I closely followed the inquisition of Jordan Peterson by the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO). It unfolded like a Kafka-meets-Stephen King novel. As a physician, this case and its precedents have direct implications for my profession’s ability to care for patients. Healthcare professionals are increasingly compelled to self-censor or parrot only what their regulatory body deems acceptable on politicized topics. In this context, the CPO was abjectly failing its legal mandate to uphold the public interest. Peterson’s case – and the growing number that seem politically motivated – serve as another curtain call for Canadian liberty. Remind me again of how absolute power corrupts?
In 2022, Peterson’s college received roughly 15 complaints about comments he made online from people around the world, including criticism of Justin Trudeau. The kicker was that not only were none of the complainants his patients, some falsely claimed to be. Surely, these would be dismissed as vexatious. Instead, the CPO ordered Peterson to undergo social media re-training at his own expense for an indeterminate amount of time, on pain of license forfeiture.
They must have known he was voicing what many were thinking. How about after the public protest outside their ivory tower? Or when they received about 25 000 complaints about how they were treating him? Amazingly, the psychology Politburo failed to recognize their own diagnosis of institutional narcissistic personality disorder.
My own regulator, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), reprimanded Drs. Irene Polidoulis and Kulvinder Gill for not sticking to the ideological script during the pandemic. Free speech champion Elon Musk has supported Dr. Gill’s appeal to the Supreme Court. In contrast, the CPSO received nearly 70 complaints about a physician calling for gun bans on social media and correctly dismissed them as frivolous. The double standard was unmistakable: only progressive viewpoints are permitted. As Orwell warned in 1984, authoritarian bodies aim to narrow the range of thought.
I was relieved when Dr. Peterson chose to fight this in court. But this witch hunt morphed into a dystopian nightmare when the court ruled against him and, subsequently, the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, closing all legal avenues within Canada. Whether or not you agree with Peterson is beside the point. The CPO’s victory, by extension, granted Big Brother-like powers over the one in five Canadians who are regulated professionals.
What were all these ideologically captured institutions thinking? Recent inquiries into COVID-era regulation – including Alberta’s task force – have reinforced what many professionals experienced firsthand: colleges increasingly acted as “arbiters of truth” rather than guardians of evidence-based practice, with just 2% of their communications citing studies. “Regulators actively sought to intimidate, threaten, and discipline medical professionals.” And doing their best Stasi impression, they even directed members to report colleagues – despite the fact that most actions later deemed punishable were ultimately defensible. With public trust in healthcare authorities fractured since COVID, and as more medical topics become politicized, patients are already routing around the system – often toward AI – because they no longer trust doctors to speak freely.
Pioneering Surgeon Joseph Lister faced ridicule in the 1800s for advocating sterile wounds and instruments. Hindsight being 2020, there are many pandemic policies public health officials would now rethink, such as prolonged school closures. What medical topics will be off-limits tomorrow? As technologies and pharmaceuticals continue to evolve, instead of regulatory apparatchiks making declarations of misinformation, the autocorrective process of free speech is best poised to safeguard patient care. As both a physician and Canadian citizen, I would rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.
Peterson suggested limiting complaints to Canadian patients and their families, and restricting them to the professional’s field of practice. Regulators should, at minimum, commit to not policing political speech. I would go further. Professionals, especially physicians, must be able to defend themselves just the same as common criminals. Maoist struggle sessions, where guilt is presumed and leniency follows immediate confession, should be forbidden. When there’s no mutual admission of fault, go quickly to an independent arbitrator agreed upon by both parties.
There must also be skin in the game for the complainant. It should not be possible to trigger a life-altering ordeal for a professional upon whom patients depend with a few mouse clicks. Reasonable procedural safeguards could help discourage frivolous complaints while preserving access for legitimate ones – for example, a modest filing fee refundable if a complaint is deemed non-vexatious, or a more structured complaint requirement that demands a modicum of specificity and evidence at the outset. No system will be perfect – only tradeoffs – but every functioning system requires checks and balances.
There is, however, a glimmer of hope. In Alberta, Bill 13 – the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act, informally dubbed “Peterson’s Law” – has passed first reading, signaling a serious attempt to rein in regulatory overreach by restoring viewpoint neutrality as a guardrail within professional colleges. If carried forward, it would represent a rare recognition that regulators exist to protect the public, not to enforce ideological conformity.
Even if such reforms ultimately stop at the provincial border, the rest of Canada’s professional colleges would benefit from embracing epistemic humility. They could shrug off the burden of having all the answers – a weight as unbearable as Atlas’ celestial load – and concede that they have struggled to adapt their self-regulatory role to a rapidly evolving technological, informational, and political landscape. By returning to evidence, due process, and genuine neutrality, colleges will win by restoring confidence in their institutions and rebuilding public trust in the professionals they govern.
