For anyone who decided to take Peterson's opinions about C16 as fact instead of doing any research themselves:
Here's an official legislative summary.
It's a 13 page pdf. The first four pages consist of a title, two paragraphs explaining what a legislative summary is, a table of contents, and one blank page.
The next 4 pages summarize the bill and give context to its purpose. From the background summary paragraph on page 1 (page 5 of the pdf):
The bill is intended to protect individuals from discrimination within the sphere of federal jurisdiction and from being the targets of hate propaganda, as a consequence of their gender identity or their gender expression. The bill adds gender identity or expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the list of characteristics of identifiable groups protected from hate propaganda in the Criminal Code.
So this is an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act, but what does that do?
From the legislative summary of C16, page 2 (page 6 of the pdf):
Human rights laws in every jurisdiction in Canada prohibit discrimination against people based on certain listed grounds, such as sex, ethnic origin, religion, disability or sexual orientation. For example, the Canadian Human Rights Act lists 11 grounds for which discrimination is prohibited. These laws provide complaint mechanisms that individuals or groups may follow when they believe that they have been discriminated against in the provision of services, accommodation and employment.
The Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination by federally regulated employers or service providers
So the bill puts gender identity and gender expression on the same level as sex, ethnicity, and disability. If you look at the
Canadian Human Rights Act, it prohibits federal employers from discriminating on those bases, but there's nothing in C16 so far that suggests that pronouns have anything to do with that. What about the section on hate propaganda on page 6 (pdf page 10)?
Criminal offences related to hate promotion are set out in sections 318 to 320.1 of the Criminal Code. Section 318 makes it an offence for anyone to advocate or promote genocide, which is defined as acts committed with an intent to destroy in whole or in part an identifiable group by either killing its members or inflicting on them such conditions as to deliberately bring about their physical destruction. Those found guilty may be punished by up to five years' imprisonment.
I'm not sure what the problem would be unless someone wants to advocate for genocide. There's still nothing that even remotely implies that you can be charged for not using the proper pronouns. The rest of the actual text is about sentencing guidelines, and then there are 2 1/2 pages of sources.
So there's nothing in C16 that could possible be interpreted as making it an offense worthy of prosecution to not use the correct pronouns for a trans person (unless the person doing the interpreting is a complete moron).
But C16 is just an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act, so maybe there's something in there that could be interpreted in that manner.
Well, there is. It's Section 13, the "hate speech provision." I guess I could see someone stretching that to be the problem they claim C16 to be if they really wanted to.
There's just one problem with that.
IT WAS REMOVED THREE FUCKING YEARS BEFORE C16 WAS EVEN PROPOSED!
So not only is what Peterson said about C16 not actually present in C16, but the only other thing that could have been used to criticize the act C16 modifies isn't present either.
There are only two possibilities here:
1. Peterson, a college professor, was too dense to understand 7 pages of plain, direct language (complete with context and definitions).
2. Peterson lied about the contents of C16.
So the kindest description of the people who supported Peterson over C16 is that they were too lazy to read a few pages of the thing they were so afraid of, or they did read it and were just too stupid to understand it.
