Jordan Peterson on bill c-16: what the evidence says · JRE #877

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Peterson asserted in November 2016 that Canadian law already made declining to use alternative gender pronouns a crime. The statutory text does not support this. Bill C-16 (S.C. 2017, c. 13), which was still before Parliament at the time and received royal assent on June 19, 2017, added gender identity or expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act's prohibited grounds and to the Criminal Code's hate propaganda and sentencing provisions (s. 318(4) and s. 718.2); it mentions pronouns nowhere and creates no new criminal offence. The Canadian Human Rights Act is a civil statute enforced through complaints and tribunal remedies, not prosecution, so misusing pronouns was not and is not a crime under it. The comparison with racial epithets is also misleading: while merely uttering an epithet is not itself an offence, Criminal Code s. 319 already made public incitement and wilful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group crimes punishable by up to two years' imprisonment, and s. 318(4) has long defined identifiable groups by colour and race, so racially hateful speech can be prosecuted in circumstances where pronoun misuse cannot. The core assertion, that not using preferred pronouns was already a crime, is false.