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

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Peterson accurately relays that the University of Toronto's October 2016 letters warned him that refusing students' requested pronouns could violate university policy and the Ontario Human Rights Code. The added gloss "so also illegal" overstates what that Code does: it is civil anti-discrimination law that applies in defined social areas such as employment, services, and housing, and a breach leads to tribunal remedies, not criminal charges or general personal illegality. The Ontario Human Rights Commission's policy position at the time was that deliberate misgendering could constitute gender-identity discrimination or harassment in those covered contexts, a position then untested at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. The employer-liability point has a partial statutory basis, since section 46.3 of the Ontario Code deems a corporation liable for discriminatory acts of its employees in covered contexts, but that is narrower than responsibility for "everything" an employee says. The federal Bill C-16 (S.C. 2017, c. 13), often conflated with this dispute, added gender identity or expression to Canadian Human Rights Act sections 2 and 3(1) and to Criminal Code sections 318(4) and 718.2(a)(i); its text does not mention pronouns, and it had not yet passed when this episode was recorded in November 2016 (royal assent came June 19, 2017). The claim is therefore a broadly accurate account of the university's warning combined with a misleading characterization of the law: context-specific civil liability, not blanket illegality.