The Alberta Law Society (LSA) announced that following a vote at a special meeting Monday, the society will retain the power to prescribe the professional development courses lawyers must take, on threat of suspension for noncompliance.
The meeting was called after a group of 50 of the province’s lawyers petitioned for a member vote to repeal a new regulation, Rule 67.4, which allows the LSA to mandate specific courses as part of mandatory professional development.
Blackett said lawyers must be allowed to choose which professional development course they would most benefit from, depending on their specific practice and specialties, noting some lawyers may have “robust political reasons” for objecting to Rule 67.4.
The LSA “must regulate in the public interest, which includes promoting and enforcing a high standard of professional and ethical conduct by Alberta lawyers,” said the statement.
Calling the attendance at the virtual special meeting “an unprecedented level of engagement,” the benchers stated, “We have always understood that there is a balance to achieve between setting standards of competence to protect the public interest and allowing lawyers to choose their own continuing professional development.”
The LSA has “not identified other courses that we believe should be mandatory,” it added.
The first course that the LSA mandated, “The Path,” is a five-module online course on “the history and contemporary realities of First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada.”
“Indigenous cultural competency” is one area “where it is appropriate that the Law Society mandate education,” it said.
Some lawyers found The Path to be “cultural and political” in nature, according to an email thread between the 50 signatories to the petition shared with The Epoch Times.
“Finding a legal component to the course was difficult,” said one lawyer. That individual said that giving the LSA power to force members to “take cultural teachings could be abused.”
Cold Lake constitutional lawyer Leighton Grey provided a statement to The Epoch Times saying the LSA’s implementation of Rule 67.4 is based on “political ideology.”
Grey, whose great-grandfather was a chief of the Carry Kettle Band and who has represented thousands of indigenous people in his 30-year law practice, said he completed The Path.
“I found it rife with inaccuracy and skewed by a post-modernist history of indigenous peoples in Canada,” he said.
Blackett also said he found the first training course mandated by the LSA to be “wildly objectionable” and “political indoctrination.”
He said the LSA is falling victim to a “brand of wokeness called “decolonization.”
Calgary lawyer Roger Song, who initiated the petition, told The Epoch Times he is opposed to the law society dictating which courses will be mandatory.
“Your license to make a living can be automatically suspended with no hearing” for non-compliance, he said.
Unless new benchers are elected at a November election and repeal 67.4, the rule will remain.
