Law Professor Ryan Alford makes his case in a one-man constitutional challenge against the federal government at the Supreme Court of Canada, presenting arguments in Ottawa at a hearing on Nov. 5, 2025.Supreme Court of Canada
Ryan Alford, a law professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., is a student of legal history, investigations of the recent and distant past.
He has five degrees from five countries. He is a Buddhist. He does not have a cellphone. His first book detailed post-9/11 legal abuses and presidential power during the U.S. War on Terror. Another book illuminated the centuries-old, pre-Confederation principles that underpin Canada’s Constitution and impose limits on a prime minister’s power.
Over the past eight years, Prof. Alford has forged through a legal odyssey that began at the local courthouse and, in the unlikely result of a quixotic mission, reached the pinnacle of the country’s justice system. Call it one law professor versus the federal government.
“I did not relish this,” Prof. Alford said. “I knew right away that people would say I’m a nutty professor.”
The culmination arrives Friday morning, when the Supreme Court of Canada issues its judgment on Prof. Alford’s challenge to the constitutional boundaries of a prime minister’s ability to curtail the centuries-old right of MPs and senators to speak freely in Parliament.
In 2017, when Prof. Alford read stories of the federal government’s push to pass the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, he became concerned. The law created a group of Parliamentarians in the House of Commons and Senate with top secret clearance to review national security and intelligence operations. It reports to the prime minister.
It included a compromise.
The law froze out committee members’ parliamentary privilege if they spilled state secrets. Privilege includes legal immunity for anything said in Parliament. This is central to holding the government to account. The roots of the legal shield stretch back to 1629 when King Charles I jailed Sir John Eliot for opposing the King’s taxation plans in the English Parliament.
The 2017 abrogation of parliamentary privilege, to Prof. Alford’s mind, trampled an inviolable right, and the Constitution did not allow it.
Prof. Alford issued a warning at a Senate committee before the law passed. He then took the federal government to court.
It seemed like an abstract and academic challenge. No secrets had been revealed. No one had been jailed. But it was real to Prof. Alford, who earned his law degree at New York University in the early 2000s, in the shadow of the destroyed World Trade Center towers and the start of the War on Terror.
The eight-year odyssey began in 2018. Prof. Alford first had to prove in court he deserved what is called public interest standing, which allows a person to bring a constitutional challenge even if they are not directly affected. He lost and later won on appeal. He then needed to prove the merits of his case.
Prof. Alford invoked a scenario where a senator on the security committee hears classified information about the Canadian Armed Forces targeting Canadian citizens overseas in drone strikes – an echo of actual actions in 2011 in Yemen taken by former U.S. president Barack Obama.
But the security committee law means that revealing such information in Parliament could lead to the senator’s imprisonment.
Prof. Alford’s big win came in 2022. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice declared the federal government wasn’t allowed to eliminate parliamentary privilege in the security committee law.
Two years later, at the Ontario Court of Appeal, Ottawa won. The law was legal.
Prof. Alford launched his last long-shot appeal and asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. The top court agrees to a small fraction of such requests and basically never takes an appeal from a one-man band. Yet the Supreme Court said yes to Prof. Alford.
Then the real pressure hit. As a boy growing up in Ottawa, he never really noticed the stately Supreme Court building. Now, the law professor was about to argue a case against the federal government in Canada’s apex courtroom. “It was,” he said, “extremely daunting.”
The Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa, on March 13.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Governments mounted their fight against Prof. Alford. In legal filings, Ottawa said the professor misunderstood the Constitution. Several provinces backed Ottawa. Ontario said legislatures “have the power to regulate their own privileges.” The Speaker of the Senate said limiting free speech in Parliament is an “essential and necessary part of parliamentary privilege.”
But Prof. Alford had a few allies. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the complete immunity to speak fearlessly in Parliament is “a structural bulwark against the political majority muzzling the parliamentary minorities.”
At the Supreme Court last November, Prof. Alford spoke for his allotted hour to make his appeal and fielded a fusillade of questions from the judges. He encapsulated his argument in parliamentary history: “The freedom to speak freely in debate without being subject to imprisonment regardless of whether one’s speech defies the wishes” of the prime minster.
It was a difficult climb but he had help at the mountaintop. Eugene Meehan, an Ottawa lawyer and navigator of the Supreme Court’s arcane rules, lent a hand with logistics. Mr. Meehan described the legal challenge in an interview as a foundational case on details of the Constitution. He saluted Prof. Alford’s perseverance: “A single individual kept asking a question when most people would have stopped.”
Christine Van Geyn, who has worked with Prof. Alford, likened him to someone who stepped out of a history book, with a thick beard, tortoise-shell glasses and a penchant for three-piece suits.
“Ryan combines deep scholarly expertise with real-world impact that’s rare in Canadian legal circles,” said Ms. Van Geyn, a director at the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which argued at the Supreme Court in support of Prof. Alford.
In Prof. Alford’s office at Lakehead University, he keeps an image of Fudo Myoo, a symbol of wisdom and strength in Japanese Buddhism. It gets Prof. Alford talking about impermanence, and of lessons learned and forgotten.
Win or lose on Friday, he hopes his case sparks interest in how the long-ago past shapes the present and the future. “There’ll be another emergency, there’ll be another purported rationalization, and people will forget everything that we’ve learned.”