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(I have heard from one paralegal who also claims the LSO attempted to intimidate him by sending two investigators to his office, with a recorder, demanding he verbally enter into an undertaking to refrain from criticizing the LSO on social media. That was back in 2017, when the resistance to the SOP was just beginning. He didn’t respond to an email Thursday.)

In any case, the SOP is in my eyes a form of compelled expression, and those who ran against it were the StopSOP slate.

There were 22 and all 22 were elected to Convocation (which is what the LSO calls its monthly board meetings) when the votes were tallied this week.

The election was divided, as it always is, into candidates from Toronto and candidates from outside the city. The top 20 vote-getters in each category were elected as benchers.

When I say StopSOP’s victory was resounding, it was.

The SOP is in my eyes a form of compelled expression

In the outside Toronto category, seven of the top vote-getters were members of the StopSOP slate.

In Toronto, the top 10 vote-getters were all from StopSOP.

The two candidates who got the most votes were, in Toronto, Murray Klippenstein, and outside it, Ryan Alford, a law professor at Lakehead University.

It just happens that these two men were among the outspoken leaders of StopSOP and the two who have launched a constitutional challenge to the new Law Society rules — they, and the Canadian Constitution Foundation that supports them, say the SOP abridges the Charter rights of freedom of speech, thought and conscience.