Wokeness is a radical political movement that operates, in part, by “capturing” institutions. Once “captured,” an institution is made woke in its objectives and operations and propagates wokeness using its available resources, often in an authoritarian manner.
For example, an employer that is captured by wokeness will bring “diversity experts” into the company’s human resource department. That department then sets about making woke policies, eliminating liberal policies, compelling employee submission to woke indoctrination, publicizing the employer’s wokeness, and hiring, disciplining, and firing people based on woke criteria.
Wokeness has captured nearly every Canadian institution: education, charity, government, business, finance, indigenous reconciliation, and even the church.
We are now witnessing the capture of various professional regulators and, by extension, the industries and professionals subject to their regulatory powers. Those powers are vast. They include the power to decide who can work, what education they must take, what values they must hold, and whether anything they do in their professional or private life is misconduct warranting sanction, including de-licensing.
When professional institutions are captured, these powers can be weaponized to achieve woke objectives.
The Path is purportedly an act of indigenous reconciliation. However, it is politicized regulatory overreach which is more likely to do serious harm to the cause of reconciliation and to Canada in the process.
The LSA likely has no legal authority to mandate cultural re-education like The Path. While some Canadian law societies have the power to impose “continuing professional development” (CPD), the LSA likely does not. The Legal Professions Act is worded far more narrowly than legislation in other provinces.
Even if the LSA has the power to impose CPD, “cultural competency” training is a different bird all together. It is more an exercise in historical and political indoctrination than professional education.
The Path is a genre of wokeness called “decolonization.” The Path, like all wokeness, employs “post-modern” ideology and relies on a flawed and severely distorted “history” to delegitimize Canada’s political and even social foundations. It tells us that Canada’s history towards its indigenous people is largely one of racism and genocide. It’s a history lesson bursting with wild speculation as to evil psychological motives and socioeconomic cause and effect—all presented as established fact—almost completely devoid of counterbalancing facts, nuance, or context.
“Canada’s colonial legacy is still alive,“ it reads. ”It’s clear when you look at the overall numbers. While Indigenous people make up about 5% of Canada’s population, they represent 27% of its prison population.”
The Path does contain some practice recommendations which provide a fig leaf of cover for what is essentially a political enterprise. For example, lawyers are taught to treat indigenous people with special care, including not focusing on their “current circumstances” but rather on their (inter-generational) “trauma.”
“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
The Path, along with the entire “decolonization” project, will do serious damage to Canada. It will increase racial division, erode liberalism and democracy, and prolong and compound the crushing socioeconomic conditions that have for far too long plagued many indigenous Canadians.
Sentimental dreaming does not solve real problems—thoughtful and pragmatic work does.
To demonstrate the destructive tendencies of The Path, take for example the method of its delivery.
While the woke capture of any professional regulator is dangerous, law societies make a particularly vulnerable attack vector because they are enmeshed within the legal structure itself.
A liberal democracy operates by the “rule of law.” Free citizens elect legislators who make laws. Citizens must know and follow the laws. If someone wants to change the law, they must appeal to voters and legislators.
Lawyers have a special job in a liberal democracy: operating and protecting the rule of law. Lawyers are something like hockey referees. Their job is to maintain and enforce the rules to ensure a good game. Their job is not to change or bend the rules mid-game to favour one team over another. That would be cheating and would ruin the game.
While some may claim The Path contains valuable and important history and proposals for changing Canadian law, note exactly where this history and these proposals are made: to 10,000 captive legal professionals.
The Path seeks to change how lawyers think about the law, how they practice the law, and advocates for changes both to what the law is and how the law should be applied. It effectively seeks to change the law, not through the legislature, but by applying direct ideological force on the “referees.” That is both authoritarian and anti-democratic.
The Path is not only dangerous in its delivery, but also in its content.
The Path’s post-modern ideology is the Enlightenment’s antithesis. Post-modernism, the product of mid-20th-century French philosophers including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, is based in “metaphysical relativism” and “moral relativism,” which means, in essence, that there is no such thing as the real world and no such thing as “right and wrong.” Rather, there is only one’s perception of the real world and one’s perception of morality, which differs from person to person, culture to culture. Your perception of the real world and morality are simply the product of your place in a power hierarchy, or in several “intersecting” power hierarchies. These power hierarchies are ones of race, sex, gender, etc. This is why wokeness is obsessed with race and other tribal affiliations. Where the Enlightenment sees an individual human, post-modernism sees only a member of a tribe.
It’s obviously surprising, if not a little suspicious, that a purportedly “indigenous worldview” is a form of European post-modernism.
More to the point, though, post-modernism is toxic to our legal system which is very much premised on there being a real world—and only one of them. The purpose of a trial is to determine “what happened,” not “what is everyone’s ‘lived experience’ about what happened?” A court does not read a law or contract and ponder what those words mean to each tribe. Rather, a court interprets language to understand its objective meaning. Contrast this with The Path:
“The Crown thought the Treaty was about land surrender. The First Nations thought it was about sharing the land.”
Likewise:
One particularly ruinous post-modern tool employed in the Path—and presumably intended to be employed to remedy our “colonial” legal structure—is the woke dogma of “systemic discrimination.”
What happens to Canada if law societies, lawyers, and the courts set about eliminating “systemic discrimination?” How would Canada look if we were to ensure that every law, every aspect of the legal system, and every exercise of legal power led to exactly the same result for everyone? That’s not diversity, it’s dystopia.