Alberta lawyer Roger Song moved to Canada 25 years ago from China to distance himself from a regime he says he could no longer live under.
Having witnessed the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre–when government forces opened fire on unarmed students demanding democratic reform–he says he saw Canada as a place of freedom where he and his family could start over. He was a law professor at Peking University at the time, and says he witnessed how the regime used its authority to suppress students’ “legitimate demands” for democracy. “I couldn’t allow my children, my next generation, to be still subject to this type of dictatorship,” he told The Epoch Times in an interview. “So that’s why I decided to leave China at that moment.”
But now, he is raising the alarm over what he says is a growing ideological push in Canada that increasingly mirrors the ideological tyranny of communist China. Song filed a lawsuit against the Law Society of Alberta in 2023, over concerns about mandatory cultural training for lawyers imposed by the society–a move he says is similar to what he saw growing up in China.
“Canada is now moving toward the place where I escaped from,” he said.
In 2019, Song was required to complete “cultural competence” training to maintain his legal credentials in Alberta. He says the society’s professional development program–which covers topics such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), gender identity, and promotes the need to “dismantle systemic inequalities and barriers”–imposes “politicized” requirements and redefines legal competence as adherence to “woke” political beliefs.
He launched a legal challenge in 2023, asking the courts to remove these requirements for lawyers, but the challenge was dismissed this year, with the Court of King’s Bench ruling in a Sept. 12 decision that the training requirements fall under the law society’s scope.
“Having a basic understanding of the people and communities you serve as a lawyer does not work against the public interest. Nor does cultivating a safe work environment built on the principles of evolving human rights law,” reads the decision.
It adds that the law society sees its professional development requirements as “necessary to achieve a greater societal good, and it was within their authority to do so.”
Song argues that compelling lawyers to adopt specific viewpoints goes against the principle of independence of the bar, which the Supreme Court of Canada has described as “one of the hallmarks of a free society.” This principle refers to the ability of lawyers to act in their clients’ best interests, free from undue state or public influence.
“In the area of personal belief, ideology, political issues, it’s an alarming sign if you’re forced to take any type of mandatory training, because if you’re taking mandatory training, that means the content of the mandatory training is considered as the dominant notion, dominant view, dominant attitude, dominant culture of this society,” Song said.
He adds he felt pressured to complete the training because he did not want to lose his licence. “The thing is that if you fail to submit that certificate by deadline, your licence is automatically suspended,” he said.
Song says the law society’s training violates his Charter rights to freedom of conscience and expression, amounting to “compelled speech, forced ideological conformity, and suppression of conscience and expression,” according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which represents Song in the case.
According to Rule 67.4 of the Law Society of Alberta, the society can “prescribe specific continuing professional development requirements to be completed by members, in a form and manner, as well as time frame.”
Lawyers who do not complete the mandatory training “shall stand automatically suspended” the day after the deadline to complete the course, the rules say.
