The Assault on Professional Competence

How Canada's professional colleges are weakening our medical, legal, and physical infrastructure

According to Statistics Canada, there are nearly 250,000 professional engineers in Canada, along with 350,000 nurses (and allied health professionals), 120,000 physicians (and veterinarians), 105,000 lawyers, and 92,000 therapists.

Besides having successfully completed years of difficult training and willingly shouldered responsibility for the public they serve, what do all those professionals have in common? That would be the fact that their professional careers now depend on adhering to hard-to-define anti-racism, equity, and diversity standards; standards that could reduce the objective quality of their work.

For context, equality of opportunity and fair treatment for all people have been the universal legal and practical standard in Canada for many decades. Just spend some time with the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act, and various provincial human rights codes to get a sense of what’s already required.

New demands for “equity” and “anti-racism” are obviously looking for something very different. And, incredibly, it’s something that Canadian law at least appears to permit.

The Royal College of Physicians

The Royal College oversees the medical education of specialists in Canada and establishes and maintains certification standards. Those standards are, in part, defined by the CanMEDS framework “that identifies and describes the abilities physicians require to effectively meet the health care needs of the people they serve.”

The current version of the framework has been around for a while now and appears pretty straightforward. But the College is actively working to update the framework as part of an initiative known as CanMEDS 25. According to the College website, the proposed changes will require physicians to:

• Support the goals of anti-racism and anti-oppression

• Support the goal of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility

If they’re eventually adopted, Canadian doctors and medical institutions will presumably be expected to incorporate those goals into their hiring and professional activities. Failure to meet those poorly-defined expectations could well result in career-ending enforcement.

College of Nurses of Ontario

Since Canadian nurses are regulated at the provincial level, I’ll use their Ontario college as an example. The official College of Nurses of Ontario Code of Conduct document contains this description of nurses:

They advocate for equitable and culturally safe care that is free from discrimination.

Granted, that’s just one small sentence quoted from a far longer document. But it’s also a legal document, and even the smallest detail can be raised and used against someone in a professional review.

Think that’s far-fetched? Imagine being accused of failing to deploy more scarce resources for patients from “underserved communities” than for other patients. Adoption of the principle of equity (which requires that all groups should experience equal outcomes) would seem to demand unequal treatment.

College of psychologists of Ontario

The College published its standards of professional conduct on its website. The current document seems to date from 2017 and contains nothing particularly noteworthy. But their website also hosts an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion statement, which declares the College’s commitment:

To continuing its work on issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion…

This declaration doesn’t rise to the level of a formal license-related requirement. But we’ve already seen how, in the case of Professor Jordan Peterson, a related complaint could lead to actual license revocation.

The Law Society of Ontario (formerly the Law Society of Upper Canada)

The Society requires all lawyers practicing in Ontario to complete 12 hours of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) activities each year. As of 2020, at least three of those hours must come from within the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion domain.

Now it’s interesting that the inoffensive word “equality” is used nine times on that page. But in the context of learning resources, the phrasing is different: