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:
The following Law Society Equity Legal Education programs have been accredited and webcasts are available for viewing [emphasis mine]
That could have been a typo. But we’re dealing with lawyers. And the Society does explicitly offer support to members of the public who feel their rights were infringed by a lawyer through their Equity Supports & Resources page. There, you’ll find how:
As part of The Law Society of Ontario's mandate to ensure access to justice, the Law Society builds equity and diversity values and principles into its policies, programs and procedures.
In other words, if an Ontario lawyer is accused of failing to live up to the “equity” ideal, the Law Society may use it’s authority and (considerable) resources to impose their preferences.
Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO)
We all want our bridges and public buildings built using the most demanding engineering standards. Only the most experienced and competent engineers can reliably protect us from catastrophic infrastructure failures.
But the PEO’s current policy goals suggest that other considerations interest them more than technical competence:
The new Anti-Racism and Equity (ARE) Code promotes policy development approaches that initially will prioritize the most marginalized communities, including Black, Indigenous other racialized populations, and provide a high focus on developing strategies to counter any systemic discrimination impacting persons based on gender identity—including female, two-spirit, intersex, transgender and gender variant persons.
With this, the PEO seeks to prioritize the hiring of engineers from marginalized communities. Considering how it’s already illegal to overlook qualified applicants because of their gender or race, this new goal must involve prioritizing less qualified candidates based on their personal, non-professional characteristics.
This growing trend among professional societies and colleges is obviously designed to change society. But will everyone be happy with the results? Isn’t it likely that the quality of the mission-critical services provided by our medical, legal, and engineering institutions will decline? Won’t many bright and talented young people, uncomfortable with the new ideological orthodoxy they’re expected to adopt, simply avoid careers in these professions?
Is all this even legal? Here’s the beginning of Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
This would seem to protect even members of well-established and historically well-served ethnic groups. However, Subsection (2) states that:
Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
My (non-legal) understanding is that, in practice, it’s expected that application of Subsection (2) should be tempered with the principles of balance and proportionality to prevent reverse discrimination. In addition, we’re still expected to incorporate qualification and competency considerations in all hiring practices.
Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the law along with the new and growing militancy of the equity and anti-racism movement suggests that we might be in for some institutional turbulence.
Thank you for doing all this work to show how deeply the rot of DEI is spreading in professional associations in Canada. This should send shivers down the back of any person who wishes to live in a sane society.
All professional associations in Canada are already corrupted by their relationship with the (increasingly leviathan) state that grants them monopoly right to practice legislation. Their boards have government appointees and their staff are generally onboard with all the other institutions captured by cultural Marxism that now dominate the humanities faculties and wider culture. Their interest in maintaining their monopoly exceeds their interest in professionalism. One need only go back a couple of years to see the ease with which some of these professions canceled and ejected otherwise competent members questioning state directed political (not science-based) mandates within fully state-compliant and corrupted associations. We don't have professions offering objective standards of practice to willing buyers, we have guild socialism.