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.

One of the lawyers involved in that petition, Roger Song, sought a judicial review, which was dismissed by a judge last September.

Song said Friday he believed the law society “made a righteous decision to stop mandatory cultural competence training on lawyers, so I rejoice.”

He said he believes all lawyers have their own perception of what cultural competence is.

“I think we should leave that to the lawyers to individually decide what kind of culture they want to embrace,” he said.

In an email, Bud Melnyk, the new president of the Law Society of Alberta, said “with over 10,500 Alberta lawyers completing the Path over the past five years, the Law Society is confident that we have responded to this important call to action in a meaningful way.”

“Although the Path will no longer be mandatory once the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act is in effect, it will continue to be available to interested Alberta lawyers,” Melnyk wrote.

Jessica Buffalo, the Law Society of Alberta’s first Indigenous initiatives counsel in 2022, said she long feared that EDI initiatives at the society would be cut.

“It shouldn’t have to be mandatory, but that was the only way most of the profession would engage with it,” she wrote in an email.

“If they remove the mandatory requirement but continue to provide the course, they are still partially upholding their commitment to the Call to Action.

“But it’s not meaningful if they can’t tell Indigenous communities how they are protecting their interests by ensuring their lawyers can work competently with and for them. Again, I ask, who does the public interest include?”

Melnyk said the law society’s equity, diversity and inclusion committee will also not be re-established for 2026 because of the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act.

“Going forward, we will continue to advance permissible EDI initiatives through the other strategic committees,” Melnyk said.

Jeffrey Westman was on the society’s committee from 2022 until 2025. He said among the committee’s key initiatives was to break down barriers for internationally trained lawyers joining the profession.

“I think the law society might be changing its practices in response to a political climate, but I think the contributors to the political climate don’t fully understand EDI,” Westman said.

“Behind the politically-charged term, there is an apparatus there for the law society as a regulator to figure out, what are these issues that are preventing people like internationally trained lawyers from fully participating.”

The changes at the society come amid a broader period of change tied to new legal legislation in Alberta.

In January, all 14 of the Alberta Law Foundation’s employees resigned in the wake of new government powers that gives the justice minister more control over the organization. 

Alberta lawyers protest provincial decisions

Melnyk, who began his term as law society president in late February, wrote in a letter this week that the society was committed to help the foundation stabilize through its transition.