A prospective Punjabi lawyer in Alberta is challenging Law Society of Alberta and the provincial government in court for requiring him to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen to practice law.
Prabjot Singh Wirring, graduated from the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University and is set to complete his articling requirements this August. And the next step for him is to apply to Law Society of Alberta and go through their bar code ceremony. However, that ceremony requires him to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Wirring on the other hand is arguing that doing so would compromise his faith and identity because he has already made an absolute oath to Akal Purakh as an Amritdhari (initiated) Sikh. According to an article in The Globe and Mail, Wirring filed a legal challenge against both bodies earlier this month and seeks to provide an alternative oath, or be exempt, to be admitted to the bar.
Wirring also appeared in an interview with Evan Solomon where he explained that there are 2 kinds of practitioner in Sikh faith. The regular congregation is called the Sangat and then there are smaller portion of those who have joined the Khalsa. Joining Khalsa requires more stringent oath to live by certain discipline and code of conduct. “We take oath of allegiance to Akal Purkh and as part of that we cannot owe that allegiance to anyone else,” he said in the interview.
According to the Globe and Mail article, compromising his principles at the outset of his legal career would be counterintuitive, he said, and go against the values that form who he is as a person and soon-to-be lawyer. Wirring said his entire life has been shaped by his religion and inspired his commitment to social justice.
He said he reached out to executives of the Law Society of Alberta, a self-governing body that sets standards for lawyers, before pursuing legal action. Although they were sympathetic to his situation, he said they were unable to provide an accommodation because the oath falls under provincial legislation.
Wirring in the interview to Evan Soloman said that he was not asking for something extraordinary as many provinces in Canada have already gotten rid of this requirement. It’s an oath of allegiance to the Queen that most provinces, particularly the large and diverse ones, have done away with or is no longer mandatory.
Other provinces and territories in Canada, such as British Columbia and the Yukon, allow people with religious or conscientious objections to provide a different oath to practise law.
Avnish Nanda, an Edmonton-based lawyer representing the plaintiff, said this lawsuit highlights the need to do more. He shared on his Twitter, “Any of the oaths that licensees are required to provide in B.C, Ontario, or Nova Scotia, where the oath of allegiance is optional or not required, and replaced by one where an individual swears to act in a diligent and faithful manner, uphold the cause of justice/public interest.”
Wirring is not the first person to challenge law on this issue. Nanda on his Twitter shared that Patricia Monture-Angus, from Six Nations was called to the Bar where the Law Society asked her to swear an oath to the Queen. She refused arguing she was a member of sovereign nation. She filed an action against the Ontario Attorney General because she objected to swearing allegiance to Queen in the call to the bar ceremony; for Monture, it was not appropriate to swear allegiance to a ‘foreign’ monarch, and she wished to carry an eagle feather at the ceremony, symbolizing a commitment to tell the truth in her own culture. In 1992, the Law Society voted to make the oath optional.
Another First Nations woman from came in support of Wirring and wrote, “I hope he wins! As a First Nations woman who will be forced to swear an oath to the Queen next year in my call to the Bar it weighs heavily on my heart on how wrong it feels considering what has been done to my ancestors and my family because of that institution and colonization.”
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