A royal opt-out: Lawyers’ constitutional freedoms and the fine print of Alberta bar calls

Law360 Canada (September 29, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT) --

Heidi J. T. Exner

Since November 2025, Alberta students-at-law are no longer required to pledge “true allegiance” to King Charles III to become an Alberta lawyer. Yet most don’t even know it.

That is the practical result of Wirring v. Law Society of Alberta, 2025 ABCA 413. The Alberta Court of Appeal held that the statutory oath of allegiance, formerly compulsory for admission to the Alberta bar, unjustifiably infringed religious freedom under s. 2(a) of the Charter. The impugned requirement was declared unconstitutional and of no force or effect. For an institution built on words, this was a case in which the court took the words of this oath seriously.

Prior to Wirring, the admission ritual compelled new Alberta lawyers to repeat the following passage:


An applicant could make a solemn affirmation rather than swear to the oath, and could also omit “So help me God,” if they so chose. But the central undertaking remained. Declaring to be “faithful and bear true allegiance” to the King, his heirs and successors could not be made less meaningful by a different mode of recitation. The state still required would-be lawyers to make an allegiance commitment as the price of entering the profession.

For many of us, the passage in this oath may register as mere antique ceremony, somewhere between horsehair robes and Latin legal maxims. But for Prabjot Singh Wirring, a devout Amritdhari Sikh, this was not decorative language. His religious commitments prohibited him from taking an oath committing allegiance to anything other than Akal Purakh, the divine being recognized in Sikh tradition.

In short, Wirring could not truthfully make the required promise, and Alberta’s statutory scheme told him that without it, he could not join the profession.

Thankfully, the Court of Appeal understood the constitutional significance of Wirring’s collision. A professional gatekeeper cannot make a person choose between living faithfully by sincere religious commitments and practising law, then dismiss the conflict because the gatekeeper regards the required words as merely symbolic. That is not inclusion. It is conditional inclusion, available only to those who can either make the promise or pretend that it means something else.

Although my conviction is personal rather than religious, like many others, I, too, am uncomfortable with this oath. I know in my heart that I could not truthfully swear it, and I am profoundly thankful that Wirring undertook this lengthy but long overdue fight.

The court’s answer: Allegiance means something

Wirring’s multi-year litigation has quite the history. The Court of King’s Bench initially rejected his challenge in 2022. It held that the oath, properly understood, was not really directed to the monarch as an individual. Rather, it was a symbolic commitment to the rule of law and Canada’s constitutional system.

The Court of Appeal accepted part of that interpretive account. It agreed that the oath’s legal object was not the sovereign personally, but rather it was connected to “the rule of law and the Canadian system of constitutional government.” Yet that did not end the analysis. The problem, the court said, was not simply the identity of the recipient. “The problem with the Oath of Allegiance was that it was an oath of allegiance, never mind to whom.”

That distinction matters. “Allegiance” is hardly a casual or even ordinary variety of support. It carries a stronger, overriding commitment. The adjective “true” reinforces that force. However, Wirring’s evidence established that his existing religious oath prevented him from swearing or affirming allegiance to anything else, including so-called abstract ideals. The court found that requiring the oath therefore interfered with his ability to live according to his beliefs. That was a genuine infringement of s. 2(a), not a misunderstanding to be corrected by judicial etymology.

The Law Society of Alberta did better on the first part of the Oakes analysis (R. v. Oakes, [1986] 1 S.C.R. 103). The court accepted that maintaining and promoting the rule of law and Canada’s constitutional system are pressing and substantial objectives. It also accepted a rational connection between an oath and those objectives. But constitutional justification is a marathon, not a jog around the park. Alberta failed at minimal impairment and overall proportionality.

Alberta provided no evidence or argument showing that a compulsory oath of allegiance was minimally impairing. This omission was conspicuous because other jurisdictions had already found less restrictive paths: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Yukon and Ontario made the oath optional; British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island removed it. Alberta could not establish that the rule of law was so fragile that it depended on compelled allegiance from a narrow cohort of newly called lawyers.

The court accordingly declared the relevant statutory requirement unconstitutional under s. 52(1) of the Constitution. It identified three legislative remedies: make the oath optional, remove “be faithful and bear true allegiance” or eliminate the oath entirely.

For future Alberta lawyers, the result is refreshingly simple: no mandatory oath of allegiance as a condition of entry to the profession.

What remains at bar calls

It is important not to overstate Wirring. The decision did not abolish professional oaths, and it did not sever lawyers from public-law obligations. We still make the separate law society oath. That oath is not only eloquent but substantial, despite the fact it includes this surreptitious undertaking:

“I will uphold and maintain the sovereign’s interest and that of the public according to the law in force in Alberta.”

