Alberta’s 'Peterson law' leads lawyers' regulator to stop mandating Indigenous education course

The regulator for Alberta’s lawyers says it will no longer mandate Indigenous cultural competency training in advance of what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith calls the “Peterson law” coming into force.

The Law Society of Alberta will also cut its equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) committee in response to the government’s Bill 13, the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act, introduced last November.

Under the new provincial rules, regulators can’t "make cultural competency, unconscious bias, or diversity, equity, and inclusion training mandatory."

In late November, in a speech to delegates at the United Conservative Party convention, Smith said her government had been inspired by the “attack” on psychologist and media personality Jordan Peterson.

In 2022, Peterson was sanctioned by Ontario’s regulator for comments he made online, including some related to transgender people and plus-size models.

“No professional will lose their licence to practice due to their political beliefs, or for not kotowing to DEI and other destructive mandates,” Smith said.

"That came from you. That was your policy last AGM. We're calling it the 'Peterson law.'"

Major U.S. corporations have scaled back their equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives over the past year following the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and some groups in Canada have followed suit.

In 2021, the law society introduced "The Path," a one-time requirement tied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's “calls to action.”

The law society is governed by 24 individuals known as benchers, who had agreed that all Alberta lawyers, as “key contributors to the socio-economic fabric of society,” had a responsibility to be informed, whether a lawyer’s practice involved Indigenous clients or not. 

“The justice system [has] an obligation to share a baseline understanding of how Indigenous clients experience the law in our province and across Canada,” reads a letter attributed to Kent Teskey, president of the society at the time.

But it was long challenged. Glenn Blackett, a Calgary-based lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, called the course "re-education, or indoctrination, into a particular brand of wokeness called 'decolonization'" in a 2023 blog post.

In 2023, 50 of the province's 11,100 lawyers petitioned the law society to remove a rule that allowed the regulator to mandate legal education. The society held a “special meeting” around that petition, and more than 3,400 lawyers logged in.

It resulted in a vote of 864 lawyers for and 2,609 against removing the power for the regulator to mandate continuing education.