Glenn Blackett is a lawyer in the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms network and is representing Roger Song in his lawsuit against the Law Society of Alberta. Here is a dirty little secret about the law from a lawyer: no matter how clear laws might seem, there are countless ways for lawyers and judges to ignore, pervert, or subvert them. Canada’s laws are highly vulnerable to incompetent or unethical lawyers and judges. For this reason, lawyers and judges must swear oaths of loyalty to Canada’s Constitution. This is a sacred commitment not to abuse their position of trust for personal or political reasons. Further, provincial law societies are granted sweeping statutory powers — including disbarment — to ensure all lawyers adopt the proper legal culture of competence and loyalty. .OLDCORN: Supreme Court’s softening on child porn sentences is a national disgrace.But what happens when a law society itself actively seeks to change or subvert the law to further its own ideological agenda? And what can individual lawyers and the public-at-large do to put a stop to this?These are not theoretical questions. Over the past several years, Canadian legal regulators, including the Law Society of Alberta (LSA), have changed the way they regulate. And they now use their enormous statutory power to advance a political agenda.These changes are being resisted by my client, Calgary lawyer Roger Song, who recognizes many unsettling similarities between the LSA’s actions and his own past experiences in Communist China. Given the stakes, Song needs everyone’s support..Provincial law societies have been granted significant independence from government control to insulate the profession from political pressures that might destroy the independence of lawyers. Their regulatory powers ensure lawyers protect the “rule of law” — the impartial application of the law as written by legislatures. In a democracy, only legislatures change laws.Unfortunately, Canadian law societies have started to abuse that independence. The LSA, for example, has recently expanded its definition of “competence” to include “cultural” competence — which means, in a word, being “woke.”.MacLEOD: Calgary’s human crisis — The price of our indifference.By “woke” I mean the constellation of activist post-modern ideologies which include critical race theory, critical legal theory, postcolonialism, and gender theory. Once a critical mass of lawyers go woke, or all the “classical liberal” lawyers retire or are cowed into silence, the law and the Constitution will go woke as well — all without changing a single word of the laws written by democratic legislatures. We often encounter wokeness under the labels “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “reconciliation,” “decolonization,” and “systemic discrimination.” Proponents of wokeness may, genuinely or artfully, claim to be motivated by Canadian values such as equality under the law, pluralism, and the inherent dignity of the individual. But wokeness is inherently and inescapably hostile to those exact values. .Wokeness is premised on relativism: what seems real depends entirely on your relative perspective as defined by your “intersectional identity” — your particular blend of race, sex, sexual orientation, body type, etc. Wokeness has it that reality is a social construct of the white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-heterosexual-able-bodied male. The pursuit of wokeness by legal regulators threatens the constitutional rights of all Canadians. Consider, for example, that the Constitution guarantees equal treatment for all Canadians. The LSA’s “key” woke resources instruct lawyers that, “Often the discourse of equality is used to perpetuate discriminatory practices because there is a focus on same or equal treatment, which is perceived as fair by dominant culture”: legal equality is oppression..OLDCORN: Using the notwithstanding clause to end the Alberta teachers' strike was right.Of course, a primary fixation of wokeness is skin colour. The LSA’s key resources elsewhere say “Whiteness … is socially and politically constructed, and therefore a learned behaviour … its ideology [is] based on beliefs, values, behaviours, habits, and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin colour … [it] places white people in a place of structural advantage where white cultural norms and practices go unnamed and unquestioned.” Whiteness is oppression. This is racism, plain and simple. The LSA’s political agenda even includes attacks on national sovereignty. It explains that indigenous land acknowledgements are now “traditional protocol used to give thanks and to pay respect to the peoples and the land for which you are a visitor upon.” Its mandatory reeducation program instructed lawyers that “when you sing that Canada is our home and native land, are you really celebrating our indigenous past? Perhaps it would be best to avoid that word altogether.”.Any form of political action by a law society should be considered a gross abuse of its duties and power. But imposing an extreme ideological objective that promotes values directly contrary to Canada’s Constitution is even more outrageous. Canadians should be furious and should be pushing back. I am pleased to report that my brave and principled client, Roger Song, recently filed a lawsuit against the LSA in an attempt to rid the organization of its woke mindset. The evidence he has amassed includes expert evidence from Joanna Williams, a renowned British educational theorist, as well as written and oral arguments explaining how the LSA is improperly engaged in an anti-Constitutional adventure..PARDY: The Referendum goose is cooked.Song is no stranger to indoctrination. He was born in China and was once a member of the Chinese Communist Party, teaching international law at Beijing University. He fled the country once he realized the cruel and destructive nature of communism in the wake of 1989’s Tiananmen Massacre. Now he sees the same totalitarian patterns appearing in the words and actions of the LSA. The LSA’s response was to argue, in essence: “We are just regulating ‘competence’ and ‘ethics’, but do not look closely or think too much about what we mean by these terms.” This is like asking the court to determine the legality of the LSA’s actions after having, first, placed its woke ideology in a locked black box bearing the label “actions that are legal.”.The Alberta Court of King’s Bench agreed with this approach and rejected the lawsuit: the LSA has jurisdiction to regulate competence and ethics. Song has now appealed the decision. Assuming Song is right that the LSA is betraying its public mandate by working to turn the legal profession against Canadian laws, including the Constitution, the LSA is now free to keep doing so immune from judicial oversight – that is, unless the decision is reversed on appeal or the government takes robust curative action. Anyone who prefers Canada’s Constitution, including individual rights, freedom of speech, pluralism, and the rule of law over the Chinese regime of collectivism, propaganda, and ideological supremacy, should be very concerned. What can non-lawyers do? Canadians everywhere are encouraged to write to their provincial governments and insist that legislation be passed banning politics of any shape from all professional regulation. Glenn Blackett is a lawyer in the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms network and is representing Roger Song in his lawsuit against the Law Society of Alberta. The longer, original version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca
