“Cancel Culture”

What to do with Sir John A. Macdonald?

An 1894 statue of the country’s founding prime minister that towers over the top of University Avenue on the grounds of the legislature has been boarded up since 2020 following several incidents of vandalism.

Dozens of small shoes lay it its feet in silent protest over the unmarked graves of Indigenous children at residential schools and Macdonald’s role in creating an education system likened to apartheid and genocide.

Sir John A – Worse Than Hitler! How about unboxing our heritage and arresting anyone who dares deface the statue?

For Jordan Peterson, it’s a full circle journey.

The popular speaker and author became a household name while protesting gender pronouns during his days at the University of Toronto. After years of international notoriety and millions of books sold, the educator and clinical psychologist is back to where it all started.

Cancel culture is in its own way democratic. Woke mobs—social media jackals or institutional flacks—don’t care whether their target for immolation is male or female, famous or obscure, a leading intellectual light or a plodding time-server. All their targets have in common is an audience. A classroom, a Twitter account, a pulpit. The pilot light of their righteous wrath never sleeps. Perceived thoughtcrimes are their tinder.

The latest of a dismal sequence of outrages and oppressive acts officiously imposed upon the very distinguished and widely admired academic, clinical psychologist and public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, is an intervention by the College of Psychologists of Ontario purporting to require Peterson to undergo a lengthy course of “media training,” in order that he might conduct his online communications “more appropriately.” This is a stupefying insolence from a professional body intent on pettifogging and harassing an extraordinarily successful colleague. Jordan Peterson has had an impeccable professional reputation throughout his 20 years as a research psychologist at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. He has immense clinical experience and his pioneering work in bringing psychology to a vast worldwide internet audience, including 15-million people all over the world who follow him on three different social media platforms, has made serious psychology much more accessible.

Jordan Peterson, the renowned or controversial psychologist (the adjective depends on your point of view and, with Peterson, everyone has a view) has embarked on what is destined to be a titanic battle between himself and the Ontario College of Psychologists.

Wokeism has destroyed Canada. We knew the situation was bad when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze the bank accounts of protesters in order to silence political action against his regime’s appalling abuses of human rights. It became unsalvageable when Trudeau followed up this behaviour by speaking about his love of China’s dictatorial powers over citizens.

Long gone are the days of suffocating niceness from our northern cousins. Now, professionals who disagree on social media with Canada’s ruling elite find themselves ruthlessly threatened by institutions that are meant to stand for liberty of thought.

The practice of psychology in Ontario, and in many other North American and western jurisdictions, is subject to regulation by “professional colleges” — essentially governmental organizations with a mandate to protect the public from misconduct on the part of physicians, lawyers, social workers, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, architects and many others, including (and most relevant to me) clinical psychologists.

How can we learn from our history if it’s removed from view?

History is a bit like Otto von Bismarck’s famous line about sausages and laws, which, he said, no one should watch being made. Think of all the people you’ve seen in pictures and statues or on coins and currency. Consider figures captured in busts and memorialized in books. Visualize military conquerors and nation builders.

Why the perpetual outsider offends all the right people.

A minor controversy over a major event arose at the start of Morrissey’s career, and a similar experience may soon plague him in the present. Common to both are children, murder and Manchester. What has changed throughout the intervening years is the nature of controversy. What has changed is the nature of those taking offence. It was once the reactionary and the conservative, now it is the radical and the progressive. It was once the old, now it is the young. ‘Manchester, so much to answer for’, he sang in 1984, recalling the bodies on Saddleworth Moor from the 1960s of his childhood. The tragedy of the Moors murders continued to resonate. That’s how the nation grieved back then. It allowed itself to mourn; it allowed itself to be angry. While some events were too sacred to be sung about. ‘Suffer Little Children’ became a tabloid story, hyped up into a minor controversy; the lyric provided a list of the lost. ‘We will be right by your side, until the day you die.’

This week I was interested to learn of a flareup of the perpetual culture war at the Arden Theatre in the Edmonton suburb of St. Albert, Alberta. Like most people who come from what is now Sturgeon County, I know the 500-seat multipurpose performing venue to be a secret blessing of the hinterland. If you picked it up and moved it into Edmonton, it would immediately compete to be the nicest, best-equipped theatre of its size in the city. It’s owned and managed by the City of St. Albert, so it can be rented for any purpose that is otherwise legal, and you probably already know from the way I’m talking where this is going.

Lord Tennyson has been branded “problematic” by academics who have criticised his “support for British imperialism”.

The Victorian poet laureate and author of The Charge Of The Light Brigade and The Lady of Shalott is one of Britain’s most famous literary figures.

However, his views on the British Empire have been branded as “problematic” by academics at the University of Lincoln, who say his opinions are “failings” to be “regretted”.