In the end, Peterson agreed to attend social media re-training on the condition that it be made public. Yet in a twist that turned the saga into black comedy, the College was unable to identify any suitable “social media experts” for months. When a facilitator was eventually unearthed, the CPO insisted the proceeding remain confidential – very much in the spirit of a totalitarian dustup. Peterson declined on principle. By that point, Canada had already lost one of its most prominent public intellectuals, who had relocated to the U.S. in part due to this ordeal.
This episode is nested within the broader culture war, specifically the battle for free speech. As the calendar turns to 2026, liberty-authority has become a far more relevant lens for understanding political allegiances than right-left, and many Canadians yearn to shift back to liberty. Regardless, the eternal truth remains: absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s time to rein in the colleges, reverse their Ministry of Truth tendencies, and return them from professional strangulation to regulation.
Mark D’Souza is a Toronto-based physician and author of Lost and Found: How Meaningless Living is Destroying Us and Three Keys to Fix it.
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"There must also be skin in the game for the complainant. It should not be possible to trigger a life-altering ordeal for a professional upon whom patients depend with a few mouse clicks. Reasonable procedural safeguards could help discourage frivolous complaints while preserving access for legitimate ones – for example, a modest filing fee refundable if a complaint is deemed non-vexatious, or a more structured complaint requirement that demands a modicum of specificity and evidence at the outset. No system will be perfect – only tradeoffs – but every functioning system requires checks and balances."
This is exactly the point I keep making in the context of other campus investigations -- Title IX, Title VI, OCR, etc. There should be punishment for frivolous complaints. Right now, there are none.
This is a huge problem in the US and Europe as well. In the Geosciences, the various professional societies, AGU, EGU, GSA all concluded during the #MeToo movement that THEY were entitled to take over regulation of the profession by imposing enforceable codes of conduct that the membership was only allowed to comment on but NEVER subject to a vote. Members of the profession are now subjected to kangaroo courts where anonymous accusers can make allegations without evidence or ability for cross examination of their lack of evidence and often blatant conflicts of interest. Geoscientists can not only be kicked out of meetings and particular societies, but the other societies will automatically honor without appeal or review the decision of the first kangaroo court. I presented a peer reviewed poster at an AGU conference session on ETHICS on how such a system violates not only legal principles in the US Constitution and Magna Carta that go back all the way to the Roman Republic and Biblical Times, but also the very precepts of science which require all claims to be subject to public review and cross examination based on the EVIDENCE. This poster was deemed a violation of the Code of Conduct that it was objecting to (naturally), I was fired from my job at a DIFFERENT society(GSA) and banned from both AGU and GSA. GSA's basis for my termination continually changed but the first was the one that spoke the unspeakable truth. I was accused of revealing information harmful to the society and information only available to the society. This was NOT true as I was defending the integrity of the society and profession by my poster and all the information was available in the public record including on their own WEBSITE. (There was even more damaging information I could have presented but which I held back as it was not in the public record at that time.) I have been treated as if I were Orwell's infamous Goldberg ever since going on 7 years now. The complainants were all anonymous with 2 even admitting that they had never even seen the poster that they were complaining about. The third had a clear conflict of interest. The societies involved admitted that everything in the poster was true but it was the impact it had on "vulnerable" populations that mattered. What is truly disgusting is that the development of these Codes of Conduct was funded with massive government grants from the so-called National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF has adopted policies to strip the grants from PI's on the basis of such flimsy allegations and reassign them to others to continue the work (no incentive to file false complaints there...). Further, accusers who file their complaints in university Title IX kangaroo courts and win will have their complaints treated as valid, but those whose complaints are rejected by their universities are allowed to have the professional societies impose punishment anyway. So...even a vindication in a kangaroo court is not sufficient to be free of the false accusations. The matter gets worse when organizations like NSF actually farm out the grant review process of entire programs to these so-called professional societies to implement...making membership in that society and submission to its unconstitutional Code of Conduct a requirement for getting federal funds. One would think that organizations dedicated to free speech like FIRE would be all over the chance to challenge such nonsense, but you would be wrong. FIRE seems to think that these societies "freedom of speech and association" allows them to discriminate on the basis of speech while simultaneously acting as a de facto government regulatory agency. The truth of course is that FIRE is unwilling to take on vested academic interests like the feminist lobby. There is a solution to all of this of course, professional societies should be required to follow all constitutional laws and have NO regulatory role of any kind. Any attempt to exert such an "enforcement" role should be see for what it is...the very harassment that laws like Title IX were meant to prevent. With the professional societies, grant making system and journals they control all thus compromised, one must conclude that the entire academic and scientific enterprise no longer holds any validity and should be treated as completely unreliable as a source of information and societal policy making until such time as a thorough reform occurs.