Bruce Pardy: Our modern system of government has moved. Moved away from the rule of law back towards rule by executive fiat. Judicial deference grants control not to a monarch but to a professional managerial class. That deference empowers the tyranny of the administrative state.

Unlike COVID, which transformed society with a fury, the administrative state triumphed slowly over many decades. Its exact origins and timing are matters of debate. Bruce Pardy examines the Anatomy of the Administrative State in a chapter for the new book release, Canary in a COVID World: How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World.

Bruce Pardy challenges the belief that a technocratic government will benefit society. “If the failure is so obvious during COVID, what makes you think that they'd be any good at very many other things?”

What makes our decade different, says Bruce Pardy, is that legislators, bureaucrats, and the judiciary “agree in the way we should proceed” and view civil liberties as “just getting in the way.”

Bruce Pardy: Critical theory, postmodernism, social justice and critical race theory have morphed into the dominant ideology.

The most serious threat to the West is not China or Russia but cultural self-hate. No coup is more effective than one committed by a people against itself.

Courts, unlike legislatures, do not have an official opposition. But the 57-year-old Justice Brown was the outspoken leader of the Supreme Court’s unofficial opposition.

Bruce Pardy surveys the descent of Canada’s legal system into Alice-in-Wonderland surrealism, a state that poses dangers to virtually every Canadian and to the future of the rule of law itself.

The Supreme Court has allowed the philosophy of John Rawls to determine the meaning of ‘fundamental justice’.

The countries of the West are teeming with Chinese spies, and Canada is no exception. But other countries have done something about it.

The “culture war” has been going on within Canadian institutions for a long time. Equity revolutionaries have waged it in a familiar pattern and the Law Society of Ontario is a textbook case.

Pardy: Lawyers are supposed to be the last line of defence for the weak and powerless. It is fascinating to watch the determination of the legal elite to maintain their own power, and to condemn anyone who criticizes it.

The Ontario Law Society’s bencher election is a lynchpin round two, with both sides more deeply entrenched in their positions today than they were in 2019, writes Barbara Kay.

Harper Collins is removing references to physique, race and ethnicity in new editions of the hugely popular mystery novels by Agatha Christie. Bruce Pardy looks at literary revisionism and the age of the “dedicated program”.

Tribunal said white people cannot claim discrimination.

The LSO bencher elections used to fairly ho-hum until SOP (a diversity and equity statement of principles). This year’s election not only has the SOP issue at its centre, but seemingly a whole parcel of issues connected to the “culture wars” of today.

Canadian regulators are imposing a new standard of professional practice. It threatens not just lawyers but professionals of all kinds, as well as every Canadian who might someday need their services.

The fight over the law society's statement of principles may be a microcosm of the fractious political clashes happening across our society, but it’s also a battle that raises a fundamental question: is there anywhere left in society that remains free of the culture war?

But not in the way you might think.

“Competence is being reimagined through a political lens, and a new standard of practice is emerging: be woke, be quiet, or be accused of professional misconduct.” ~ Bruce Pardy