crime, that the act of planting evidence or not telling the whole truth on the stand may be justified.

What is happening is the process of ordinary people becoming corrupted. This is important, because people are so often seen as “types,” - as entirely bad or entirely good. What is happening is the process of people’s moral and legal standards being eroded. Deviating from the rules is being normalized, and often justified.

There is an extraordinary paper called “Normalization of Deviance in Healthcare” which describes how broken practices become routine.

while the normalization of deviant practices in healthcare does not appear substantially different from the way corrupt practices in private business evolve and become normalized (Ashforth & Anand, 2003), the health professional’s “deviance” is virtually never performed with criminal or malicious intent. Second, health professionals typically justify practice deviations as necessary, or at least not opposed to accomplishing their ethically unimpeachable objective of relieving their patients’ pain and suffering

People argue that “the rules are stupid and inefficient,”; knowledge about rules and practices is uneven - which is to say, people may not be aware of them or have not been trained; they argue they are “breaking the rules for the good of the patient”;

Paradoxically, one of the reasons people break rules, is because they think of themselves as trustworthy and reliable, and that the rules are there to correct the mistakes of others.

People think, “This rule is for bad people. I am a good person. So I don’t need to follow it.”

“Administrators should appreciate a psychological finding that has been replicated in various forms throughout the 20th century: most human beings perceive themselves as good and decent people, such that they can understand many of their rule violations as entirely rational and ethically acceptable responses to problematic situations. They understand themselves to be doing nothing wrong, and will be outraged and often fiercely defend themselves when confronted with evidence to the contrary”

This is clearly part of what is driving our current divisons. People are shocked if you suggest - or point out - that they are in the wrong.

The genuinely alarming aspect of all of this is that when these practices become entrenched in an organization, while cutting corners may actually “smooths things over” in the short term, they lead to outright catastrophes.

“What these disasters typically reveal is that the factors accounting for them usually had “long incubation periods, typified by rule violations, discrepant events that accumulated unnoticed, and cultural beliefs about hazards that together prevented interventionsthat might have staved off harmful outcomes”.

Furthermore, it is especially striking how multiple rule violations and lapses can coalesce so as to enable a disaster’s occurrence.”

As Dan Luu wrote, in the context of developing software,

The data are clear that humans are really bad at taking the time to do things that are well understood to incontrovertibly reduce the risk of rare but catastrophic events. We will rationalize that taking shortcuts is the right, reasonable thing to do. There’s a term for this: the normalization of deviance. It’s well studied in a number of other contexts including healthcare, aviation, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and civil engineering.

This is why people talk about the importance of “humility” and recognizing the possibility that you might be making a mistake.

J. E. Gordon was an engineer and expert witness who testified in investigations after many accidents, and he observed this exact failing.

“In the course of a long professional life spent, or misspent in the study of the strength of materials and structures, I have had cause to examine a lot of accidents, many of them fatal. I have been forced to the conclusion that very few accidents just ‘happen’ in a morally neutral way. Nine out of ten accidents are caused, not by the more abstruse technical effects, but by old-fashioned human sin, often verging on wickedness.

Of course I do not mean the more gilded and juicy sins like deliberate murder, large-scale fraud or sex. It is squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won’t-learn-and-don’t-need-to-ask, you-can’t-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy and greed that kill people.”

Once these ideas become baked in, they are extremely difficult to change, because they are more than just the personality of a couple of individuals, but the way a group governs itself.

All of this matters, in the most fundamental way, to the functioning of our society. The mutual justification of open lawlessness is a kind of social accelerant that is feeding intensifying conflict, when the only effective resolution must be lawful and peaceful. It is the only way to a positive resolution, because it is the only way that ever has been.

There paper on Normalized Deviance makes specific recommendations made to change culture.

1. Pay attention to weak signals (nip it in the bud)

2. Resist the urge to be unreasonably optimistic (don’t get cocky)

3. Teach employees how to conduct emotionally uncomfortable conversations

4. System operators need to feel safe in speaking up

   1. Have policies where speaking up is expected

   2. Provide protection to staff who do speak up

5. Realize that oversight and monitoring for rule compliance are never-ending”

This is a common refrain - that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” that according to Tikkun Ulam, our task is to keep repairing and holding together a world that is always falling apart. And why the so-called sin of pride was considered the worst sin of all - because it is a belief in the one’s own excellence and perfection that leads us to believe that the ends justify the means.

-30-