Physicians college embraces social justice lunacy

by Conrad Black

One of the most absurd and alarming indications of the disintegration of contemporary society is the recent revelation that the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada has set up a study group whose purpose is to give what it considers to be suitable weight in professional medical training to questions of social justice and avoidance of racism. It is difficult to imagine what outright lunacy must have possessed the authorities of that venerable and most necessary learned profession to embark upon such an insane enterprise.

The Royal College was established along with other associations governing learned professions to determine and maintain professional and ethical standards within the profession. It is generally agreed that despite frequent shortcomings in the bar and in the accounting and architectural and engineering and other professional associations, self-regulation by these eminent occupations is preferable to having them micromanaged by legislators not personally learned in the respective professional fields.

But there has until recently been an unshakable consensus that the authority of professional associations was confined to the maintenance of professional and ethical standards; venturing into instructing members of the professions on how they should behave and think clashes directly with the entrenched and fundamental concept of all free societies by trespassing on what the American Declaration of Independence describes as the “unalienable rights” of every sane, adult, unincarcerated citizen.

We must by now, after innumerable provocations and inanities, be close to the point where most reasonable people with a firm but rational concept of their individual liberties and prerogatives, long guaranteed in the statutes and jurisprudence of all civilized jurisdictions, will respond with suitable outrage and defiance to these oppressive acts.

There is a legitimate variation of opinion on where individual and collective rights meet and conflict. The standard Anglo-Saxon rule has emerged over centuries that responsible adults should have the freedom to do anything that is not justifiably illegal in itself and does not infringe upon the comparable liberties of all other responsible people. The French and some other traditions allow for an earlier assertion of collective rights. The best-known examples of this in Canada have been the predominantly English-speaking federal courts’ usual disagreement with the opinion of Quebec courts that democratic rights should not be exploited for the purpose of attacking democracy or the free will of the majority.

From the 1930’s to the 1950’s there were a number of controversies in Quebec over the provincial government claiming the right to close buildings being used for the dissemination of anti-democratic literature, especially communist propaganda, as well as the famous utilization of a provincially granted liquor license to finance recidivistic activities of trespass and nuisance by canvassers on behalf of aggressive sectarian minorities such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Some of the same questions have arisen in respect of language legislation.

These were legitimate differences of opinion but the stealthy mission creep of professional associations abusing their statutory privileges to dictate social and political attitudes and administrative norms that had been left to the free choice of responsible professionals, is a wild leap into authoritarianism. What is proposed for the medical profession is an addition to CanMEDS, the framework for the training of physicians which is administered by the Royal College referred to, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, the Canadian Medical Association, the Medical Council of Canada and Quebec College of Physicians and various comparable organizations.

The rationale for this new onslaught of rigid political correctness is to promote “anti-oppression, antiracism and social justice, rather than medical expertise,” which should be “decentered. … To prioritize bidirectional relationships with patients, providers, communities, the land, the health system and society at large.” (A bidirectional relationship with the land will require the familiar and humdrum force of gravity to be countered by the successful incitement of upward levitations — a stern challenge even for omnipotent overlords.) The declared objective is to “reflect a sense of humility over hubris.”

As I read an excellent expose of this unutterable nonsense by Michael Higgins in the National Post on Nov. 28, I suffered a piercing stab of outright terror that both the expressed and silent thoughts of our medical profession will now be dictated by a claque of megalomaniacs who consider medical attention to be hubristic while humility consists in the extermination of what have been regarded as the principal civil rights of man for more than 2,500 years.

This appalling lunacy is advancing like a plague; it is part of the same pestilential scourge that has enabled the Ontario Bar Association to require the province’s lawyers to adopt hiring practices and civic attitudes that allow no place for any consideration except ethnic and cultural quotas. This is the same official mentality that harassed Canada’s best known and most admired citizen, Professor Jordan Peterson, because he declined to accept the instructions of those who demanded they be addressed in a vocabulary they had invented in recognition of their current state of self-identification. And it is the same form of dictatorship that caused Toronto school principal Richard Bilkszto to be so denounced and bullied for disagreeing with an education anti-racism trainer who stated that Canada was a more racist country than the United States, that he took sick leave in 2021 and ultimately committed suicide.

This is where this unspeakable madness will lead: not just tragic individual self-destructive acts, but in the suicide of civil and rational society and of any recognizable definition of human freedom. It is so mortally dangerous because unlike many previous threats to our civilization, instead of being built up by the manipulation of mobs and the rabble, it is the satanic work of perverted elites. The bankruptcy of our education system has led to a precipitate decline in the quality and integrity of our media. The old nihilist left has seized control of the environmental movement and transformed it into a battering ram to destroy economic growth and prosperity in the name of saving the planet.

And in the absence of an appreciable foreign challenge to Western civilization, our elites have eagerly succumbed to the terminal affliction of resurrecting and hideously magnifying or simply fabricating shortcomings in our history, most conspicuously the Beverley McLachlin-Justin Trudeau blood libel that Canadians attempted genocide against Aboriginal people.

The commanding heights of our society: the media, the academics, most of the corporate leadership and the entertainment industry, are morally rotten and attainted of destructive self-loathing. Fortunately the people have not lost their judgment, their courage, or their self-esteem. It must be admitted that the authors of these outrages are by virtue of their conduct, justified in hating themselves, though, presumably for reasons they do not suspect. Perseverance will be rewarded, we will change personnel and public policy as required and emerge from this pale of absurdity, derangement, and hypocrisy. The West does not now have a death wish.

First published in the National Post.