Chapter Four — Neutrality, Apparently By the time Bill 13 arrived, the government had already shown Albertans two of its favourite tricks. First, call coercion protection. Second, call control common sense. Bill 13 added a third: call ideology NEUTRALITY and hope nobody notices the wiring. Bill 13, the “Regulated Professions Neutrality Act,” was introduced on November 20, 2025, passed third reading on December 9, and received Royal Assent on December 11. The government’s own description says it applies across Alberta’s regulated professions, including occupations and skilled trades, even where its rules conflict with other legislation governing regulatory bodies. That is not a tidy little amendment around the edges. That is a province-wide rewrite of how regulators are allowed to regulate. And what exactly was being rewritten? According to Alberta’s own Bill 13 page, the law prevents regulators from disciplining off-duty “expressive conduct” except in narrow circumstances, bars mandatory training unless it relates to professional competence and ethics, explicitly says regulators cannot require cultural competency, unconscious bias, or diversity, equity and inclusion training, and imposes “neutrality” rules preventing regulators from assigning value, blame, preferential treatment, or adverse treatment based on a list of protected and belief-based characteristics. It also sets a common legal standard of review for court and internal appeals involving compliance with the Act or rights under the “Charter” or the “Alberta Bill of Rights.” That is a lot of machinery for a bill supposedly just protecting free expression. This is where the government’s language does most of the work. NEUTRALITY. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. FAIR TREATMENT. Nice, clean words. Hard to object to in the abstract. But once you look at what the bill actually blocks, the shape changes fast. A regulator can no longer simply decide that training in cultural safety, anti-racism, unconscious bias, or equity obligations is part of protecting the public unless it can squeeze that training through the Act’s narrow competence-and-ethics doorway. That is not neutral. That is a political decision about what kinds of harm count, what kinds of knowledge matter, and what kinds of professional responsibility the state is willing to dismiss as ideological clutter. This is why Bill 13 belongs in this project. It shows the government translating culture-war instincts into administrative code. Not by screaming on a rally stage, but by rewriting the terms under which colleges, regulators, and professional bodies can respond to discrimination, public trust problems, and modern ethical obligations. It is one thing to complain about “wokeness” into a microphone. It is another thing entirely to legislate new constraints on the institutions that oversee lawyers, nurses, teachers, and other regulated professionals. Bill 13 did the second thing. The Law Society of Alberta’s response was careful, but revealing. On the day the bill was released, it reminded the public that it has a duty to protect the public interest in the regulation of legal services and said it would conduct a thorough review of the new legislation to understand what it means for the Law Society, the public, and the legal profession in Alberta. That is diplomatic language. It is also the language of an institution being told the province is about to change the rules under its feet. The sharper criticism came from the nursing sector, and for good reason. The Canadian Nurses Association warned after passage that Bill 13 would weaken the mechanisms regulators use to protect the public, including their ability to respond to racist, discriminatory, or harmful off-duty conduct and their ability to require training tied to cultural safety, anti-racism, and related ethical obligations. The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario made a similar case, arguing the bill would undermine patient safety, professional accountability, and the protection of vulnerable communities by treating anti-racism, cultural safety, disability awareness, and 2SLGBTQI+ inclusion as though they were optional ideological extras rather than part of competent care. And that is the point where the government’s framing starts to fall apart. Because in a lot of regulated professions, the public-interest function is not limited to technical skill in the narrowest possible sense. Competence is not just whether a nurse can insert an IV, whether a lawyer can draft a pleading, or whether a professional can pass an exam. It is also whether the profession understands bias, discrimination, power, trust, and the real-world conditions under which people receive care, representation, or service. Pretending those things are foreign ideological contaminants rather than part of ethical practice is not neutrality. It is selective blindness written into law. Bill 13 also matters because it widens the government’s pattern of central control. This project has already tracked power being pulled upward into Cabinet, ministries, and executive discretion. Bill 13 does something adjacent but equally telling: it narrows the autonomy of professional regulators by telling them what CANNOT count as mandatory learning, what CANNOT count as neutral governance, and what kinds of expressive conduct are presumptively protected. The government is not merely setting broad policy direction here. It is stepping directly into the operating logic of self-regulating professions. The sales pitch, of course, is freedom. It is always freedom. Freedom from regulators. Freedom from mandatory training. Freedom from alleged ideological enforcement. But by now the pattern is familiar enough to smell through the cologne. “Freedom” in this government’s hands often means freedom from oversight, freedom from accountability, and freedom from institutional friction when it wants to recode public norms around its own worldview. Bill 13 fits that pattern almost too neatly. This chapter is not saying every regulator was perfect before Bill 13. They were not. Regulatory bodies can overreach, move clumsily, and make bad decisions like any other institution. But that is not what this law was built to solve. Bill 13 was not a scalpel aimed at specific regulatory excesses. It was a broad ideological intervention dressed as a fairness measure. It took the government’s grievance politics and translated them into province-wide operating rules for professions that are supposed to serve the public, not the mood of the cabinet table. Why it matters: Bill 13 turns “neutrality” into a political instrument. It limits what regulators can require, narrows how they can respond to harmful conduct and systemic inequity, and shifts the balance away from public-interest regulation toward a government-defined version of expressive freedom. It is not housekeeping. It is ideological control with a calm voice and a tidy label. Final Thought The clever part of Bill 13 is the packaging. Call it the “Regulated Professions Neutrality Act” and half the battle is already won. Who wants regulators to be unfair? Who wants expression to be punished? Who wants politics inside professional discipline? But that is the trick. The bill does not remove politics from regulation. It imports the government’s politics into regulation and labels the result neutral. That is a hell of a magic act. And like most magic acts, it works best if you do not look too closely at the hands. bsky.app
Chapter Five — Rewriting the Referee’s Rulebook Some bills target workers. Some target patients. Some target vulnerable kids and then dare the courts to object.
@unroll.skywriter.blue Thread unroll, please.