Anyone in Canada can, in accordance with this legislation, accuse anyone they choose of making said accuser “fearful.” Fearful of what, you may ask? That the person so specified may, in the future, commit a hate crime, as broadly defined. This is not only a future crime that has not yet occurred, but a future crime defined only by someone’s “fear” that such an event might occur. So this is far more than the mere ‘thought crime’ defined by George Orwell – the characteristic of the worst conceivable totalitarian state. It is the merely subjective judgment (not judgment; feeling) of any old accuser that such a crime might conceivably occur.
If the magistrate in question is convinced (and remember just how ideologically captured the judiciary is becoming, particularly but not uniquely in Canada) then the person so accused can be restricted to their house, with an electronic monitoring bracelet affixed to their leg, denied access to their friends and family, either in person or online, and be required (!) to provide samples of their bodily fluids whenever requested for a period of no less than one year.
There is yet much else in this most totalitarian of bills, but that will suffice for now, to make the broader point.
Bill C63, already through first reading, sets up an entirely new and indefinitely expandable extrajudicial bureaucracy, with all the power of a court available to anyone who is appointed, or their subordinate employees. It does that under the guise of protecting children from sexual exploitation, although there are many other ways of doing this. Despite it being a court, it is not bound by traditional precedents or evidentiary standards. Furthermore, Canadians are required upon serious penalty to comply with its directives, or face the consequences. It has extremely wide latitude in its choice of punishments, including even lifetime imprisonment, and encourages the development of a veritable class of informants, who can cause those they target extreme trouble merely on the basis of their subjectively-defined “fears”.
These are deemed merely by the fact of their existence to be of sufficient gravitas to enable a provincial magistrate, so inclined, to subject someone explicitly free of any crime other than the hypothetical and future to a severe restriction of personal freedom, constant surveillance, and forced participation in highly personal medical monitoring.
What could possibly go wrong?
Trudeau’s toxic legacy
And that, my friends, is Trudeau’s Canada in a nutshell: all progressive nicety on the outside; all delightful grace and designer socks and care for women and the oppressed, whilst on the inside a totalitarian proclivity so strong that merely to investigate it is to skirt paranoia. Sheep’s clothing and ravening wolves indeed. Our Prince Charming Justin (much more truly the Gaston of Beauty and the Beast) is indeed everything wrong with the faux-compassionate and equity-obsessed Left, full of false promises, while pregnant with a desire for extreme totalising power.
Consider this bill as a veritable exemplar of the true Trudeau way. Who could possibly object to ensuring the safety of children, who are indeed threatened by the online world?
Hidden in its bowels, however, is the true meat of the matter: a new arm of the state, with the most sweeping of powers, aimed squarely at criminalising all opinions that are deemed not in accordance with the public good, by any and all moralising informants willing to step forward – all state sponsored and funded.
I was in Toronto during the pandemic. My strong sense? Thirty percent of Canadians would happily wear a mask, however useless, for the rest of their life, if this would provide them with continuous access to the power to spy and report upon their neighbours. It is precisely the members of this not at all scarce minority who will step – no, leap enthusiastically – forward, in the aftermath of C63, assuming the Canadian parliament is demented enough to continue its progression, and turning Canada into a country from which anyone with sense and means will strive to flee.
In truth, that’s happening already. And rightly so.
Jordan B. Peterson is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and author of “Maps of Meaning,” “12 Rules for Life” and “Beyond Order.”
You can watch The Telegraph’s most recent interview with Jordan Peterson via this link.
More from Jordan Peterson exclusively for The Telegraph:
– ‘Eco-extremists are leading the world towards despair, poverty, and starvation’
– ‘We are sacrificing our children on the altar of a brutal, far-Left ideology’