Calgary lawyer Roger Song, who has filed a public-interest lawsuit against the Alberta Law Society to defend the profession’s independence from “cultural competence” objectives, draws parallels in the situation to Mao Zedong's China. Re-education initiatives by the Law Society include Cultural Competence DIE (Diversity Inclusion Equity) and Truth and Reconciliation, with the former focusing on “how systemic inequalities and barriers affect individuals and groups.”“I was shocked that in order to practice law in Canada I was, just as in China, being compelled to submit to re-education in matters of law, history, politics, society, economics, morality, spirituality and culture,” Song said. “I found myself captured in the jaws from which I had escaped.”Song was born in China just before the 1966 Cultural Revolution. Later he taught international law at Peking University, where his students participated in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He immigrated to Alberta in 2000 and began practicing law here in 2014. Supported by the Council of Alberta Lawyers (CAL,) Song and his lawyer Glenn Blackett filed suit on October 7.It alleges the law society, established to ensure the public has “access to loyal and competent legal counsel,” has violated the rule of law by assuming a political objective with a prejudice against core Canadian constitutional principles.There are “two major parts to it,” Blackett told the Western Standard. “One is professional independence. And the other is freedom of conscience.”He explained professional independence is “a recognized principle in common law jurisdictions that lawyers have a primary duty of loyalty to their clients.”“And things which interfere with that duty of loyalty are to be avoided, if at all possible,” he said, expanding there are reasonable limits to because some things do “appropriately interfere,” such as the obligation to comply with the law. “But one of the most significant risks to a lawyer's independence would be to interfere with a lawyer politically,” Blackett said. “To politically interfere with the lawyer so that you try to influence a lawyer to comply with political requests.”The new cultural conditioning guidance the law society gives its lawyers is "framed fairly broadly,” he said, offering the example of anti-racism.“The question then becomes, what’s that? If you know your woke ideology, you know that this is a person who is an adherent to critical race theory and believes that you must pursue equity through the dismantling of systemic discrimination.”A lawyer now has to "adapt [their] communication for enumerated groups," Blackett explained to the Western Standard. "Like how to be culturally competent when [dealing] with Indigenous people."The new rules mean operating under the assumption the group is “intergenerationally traumatized," he said. Certain “terms are used” and “it's not exactly clear necessarily what those terms mean.”The Alberta Law Society now wants lawyers like Song and Blackett to implement "inclusive" practices at their office, which probably means things like "asking them about their white privilege when they come in for a job interview.""When you really employ inclusive hiring, retention, and promotion practices, that seems to mean that you should hire on a quota basis looking at, for example, people's skin color...but it may mean that you hire, retain, and promote people who are ideologically compliant."The lawsuit argues the law society’s move to require professionals to undergo social re-education training violates Canada’s constitutional principles of parliamentary sovereignty, democracy (including freedom of conscience and expression.) constitutionalism and the rule of law, recognition of the inherent and equal dignity of each individual, personal freedom and respect for minorities (including religious minorities,) and reason (including objectivity and science.)Song’s lawsuit further alleges the objectives violate “freedoms of religion, conscience, and expression guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” for professionals, including Song, who believe “that God, and not political ideology, is the supreme source of universal truth and morality.”Those who uphold this truth believe “people have inherent individual dignity and worth, and that people are essentially the same, regardless of race.”“My whole life I had been indoctrinated into socialist ideology,” Song said. “It made me a follower of the CCP. But the freedom of conscience I enjoyed in Canada led me to the greatest gift of my life. In 2004 I became a follower of Jesus Christ.”Song, whose father Xin Ziling wrote books exposing Mao’s Great Leap Forward after serving as a veteran member of the CCP and PLA (People’s Liberation Army), believes politically driven ideology like critical race theory, gender theory, and post-colonialism are “hostile to liberal democracy.”Blackett pointed out that the federal and provincial legislation governing the judiciary specify a “growing requirement on judges to become educated.”“Judicial education requirements on judges is now in statute,” he told the Western Standard. “Before a judge can be appointed to the bench they have to complete, or undertake to complete, continuing education related to sexual assault law and social context,” which includes “systemic racism and systemic discrimination.”"And systemic discrimination is, so far as I understand it, just a loaded word meaning the opposite of equity," he said. ". But you don't really know what kind of education judges are getting, because that's behind closed doors. It isn't public information, per se, even though it would be [paid for by] tax dollars.”“But nonetheless, it's my law society telling me what I need to do in order to be safe, effective and sustainable.”Blackett said Song is concerned of the term "entryism," applying to Canada as it does in China, where "you have you have the people and the enemy of the people.""The people are peasant labourers toiling in the fields," he said. "But if you're a peasant, who says, 'I don't like communism, you've just become the enemy of the state."“He lived in China, he knows that, basically, you can have all the laws you want. But if you have a political objective floating over the law, that political objective is going to just dissolve the law.”“There might as well be no laws, ‘just the party line.’”In China the constitution “says you have free speech, but you don't, because the party line is the more important objective to consider when you're applying the ‘law.’“So he came to Canada and he sees the same. He sees the same corrosive political objective now being forced on him through his law society. So one of his interests is, I would say, saving Canada from the fate that befell China.”
