Today is the first day of the BCSC Law Society of British Columbia (LSBC) trial, and I hope, for both my sake, and the sake of British Columbia, that the rump remnants of the LSBC and Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia (TLABC) lose. Moreover, I do not care if the rump remnants of the LSBC, or TLABC, or any hectoring or censorious professional quarter, do not like hearing it, and am prepared to wear for all eternity having said so. First, though, an important preface: British Columbia, Canada, is actually the greatest polity in the world. Skookum, better, more enlightened, our Constitution is good, our Courts (especially our Supreme Court) are honourable and intelligent, we are generally, though not exclusively, good neighbours and gracious guests of the First Nations here, and we generally enjoy a stable existence which we should seek to cherish and preserve. That cannot be said of everywhere, and I am glad to be scrabbling on the bottom of the heap fighting with the Crown and legal regulator here, than to be on the top of the heap elsewhere. With that said, I am for the legislative transcendence of this institution, the LSBC. It is a bad institution, perhaps the worst institution I have ever encountered: cold, stupid, dysfunctional, unfeeling, unintelligent, tasked with enormous power and responsibility and yet woefully unfit and incapable for purpose, and all the worse because it conducts itself entirely at a remove from the overwhelming majority of communities in British Columbia, sequestered as it is to one high-rise office in Vancouver with a hostile phone-tree, like a bank.
Its proponents point to its longevity as proof of its worth. ‘Look at the mighty oak tree, the LSBC,’ they say, when in point of fact this institution actively practised completely arbitrary and capricious racial and ideological exclusion for well over 100 years. Its membership today are demographically, and sociologically, descended from the beneficiaries of that exclusion, their being kept in absolute fiat power over the provision of legal services as a gated-community unto themselves. When the body of 14,000 licensees makes a decision on who ought or ought not be included, a membership which has at least in part been selected for on that basis, that is intrinsically suspect. Claims that it has since been reformed and rationalized are greatly exaggerated. In truth it does not even represent the greater mass of actually practising British Columbia legal practitioners today. Rather, what actually occurs is that everybody knows this hulking wreck functions poorly - and only in the interests of a tiny, extremely affluent minority - is malformed, does not fulfill its public duty in a rational way, and yet one is obliged, blackmailed, into silence and obeisance, allegedly because the alternative might be worse. The present litigation over the new Legal Professions Act in British Columbia has thwarted and thawed that conspiracy of silence somewhat. In a piece this past week for the Vancouver Sun, King's Counsel Peter Gall conceded that "the Law Society has had decades to meet the access challenge, but has failed to do so," that the Law Society's own processes take "too long, [are] too expensive and [are] unnecessarily adversarial," and that, ultimately, "the status quo isn't defensible." Peter A Gall "BC's Legal System is Failing to Serve the Public Interest" Vancouver Sun, October 9, 2025. I disagree with some of Mr Gall’s other views and conclusions, but it is nonetheless astounding all on its own that Counsel of such standing would openly pronounce the way legal regulation occurs in British Columbia as effectively moribund. It is not little old’ me, I can say, it is King’s Counsel Peter Gall. If the LSBC restorationist thugs torture me and shove bamboo up my nails, I’ll shout, ‘it wasn’t me, sire, it was Peter Gall KC!’
The rejoinder that the LSBC as it presently exists is ‘democratic,’ and that no reform ought to take place because it might upset the precious ‘democracy’ of the LSBC, is risible. The LSBC is at times led by its membership in the most general and diffuse sense, but in point of fact it gets led alternately by an extremely bureaucratic, terse and alegal staff, and a few Olympian Bencher Gods who descend to attend to the affairs of mere mortals, including law, basically never. When the membership passes a motion which the Benchers or staff don’t feel or imagine to be feasible or worth pursuing, they just don’t, as they haven’t with the member resolutions on Articling Student protections passed at the last Law Society AGM. In this respect, some in the profession speak about shepherding the LSBC as though it were an incredibly unwieldy tanker, being pulled gradually and precariously by tiny ropes towards purpose. And, if that is the case, that is not a good institution. Really, consider, an institution which constantly has to be apologized for in its incoherence, inability, delay, and irrational social hierarchy, as in, ‘oh, it doesn’t mean it, it’s just an impossibly incoherent 155 year old institution, it just needs to be coaxed,’ is not a good institution. It is insane that this institution, of this importance, has been trivialized to the point where complete incapacity is habitually normalized and hand-waved away.
