Chris Selley: Canada’s law schools, law societies have incinerated their reputations

“Murderous rapist has no right to a McGill law degree,” was a very apropos National Post column headline the other day. I think everyone halfway normal can agree on that … though clearly there are some addlepated folks in admissions who thought it was a novel, kooky idea to admit Jeffrey George Ewart into McGill’s law school. He was convicted in 1984 of killing one woman and permanently injuring a 15-year-old girl, and who is assessed by the Parole Board to present a “moderate to high risk” of reoffending violently against women.

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And while some McGill students have united around demanding he vacate the premises, others signed a petition that he should be allowed to stay. The former won out, thanks goodness.

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One common refrain: “Relax, it’s not like he’d ever pass the bar with that record.” OK. But wouldn’t a young person who could pass the bar be a better candidate for a spot, by definition?

Canadian law schools are too good at embarrassing themselves. U of T finds itself caught up in a potential “fake Indigenous professor” controversy, with the target this time being Indigenous law professor Holmes Skinner. She describes herself as “Anishinaabe-Scandinavian” but concedes she has no documentation to support the Anishinaabe part. Skinner’s accuser is currently being sued for libel by four other women she accused of faking Indigenous status. It’s a mess.

That followed the complete blow-up with respect to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the utterly revered child advocate and law professor at UBC, who had no evidence at all to back her claim to Cree ancestry. (Her work on behalf of Indigenous communities over the years saw several First Nations actually support her. Again: Messy) Seems like there was a pretty simple way for universities to have avoided these messes: get documentation. But I’m not an educologist. And I suppose that approach would have been controversial as well. It still is!

In December 2023, the dean of the University of Manitoba’s law faculty disappeared abruptly from campus after being accused of misspending $500,000. UBC’s and especially Toronto Metropolitan University’s law faculties descended into unseemly backbiting, recriminations and vandalism after the October 7 pogrom in southern Israel. TMU students were horrified when some law firms said they wouldn’t hire anyone publicly endorsing Hamas’s atrocities, many of whom had no reasonable defence against antisemitism. (Actual consequences? Not cool!)

Further up the chain of authority over the legal profession, which the government has delegated to the law societies (who oversee the law schools), we have yet more … questionable behaviour, shall we say.

In March 2022, the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) deemed fit to practice one Saad Gaya, whose name may ring a bell as one of the Toronto 18 terrorism plot. He got a 20-year sentence for his involvement … in 2006. So, that was quick. Last year, the society’s CEO, Diana Miles, was discovered to have received an unauthorized 50 per cent pay hike. Oops! In 2022, the LSO signed off on a financial audit of a boutique law firm, when all it needed to do to find cartoonish malpractice was look at the bank statements.

Meantime, the plague of lawyers using AI to make cases and screwing it up has very much reached these shores, and instead of summary disbarment — which weirdos like me consider a no-brainer — penalties have maxed out around the six-month suspension mark.

These are the institutions training and ensuring professional standards among those who provide essential wise counsel to individuals, corporations and governments in crises. It’s not ideal that some future counsel get wise in places that can’t make reliably good institutional decisions.

Which brings us to Langley, B.C., and a certain university you rarely hear about except to the extent its evangelical Christian existence offends some people. Some jurists were terribly offended in 2014 when Trinity Western University had the temerity to plan to open a law school. At the time, students had to sign TWU’s “covenant,” which forbade sexual relations outside of a married heterosexual couple.

All the law societies save Ontario’s — which is a big problem for a prospective law school — agreed to accredit TWU graduates automatically. All Canadian law schools enjoy this privilege. Then B.C.’s law society changed its mind, guilted by shrieking harpies into a sort of social-justice panic. There’s simply no prospect of opening a law school whose grads would have to jump through additional hoops to practise in the country’s biggest and third-biggest jurisdictions. It costs enough, takes enough time, as it is.

Using utterly tortuous logic that was torn to shreds in a dissent, the Supreme Court declined to overturn the law societies’ decisions, calling them a reasonable exercise of the law societies’ discretion. (A government itself would be unlikely to get away with such rank anti-religious discrimination, though you never know.)

The societies’ official argument was that by expanding the overall pot of law-school spots, but making students sign the covenant, they were essentially closing a percentage of the total law-school spots to gay people. But really, the motivation was the belief that TWU’s campus is a neverending nightmare of homophobic abuse, which it isn’t, and that a religious school can’t teach social justice or human rights law, which is just idiotic. Social justice and religion, including evangelical Protestantism, mix like rye and ginger ale.

Anyway, it seems rather silly to worry about a prospective law school whose students are pretty much guaranteed to behave themselves — not having been raised by activist wolves — when McGill is giving away spots to a convicted murderer and sex offender, whose presence freaked out much of the student body. (More than 70 of them signed an open letter raising concerns alleging inappropriate behaviour toward female classmates.)

The TWU Law decision didn’t make a single thing better for a single person. It was also simply unjust. Never too late for British Columbia’s and Ontario’s benchers to reconsider.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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