Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist and author who moved from a university psychology career into full-time public commentary and online publishing. He describes himself as “author, psychologist, online educator, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.” His YouTube channel had 8.85 million subscribers and just over a billion cumulative views as of September 2026.

Academic Career

Peterson was born on 12 June 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta, according to the Library of Congress name authority record for him. He worked in the psychology department at Harvard University in the 1990s: a December 1996 paper on which he is first author records his affiliation as “Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts,” and the same authority record transcribes the 1999 title page of Maps of Meaning, which gives his title as associate professor in that department. Later indexed papers carry a University of Toronto affiliation. When he appeared before a Senate committee in May 2017 he was introduced, and identified himself, as “Professor, Psychology Department, University of Toronto.” His own site now describes him as Professor Emeritus there.

He has been registered with the College of Psychologists of Ontario as a clinical psychologist since 1999. According to the Ontario Divisional Court, he stopped seeing patients in 2017 and has had no clinical practice since, while maintaining his College membership and continuing to describe himself publicly as a clinical psychologist.

His books include the academic Maps of Meaning and the trade titles 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order; his site states that they have sold more than seven million copies.

Bill C-16 and the Senate Testimony

Bill C-16 of the 42nd Parliament, sponsored by Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, amended the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to add gender identity and gender expression to the prohibited grounds of discrimination. It received royal assent on 19 June 2017.

Peterson appeared before the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs on 17 May 2017 — the committee’s final day of hearings on the bill — with counsel D. Jared Brown. His argument was not about the text of the bill but about the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies he expected to be used to interpret it. He told the committee that “the most egregious elements of the policies are that it requires compelled speech,” pointing to the Commission’s statement that refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and pronoun can constitute harassment. In his written brief he characterised the pronouns at issue as “consciously created as an expression of a particular post-modern/neo-Marxist ideology” — his own wording, quoted here rather than adopted.

He also told the committee, “I oppose discrimination against gender identity and gender expression. That’s not the point. The point is the specifics of the legislation that surrounds it.” Other witnesses and several senators at the same hearing disagreed that the bill compelled any form of speech; the transcript records the exchange.

Online Audience and Businesses

The Jordan B Peterson YouTube channel was created on 29 March 2013 and hosts 1,551 videos, including recorded university courses and lecture series on personality, Maps of Meaning, and biblical narrative. The channel and his own site both direct viewers to the subscription service DailyWire+, which carries his back catalogue and the Genesis and Exodus seminar series he produced with it.

He lists four businesses of his own: Peterson Academy, essay.app, Understand Myself, and the Self Authoring Suite. Peterson Academy sells subscription access to recorded lectures — it advertises more than 850 hours of material and more than 68,000 enrolled students — and markets itself explicitly against the cost of accredited higher education. Understand Myself and Self Authoring are personality-assessment and structured-writing programs.

Ontario Regulatory Proceeding

Between January and June 2022 the College of Psychologists of Ontario received a series of reports about Peterson’s social media posts and public appearances, including posts about a city councillor who uses they/them pronouns, about the actor Elliot Page, and remarks made on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. An earlier 2020 investigation had ended without an order but with advice about tone.

On 22 November 2022 the College’s Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee ordered Peterson to complete a coaching program to “review, reflect on, and ameliorate” his professionalism in public statements, finding that some of the language posed “moderate risks of harm to the public.” Peterson sought judicial review. On 23 August 2023 a three-judge panel of the Ontario Divisional Court dismissed the application, holding that the Committee had proportionately balanced his Charter section 2(b) expression rights against the College’s statutory mandate, and noting that the order was not disciplinary and did not bar him from speaking on any topic. The Court of Appeal for Ontario issued a judgment in the matter on 16 January 2024 (file COA-23-OM-0242), and the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed his application for leave to appeal, with costs, on 8 August 2024.

The decision also records that his Twitter account was suspended in July 2022 over a post about Elliot Page, which the platform flagged under its rules against hateful conduct.

What Is Not Established Here

Removed for want of a source meeting this project’s standard: the precise employment date ranges “Harvard from 1993 to 1998” and “University of Toronto from 1998 until taking leave in 2017,” neither of which any record consulted supports — PubMed affiliations place him at Harvard in the mid-1990s and at Toronto later, the Library of Congress authority record places him at Harvard as an associate professor as of the 1999 Maps of Meaning title page, and the Divisional Court supplies 1999 for his College registration and 2017 for the end of his clinical practice, but none of them fixes the professorial start and end dates. Removed as unsourced characterisation: that he “popularis[ed] opposition to what he terms ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’” as a described effect (the phrase survives only as a quotation from his own Senate brief); that he “influenc[ed] young male audiences”; that he “serv[ed] as a bridge between academic psychology and broader political discourse”; and the “content strategy” list, which was inference about method rather than a record of anything. Removed as stale: the follower figures “6+ million YouTube subscribers, 3+ million Twitter followers,” replaced with the live channel figure and, separately, his own site’s numbers attributed to him. Removed from primaryPlatforms: substack, for which no account was found, and podcasting, which is a technology rather than a platform slug in this collection.

Not established and therefore absent: any characterisation of his political position beyond what he said on the record; the circumstances and date of his departure from his University of Toronto professorship; his book publishers and publication years, which were not confirmed against a publisher record; and any claim about the truth of the statements the College objected to, as distinct from the fact of the proceeding and its outcome.