In addition to the oil interests, this was a gangster's warning to the world that he is running a protection racket. I assume Denmark is freaking out right now, and we should be, too.

Canada is the woman trying to keep the serial killer talking while she edges toward the kitchen knives.

The "kitchen knives" being alliances, successful defence procurement and at-home defence production.

Carney needs to talk softly until he can find a big stick.

By the way, this is a variety of systemic bias, for those who are skeptical that systematic bias is a thing.

He was horrified to learn they don't, because they had regularly been turning down Indigenous applicants on the assumption that they didn't need it.

Outside of court, one of the big ones is "Indigenous people get their postsecondary education for free." I remember talking about this to a guy who regularly worked on scholarship grants.

Failing to effectively counter the "First Nations don't pay their debts" trope one time, extended the litigation by at least 10 years and millions in legal fees.

I'm not sure what that is going to accomplish, other than further straining the justice system. I'm not sure they realize how clogged the Law Society's disciplinary system is. I don't know what part of that ends up on the Benchers' plate, but I doubt the extra work will be welcomed by justices.

I would not surprise if a lot of firms made it mandatory.

I see also that the Bill is taking a bunch of adjudication responsibilities away from the Law Society's governing body (the "Benchers") and giving it to the Court of King's Bench.

At a meeting of (IIRC) ~4,000 lawyers, which I believe is about half the lawyers in the province, 75% voted in favour of making the course mandatory. It is a free course that can be done online, in parts, at the lawyer's leisure, that it is impossible to fail.

Perhaps a prohibition by the Law Society from acting for or against an Indigenous person, or in a matter involving Indigenous rights, unless the lawyer has taken the course?

It's worth mentioning that the general membership of the Law Society voted on this.

How can/should the Law Society respond to this? Possibly there are some Charter, and maybe even division of powers, arguments that can be brought to bear. It would certainly be interesting if Alberta chose to use the notwithstanding clause to prevent lawyers from learning about Indigenous rights.

Reasonable people could argue about whether The Path course gets the balance right among Indigenous history, culture and law. But that argument can't occur while the argument is focused on whether *anything* that is "Indigenous-coded" is a matter of competency.

And this legislation expressly includes competency as a responsibility of the Law Society. So what to do when the Law Society and the Alberta government disagree as to what constitutes "competency"? It looks like the Minister will make regulations defining what is or is not a matter of competency.

But we treat these as core competencies because they come up so often. And the Law Society can hardly create bespoke bar admission courses for each budding lawyer.

Heretofore the Law Society counted ensuring lawyer competency as part of of its responsibilities to protect the public.

As for the argument that you shouldn't have to learn about these issues if you aren't going to practice in a relevant area, there are a lot of lawyers who don't generally do real estate, or wills and estates, or criminal, or family, or corporate or litigation.