Jordan Peterson Says He’ll ‘Play Along’ With Regulatory Body’s Mandatory Training and Publicize It

Jordan Peterson speaks at the 2018 Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Dallas, Texas, on June 15, 2018. (Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Outspoken psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has found a new way to “fight” the order from his profession’s governing body that will force him to receive remedial social media training: compliance.

Mr. Peterson, in a Jan. 17 column, has promised not only to dive into the social media training prescribed by the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO), but to “publicize every single bit of it.”

“Bring it on, you bloody pikers: take your next steps, bureaucrats: write me, and tell me how exactly we are to conduct my re-education. I’ll play along, find out exactly what you will do,” he said in an opinion piece published in the National Post.

“And, if I get tired of it, which seems highly likely, I’ll hand over the bloody licence I am increasingly embarrassed in any case to possess.”

Mr. Peterson’s remarks come on the heels of an Ontario Court of Appeal decision, released a day earlier, rejecting his request to quash a lower court’s decision that enforced the training order from his profession’s regulatory body.

The three-judge panel did not explain the reasons for its Jan. 16 decision. It simply stated that the case had been reviewed and that Mr. Peterson’s attempt to file new evidence to the court was rejected.

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Now that the battle in the courts has come to an end, Mr. Peterson said, he no longer has to constrain his commentary on the matter, promising a “no holds barred” response going forward.

“You have won the battle … but you haven’t won the war,” he wrote. “We’re going to perform that dance on the international stage, with all that light shining on your machinations, and you may well come to rue the day you attempted to take possession of my tongue.”

A Legal Battle

Mr. Peterson first came under scrutiny by the CPO in 2022 after it received complaints about a number of his social media posts that were directed at a plus-sized model, transgender actor Elliot Page, and several politicians, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The written complaints came from “activists in other countries” who claimed to be clients, he said.

The college alleged some of his posts may be “degrading” to the profession and could constitute professional misconduct.

The CPO’s complaints committee concluded as such in November 2022 and ordered Mr. Peterson to undergo a social media training program on professionalism in making public statements. Not complying, the committee said, could mean the loss of both his licence and ability to practise his profession in Ontario.

He subsequently filed for a judicial review last June, seeking review of the CPO’s order, but had his application dismissed by the Ontario Divisional Court in August.

The Aug. 23, 2023, court ruling said the CPO’s order requiring Mr. Peterson to comply with coaching directives fell within the college’s mandate to regulate the profession in the public interest. The judge ruled that, as a member of a “regulated profession,” Mr. Peterson bears responsibility “for the risk of harm that flows from him speaking in that trusted capacity.”

He also had his Twitter account temporarily suspended for his comments, but it was reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the social media platform in October 2022.

Mr. Peterson has defended the social media posts the CPO took issue with, saying he would make the same statements again today.

“I believe that time has been kind to my decisions: the reality of the idiocy that I pointed to then, whose reality was then denied by most, has become something increasingly apparent to an increasingly [sic] majority of people in the interim,” he said in his column.

Time also gave him a chance to position himself “very carefully,” he said, adding that he had already accepted the “inevitability” of the decision announced by the appeals court this week.

“I wasn’t even particularly upset when the news came down.”