However, the distinction between this snippet and the oath of allegiance is legally and constitutionally significant. The law society oath is not framed as an oath of “true allegiance.” It contains an obligation to uphold and maintain the sovereign’s interest and the public interest according to Alberta law, within a broader commitment to integrity, faithful service and non-perversion of the law. For these reasons, the Court of Appeal treated that as materially different from the allegiance oath that Wirring argued he could not make.

Some may ask whether this is all just semantic hair-splitting. I would caution that lawyers, of all people, should resist that reflex. The Wirring decision demonstrates that wording is not a mere technicality when the wording decides who may participate in a profession. It demonstrates that promises can matter deeply, too. A commitment to act lawfully and ethically in the public interest is one thing. A compelled pledge of “true allegiance” is another. The former describes professional responsibility. The latter asserts a grotesque hierarchy of compelled loyalty.

And, candidly, if the intended object is the rule of law, should we not just be saying “rule of law”? If the intended object is constitutional democracy, we should say “constitutional democracy.” Canada’s legal profession has enough opaque drafting without preserving a monarchical metaphor and asking candidates to infer the modern constitutional meaning from the footnotes.

The opt-out problem

The Law Society of Alberta’s current communications posture warrants scrutiny. The oath of allegiance remains present as a default option in the bar call process, despite Wirring making it non-mandatory.

Information that a candidate need not take this oath is not prominently presented as a clear, affirmative choice for new lawyers. Instead, it is embedded deep in documents encountered when students become eligible to book, and are booking, their bar call. I am informed by the law society that if I do not wish to include this oath in my upcoming Alberta bar call, I will need to independently inform the presiding justice for my ceremony and the onus is essentially on me and said justice to ensure this oath is omitted.

That is a classic opt-out architecture. Marketing departments love it. A pre-ticked box, an obscure cancellation route, a disclosure nested in a link or squeezed between procedural directions: each increases the chance that people will accept the default without meaningful choice. It is familiar behavioural design, except here the product is not a trial streaming subscription. It is a state-adjacent profession’s ceremonial demand for allegiance to the Crown.

The Law Society of Alberta’s public bar call page makes the process feel procedural and deadline-driven. Students must complete articling and PREP, schedule with the courts, notify the law society through the Lawyer Portal, submit enrolment materials, and build in at least 30 days for processing. In that administrative churn, a buried notice about a newly recognized constitutional right is easy to miss. That is precisely why disclosure must be prominent.

A student should not need to conduct a miniature document review exercise to discover that a legally invalidated requirement is optional. And that same student should not have to jump through hoops to have a legally invalidated oath omitted from their bar call ceremony. The message should appear plainly on the law society’s public-facing website, internal portal, in the booking form, and in the call ceremony instructions.

Applicants to the Alberta bar should have an active choice, not a default path: for example, “I elect to take the oath of allegiance” or “I decline the optional oath of allegiance.” Neither choice should require explanation, scrutiny, coordination with the justice swearing you in, or a special email to a membership department. Anything less repeats the precise dynamic that Wirring exposed. Treating compelled words as harmless, while making dissent inconvenient, is still unacceptable, in my view.

A better bar call ritual

I am not making an argument against ceremony. Bar calls should feel significant, because they are. We are entering a profession entrusted with clients’ lives, liberty, property, family relationships and access to justice. Ritual can mark that responsibility. But a good professional ritual should unite lawyers around obligations they can honestly undertake, such as competence, integrity, independence, fidelity to law, service to clients and the public interest.

Wirring is not anti-Crown, anti-law or anti-tradition. It is anti-compulsion where compulsion cannot be justified. It asks Alberta’s legal institutions to distinguish between honouring constitutional traditions and enforcing unnecessary declarations of personal allegiance.

That is a modest demand. It is also a profoundly legal one.

For the those called to the Alberta bar moving forward, the constitutional result is clear. No one should have to swear allegiance to the King to become a lawyer. The law society should now make the practical result equally clear, above the fold, in plain language, and without the administrative equivalent of a preselected newsletter checkbox.

Heidi J. T. Exner is an award-winning white-collar crime fighter, and she is passionate about making the world a better place. She is the founding partner of Ethical Edge Advisors, the founder and chair of the Exner Foundation, a member of JURIST.org’s advisory board, an executive at the CBA’s B.C. Branch, a member of the editorial committee at the CBA’s Alberta Branch, and she is advancing licensure to practise law in both New York State and Alberta. She welcomes you to find her on LinkedIn or check out her biography page on Ethical Edge’s website.

The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

Interested in writing for us? To learn more about how you can add your voice to Law360 Canada, contact Analysis Editor Peter Carter at peter.carter@lexisnexis.ca or call 647-776-6740.