BLACKETT: Professional colleges have no business in politics

Glenn Blackett is a Calgary-based civil rights lawyer working with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms network of lawyersThe rise of Nazism is endlessly fascinating to us in the West, as it should be. If an advanced liberal democracy like Germany could descend into totalitarianism madness, might we be at risk too and how might we avoid it?People often lay blame for Germany’s civilizational collapse, and the resulting World War, on Hitler’s extraordinary power of rhetoric, or on some supposed character defect in the German people. However, in his 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, philosopher Friedrich von Hayek explained that, “By the time Hitler came to power, liberalism was dead in Germany. And it was socialism that had killed it.”Hayek warned that socialism was advancing elsewhere in the West. Since then, socialism’s “long march through the institutions” has been wildly successful. Its success lays, in part, on its many beguiling disguises including “social justice” or “wokeness.”Like a termite infestation, wokeness is hungrily consuming the various posts and beams supporting Canada’s house of liberal democracy: K-12 education, post-secondary education, the media, private enterprise, the administrative state, charity, entertainment, and even science and the church.The current frailty, if not death, of Canadian freedom seems to have been laid bare during the COVID-19 era in our willingness — nay, eagerness — to snitch, exclude, and even demand digital evidence of the contents of our fellow citizens’ blood. The Canadian judiciary’s listless response to these profound incursions seems likewise revealing.I have written several columns on these pages, and helped pen a letter to government, warning of the woke infestation of another of freedom’s most important structural supports: the rule of law. As Hayek observes, “Nothing distinguishes more clearly a free country from a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law.”As my columns explain, the Law Society of Alberta — the regulatory agency which oversees the Alberta legal profession — seems bent on converting Alberta lawyers from “loyal advocates of the clients’ interest” to “conflicted advocates for social justice” and from “defenders” of the Constitution to its “perverters.”A dirty little secret about the law, by the way, is that it can be changed, without democratic consent, by the simple expedient of lawyers and judges misinterpreting and misapplying it. This applies with even greater force to that part of the law we call our Constitution.This anti-democratic trick, of course, is much more likely to succeed if all lawyers, including those who later become judges, work as a collective to bend the law and Constitution in the same direction. Therein lies the grave danger of the Law Society of Alberta imposing a single political objective — wokeness — on the entire legal profession.Should we allow the rule of law in Canada to become sufficiently weak, liberal democracy will inevitably collapse. However, unlike 1930’s Germany, it will not collapse into national socialism.To hazard a guess, it will collapse into a “modern” totalitarianism resembling the Maoist surveillance state now tightening its stranglehold on the Chinese. Remember, when our own Prime Minister was asked what country he most admired, his answer was China, praising its “basic dictatorship.” You may have noticed, also, how eerily mute our elites are on the topic of China’s ongoing cultural genocide against its Uyghur population.The Smith government has, thankfully, recently announced a review of Alberta professional regulators, including the Law Society of Alberta. I fear, however, that Smith has her sights set too narrowly.This may, ironically, be the result of Jordan Peterson who has rightly or wrongly, become the poster-boy for regulatory overreach. Peterson was targeted by his regulator for political expression outside of his formal practice.The lesson to be drawn from the Peterson affair however, is not that a regulator has no business regulating the private expression of members. Rather, the real lesson to be drawn is that a professional regulator has no business in politics. A professional regulator which assumes a political objective will, by necessity, use its power to advance that objective.It is far more dangerous for the Law Society of Alberta to advance its politics within a lawyer’s legal practice than in their social media feed. It is within the lawyer’s legal practice, after all, that the rule of law is primarily protected and, with it, the personal freedoms of all Albertans.My advice to the Smith government: you will not save this house by protecting just part of the beam from infestation. Half-measures will ensure, only, that the beam gives way elsewhere.For this reason I encourage all Albertans to write to the Premier, the Honourable Danielle Smith, and the Minister of Justice, the Honourable Mickey Amery, and insist that The Law Society of Alberta, along with all other professional regulators, be entirely prohibited from holding or advancing any political objective.Glenn Blackett is a Calgary-based civil rights lawyer working with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms network of lawyers.

BLACKETT: Professional colleges have no business in politics

Related Stories

Calgary man, 70, charged in child sexual exploitation investigation

Independence leader Rath facing a trio of new law society citations

RCMP issues public warning after convicted sex offender relocates to Fort Saskatchewan

Calgary defence lawyer charged with child luring after undercover probe