The legal community ought to be democratic, absolutely. Indeed, it ought indeed to have a greater and more expansive democratic mandate than it presently does, to both inform, educate, and empower the public to engage with legal life and what the legal system can do. To debate important legal and societal issues, but to do so from within the public sphere itself, and not as an in-camera thought-correction session. Legal professionals, as leaders of the community, ought to animate and suffuse the most important issues of the day, as they oftentimes labour at the most trivial. I am not convinced this is accomplished by the present yearly system of furious closed-doors debate, leading to ambiguous quasi-referendums on literally the most important and salient issues of the day, and the legal community’s orientation towards these questions. This system in fact mystifies and stupefies, both the profession itself, and certainly the public, rather than explicates and educates. On the one hand, who elected this tiny body of 14,000 licensees, alone and apparently apart from society, to arbitrate and determine questions of such significance? Is the public comfortable with this purported determination, this self-assertion (basically ex-nihilo, because the LSBC is so old) of jurisdiction to adjudicate such questions – to effectively exclude those who do not pledge fealty to the LSBC and its ideological horizons from participation in legal life? And, on the other hand, only a handful of those licensees actually participate in any given AGM. The question has become too much trying to convince these 14,000 licensees, and even among them a particular caste of networked cliques, rather than what ought to be the object and aim, convincing the public, and, more importantly, the Court. I know what the Court would have said to a number of ill-advised member resolutions over the past number of years, none of it favourable. And that is precisely the problem, that Law Society politics has taken on this para-legal existence, such that one can succeed at law, but not at LSBC.
Its detractors wail and cry for the “independence of the bar,” and the “rule of law.” A few things on this:
(1) The new Legal Professions Act is not the Draconian cartoon its detractors make of it. It is actually a legislative document, a piece of statutory engineering, which succeeds precisely because it pre-anticipates the values which would be marshalled against it otherwise, and weaves these into its basic substrate. I’ll give you an example: in the Trial Lawyers Association of BC suit they have specifically named Mr Kevin Westell as ‘thee’ Counsel supposedly and allegedly under threat. In these submissions he is billed as the everyman journeyman lawyer, and it is menaced that he might be put in the box, subjected to star chamber procedures, just for zealous advocacy! Can you imagine? Except Mr Westell isn’t just Joe-Q-Public everyman lawyer, he also happens to sit on the LSBC’s disciplinary committee, and has a direct interest in the legitimacy of a system in which there is no public law obligation to serve the interests of access to justice, no public law obligation to encourage and facilitate reconciliation, no particular need to remove barriers to practice, and not with any particularity for any disadvantaged groups, and no public law obligation to do so in a timely, transparent, proportionate way. In other words, Mr Westell has an interest in precisely the kind of unaccountable star chamber which the TLABC submissions project onto and decries about the new Legislation. What the new Legislation actually provides is something like a disinfectant for unaccountable, star-chamber processes on the part of the legal regulator, which would mark an unwanted change for the insiders of the LSBC. I think it is hypocritical to posture as this impartial practitioner whose Charter rights are menaced, when you are an active-duty Charter menacer, and I think the submissions of the Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia suffer from this defect. As for the LSBC’s submissions, they too misrepresent and mischaracterize the new legislation with shallow, falsely heroic mystifications, little more intellectually grounded than nursery rhymes. If this were Doug Ford or Danielle Smith going after the Law Society, I would almost certainly oppose it. But that’s not the case here, and what the BCNDP Government passed was a piece of legislation which is strong and defensible because it already knows and includes and statutorily enshrines all the important values which legal practitioners care about, and avails them of these provisions as a shield for them to wield actually against that legal regulator – to say, ‘here, you must allow me to challenge these authorities unmolested,’ as though it were an ancient writ. The new Legal Professions Act actually strengthens, enriches, and codifies all the liberties which legal practitioners could want to ward off against unacceptable state intrusion.
(2) The LSBC is not the knight in shining armour for the principles of the independence of the bar and the rule of law that it purports to be when under threat of legislative reform, it just isn’t. And it is dishonest and malign to pretend, for ulterior purposes, that it is that kind of institution. The LSBC protects its monopoly over the provision of legal services, that’s it. Everything it does, from onboarding legal developments in the Court, to directing and governing practice, is not structured and geared towards the promotion and preservation of zealous advocacy, but towards the promotion of the direct personal interests of licensees, and in particular its most affluent, well-established licensees. On the one hand it is easy to say, ‘oh, well it’s vital for the Law Society to keep the head-choppers and maniacs out of the legal profession,’ or the massive fraud embezzlers, the dupes of foreign money launderers, and the like, that’s fine, there is obviously a role for that. But the LSBC goes much farther than that. They are actual brain-washers, as ludicrous as 60s batman villains henchmen, like, ‘get in the brain-wash box.’ It is not enough for them to be qualified, it is necessary to swear fealty. It exists on the moral spectrum well above cult, and a few notches above mafia, but nonetheless well short of what one would expect when one hears the phrase ‘legal regulator.’ It is country-club, basically. A dressed up country-club, certainly, a nice country club, but nonetheless a country-club, and one which functions with as few preservative safeties, guardrails, processes as one would find in a gate-kept country-club. If the Law Society were the institution it pretends and purports to be under threat of its monopoly over the provision of legal services being taken away, this noble, shield on heart defender of zealous advocacy, then it would be worth preserving, obviously; except it isn’t, so it is not. And, this is the flip side of the coin of the new Legislation actually providing the kinds of protections its detractors complain of it lacking, because what the LSBC is trying to protect isn’t the independence of the bar, but rather its own private, institutional independence. That kind of ‘independence,’ is not good, actually.
