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My God, if that thing at the University of Toronto on Saturday was a debate about free speech, then the battle is already well and truly lost.

This was the “forum” on Bill C-16 put on by the arts and sciences faculty, wherein the embattled psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson was to engage in presumably spirited discussion about implications of including “gender identity” and “gender expression” in the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code.

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(Those amendments were the focus of C-16, which passed in the House of Commons on Friday, as compared to Bill C-17, which is how the university helpfully described the event on the tickets to it. Bill C-17 actually amended the federal Food and Drugs Act and passed into law two years ago.)

It was Peterson who brought the issue to the fore with a series of videos he made and posted on YouTube this fall, during which he worried aloud about the bill (C-16 not 17), suggested that probably even making the videos, let alone pledging that he wasn’t going to use gender-neutral pronouns if asked to do so, was now probably illegal.