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Compelled speech always feels totalitarian, even when the speech reflects values you believe

The least that could be said for the old Cold War McCarthyists was that they were sincere in their fear of communism. But in the current climate, one senses the law society is far more interested in signalling the enlightenment of its own staff. The whole exercise seems like a sort of condescending virtue-signalling kabuki. Yes, the vast majority of Ontario lawyers will follow the new edict—because the law society has the bully power to take away a lawyer’s ability to feed his or her family. But these lawyers will do so in a spirit of cynical detachment, copying out “model statements” from the Internet the same way casual Catholics mumble out Latin prayers.

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It’s tempting to write off the whole thing as just another exercise in political correctness. But it’s not. Since the days of the Renaissance guilds, the legal profession has always had a puffed up view of itself. It’s not just the robes, the wigs, and the gratuitous Latin jargon. It’s also the myth that lawyers comprise a moral vanguard within society, with sacred duties that extend beyond the daily humdrum of litigating divorces and drafting contracts.

I should specify that it’s the pompous atmospherics and conceits of the legal industry I dislike, not the lawyers themselves—who usually are no more and no less odious than all the rest of us.

For a few years during the late 1990s, I worked as a lawyer in New York—helping Park Avenue clients structure their corporate holdings and transactions. My firm’s clients were Christian, Jewish, Arab, black, white, gay, straight. Never once did any of them evince the slightest interest in my ideas about diversity or inclusion. I suspect they would not have cared a whit if I were a full-on bigot, provided I successfully diverted their domestic income streams into low-tax jurisdictions. They didn’t want to know about my inner life, nor I theirs. I was a fee-for-service worker plying my trade for a salary, no different from a cook, a tailor or a journalist.