(3) The legal profession, and society, would be immensely and enormously edified and bettered by a legal profession not afraid of and cowed by its legal regulator. Yes, legal professionals should have to uphold the highest standards of conduct, in keeping with their position in society. At the same time, the regulator ought not hold a monopoly over what constitutes the highest standards of conduct, because allowing them to do so results, invariably, in an unrealistic, unobtainable, patrician sophist ideal, against which those who are committed to actual causes in society are judged unfavourably. Those who actually contend, and attempt to intervene on behalf of the least well off in society, are the most heavily thought-policed by this Keystone-Cops squad of ‘professional’ brain-cleaners. As a sub-point, please do not misconstrue this as endorsement of vestigial and unenlightened anti-indigenous sentiment, to the extent that it is present within the BC legal community. Such opposition to the regulator is actually wrong and embarrassing, not because one ought not challenge the legal regulator, but because they are challenges to and contempt for the rulings of the Court on the subject. The LSBC is pretty barely and superficially a promoter and defender of Reconciliation and our Constitution, anyway. If it were such a thing it would have been issuing daily condemnations of opposition leader John Rustad calling BC Provincial Court Judges ‘Pedophile Lover.’ It didn’t.
Many access to justice problems are actually a matter of it being a risky and dangerous to attempt to help those in distress. The LSBC, by design, makes this actually as difficult, treacherous, and unpalatable for legal practitioners, and aspirant legal practitioners, as possible, precisely to drive up and inflate the cost of legal services, because this is what the tiny clique which directs the LSBC want. This has a direct and overwhelming negative effect on society. Society is paying for the LSBC’s self-defeating self-dealing, and the absence of a reliable supply of assistance with basic and oftentimes seemingly trivial legal services. The LSBC excludes those who don’t pledge fealty to this insular, sort of vaguely mason-like agreement, the greasy handshake. That is bad for the British Columbia Public, that is not the LSBC fulfilling its mandate to protect the Public, that is the LSBC harming the BC Public by knowingly depriving it of legal services by being an impossibly obtuse, self-dealing aristocratic garden-party. The rule of law would actually be strengthened by legal practitioners unafraid to say the wrong thing, or stand up for the wrong cause, lest they be subject to endless procedural persecution by their regulator, an otherwise completely unaccountable, quasi-public, quasi-private institution.
You can feel free to disagree, I know many do. I have found the opposition of the Canadian Bar Association to the new Legal Professions Act in particular disappointing and superficial. Law Societies have worked, and continue to work today, enormous injustice through procedural persecution and exclusion, historically on racial and ideological grounds – and I would contend continuing on class grounds. Many of the filtration mechanisms of the LSBC seem explicitly like class-based weeding out systems, rather than serving any rational form of preparation for legal practice. It is actually an incredibly progressive development for the independence of the bar, the rule of law, and the protection of rights in British Columbia and Canadian society, that a cold, bureaucratic, and risk-averse regulator be constrained by at least some basic guardrails in how it can treat legal practitioners, and aspirant legal practitioners, as are provided by the new Legal Professions Act.
For my part I will never be ashamed or sorry for endorsing and promoting the utility of this legislation, whether it becomes implemented or not, because my values aren’t determined by a greasy handshake, and I’d rather throw in with Immanuel Kant than the petty, aggrieved little surveillance, intimidation and retribution state they’ve got going on at LSBC HQ. I hope the Honourable Justice Skolrood sees right through the false heroism and chestbeating hysterics of this gaggle of affluent, insider persecutors. I sincerely hope he sees this entire exercise, where the most affluent, insider connected lawyers in British Columbia collude to inhibit and impede rational, reasonable, even enlightened, regulation of the legal profession, by an independent body conceived of for precisely this purpose, as ridiculous and grating to any of the British Columbian Public savvy enough to know it is going on.
We won’t know for months, maybe many months. Oh man, too many months. But until we do, and while arguments commence, just remember, the people who are ready to stride on into Court portraying themselves as the white hats, and the Government Man as the tyrannical bad guy black hats, it might just be that the biggest tyrants of all are LSBC insiders finally and justly being deprived of their arbitrary, irrational, archaic and fiat privilege. The access to justice crisis exists because these people, who subject legal aspirants and newly called lawyers to the same kind of Draconian unfairness which they menace and project onto the new legislation, consciously, knowingly, concertedly restrict the supply of possible provision of legal services, in order to inflate its pecuniary value. In doing so they derange both the BC legal profession, and BC public. I don’t think that’s consistent with the white hat cliche.
