The three judges who made the decision are all top-flight and highly respected. The problem is not the judges but the law they felt obligated to apply and the facts as the College presented them. The leading case in the applicable law is the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2019 Vavilov, which instructed judges to show considerable deference to decisions of expert regulators.
Why does this matter? Because anyone subject to disciplinary action is protected by certain legal safeguards, while mere education — whether labelled continuing or remedial — involves no such safeguards. The Court took its description of the College’s order directly from the College’s own description of it. But that description was opaque, inaccurate and hence arguably unreasonable under the Vavilov decision.
The Court wrote that the College’s order “simply requires him to have coaching ‘to review, reflect on, and amelioratehis professionalism in public statements’ in order to avoid making demeaning and degrading statements about people that may be harmful to them and to the profession.” The key word is “ameliorate.” In this context, it means change his attitude to the satisfaction of the mandatory coach.