The big governance coalition, which formed to return the LSO exclusively to the establishment, has repeatedly accused the former StopSOP slate of trying to cut funding to county law libraries. This misinformation now appears to form the backbone of the coalition's platform. 

You should know the facts. 

My first mistake? I used to ignore these elections, which happen every four years. I mean, who cared? I didn’t even know who was running most of the time. “Convocation,” the governing body of the law society, was a leisure club for big-name lawyers, and I wasn’t one of those. Benchers rubber-stamped policy, sampled the law society’s wine cellar, and let staff run the show. I paid my outrageous fees, checked boxes on my annual report and figured the law society was irrelevant to my life.

Mistake two? Many lawyers, depending on how long ago they were law students, know that the intellectual rot of critical race theory and social justice nihilism has slowly conquered Canadian law schools. But I — we — believed the legal profession would remain largely immune to its effects. Academic theories opposed to the Western legal canon and designed for an imaginary universe would be slapped down in the real world of clients and courts. Wrong again!

These two mistakes coalesced.

The College of Psychologists of Ontario wants to re-educate Jordan Peterson for criticizing Justin Trudeau on social media. Nurse Amy Hamm is presently before a disciplinary panel of the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives for saying that biological sex is real. Numerous doctors have been sanctioned for expressing medical views contrary to official government COVID policies. Across the country, regulators are censoring, disciplining or ousting members of their professions who fail to comport with their political imperatives. A new standard of practice is emerging for Canadian professionals: be woke, be quiet, or be accused of professional misconduct.

But the Law Society went beyond this and required all the province’s lawyers to join the Law Society’s ”accelerating culture shift” and proclaimed every lawyer’s obligation to “promote” equality, diversity, and inclusion. This was a scandalous promotion of personal values and enforced thought and dogma that in itself compromised the dignity and liberty of all of the members of the legal profession in the province. It is a dictation of values to be held and spread and transmitted and not merely a regulation of conduct. Of course, under such a regime, it immediately becomes impossible to distinguish between a lawyer fairly evaluating the talent, aptitude, and suitability of people competing for a position from a lawyer exercising a prejudiced preference of appearance, ethnicity, age, sex, sexual orientation, or disability.

The whole initiative was obnoxious and obtuse nonsense but the imposition of the obligation to promote equality was the real show-stopper, and a StopSOP group of candidates was elected as benchers of the Law Society, taking the incumbents by surprise, and they managed by a narrow margin to repeal the Statement of Principles, which could have been construed as requiring them to agitate aggressively for gestures of compulsory equality and diversity in any clubs, associations, social groups, or religious denominations where any Ontario lawyer was active.

The universities are the most extreme example but other professions have fallen prey to the same problems. The Law Society of Ontario attempted to mandate diversity statements for all lawyers. This was after they changed the name, ditching the “Law Society of Upper Canada” moniker (dating to 1797) because of its ostensible white colonial taint. The issue here isn’t the political opinion of any particular lawyer or historian. It is instead the way professional associations and institutions are being taken over by activists who demand that only certain political views are the new normal.

Is this a new way of forcing woke thought on the profession? Are these recommendations a purpose-built tool for speech curtailment and indoctrination? I don’t believe that was the intent, but could they be used that way? I know of one clinical psychologist who would say yes. The report recommendations, if accepted, will change PAC for the long term and provide a powerful subjective measure of judgment over “concerns” that are non-discipline worthy — potentially creating a groupthink committee.

Lawyers were so up in arms that a slate of bencher (the term for directors of the law society) candidates ran directly in opposition to the society’s overreach and every single one was elected. They were elected because Ontario lawyers were worried that the LSO, empowered by this statement of principles, would conduct itself precisely in the fashion which the College of Psychologists just has and order witch hunts against the politically incorrect.

An astro-turfed campaign of manufactured outrage has ensued. Benchers have received letters from the usual interest groups and activists bizarrely accusing benchers Shi and Lean of threatening library funding.