Opinion: No genuine rule of law can exist without independent lawyers, who are no less essential than independent courts
It is an election year and the politics are fierce. No, I am not referring to the upcoming federal campaign but to the election soon to take place at the Law Society of Ontario. Lawyers and paralegals will vote in late April on their choices for “Bencher,” the quaint name for the people who sit on the regulator’s governing body. Sounds boring, I know. Not even the lawyers and paralegals usually pay attention. This time, however, is different.
The problem is that the Law Society means something quite different. “Equality does not mean treating all people the same,” it states on its website. It demands that its licensees state their commitment not to equality of treatment but to equality of outcome based on identity politics. No genuine rule of law can exist without independent lawyers, who are no less essential than independent courts. That a Canadian legal regulator would compel its licensees to state their embrace of progressive values as a condition of their licence is astonishing — but no more so than the compliance that followed. Last year, the first year of the mandatory statement, 97 per cent of lawyers and paralegals obeyed.
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