Imagine that you are a provincial Attorney General. The Cabinet, for whatever reason, has lost confidence in the provincial law society. The Premier asks you for options to decrease its effective authority in the self-regulation of the legal profession. She dares you to think big but also challenges you find a subtle way to achieve this goal.
Your first – and admittedly unimaginative – instinct is to change the composition of the governing board of the law society. You consider abolishing the law society entirely and replacing it with a new body in which elected lawyers will not form the majority of the board. You could even assert that this change is necessary for important objectives that make the legislation as a package incredibly difficult to oppose – say, access to justice, or indigenous representation. However, you have a nagging suspicion that this approach would be problematic. Legally, it would be vulnerable to a court challenge around the independence of the bar; politically, it could look like a frontal attack on self-regulation. You then consider keeping he law society but changing the composition of its board, currently dominated by lawyers elected by the profession, with a law society board dominated by provincial appointees. You realize, however, that this approach might also be too blatant, even for your government. In the hope of side-stepping such controversy, you seek a more nuanced option.
You decide to focus more narrowly on professional discipline. You briefly consider requiring the law society to discipline lawyers by application in superior court. Unfortunately, that too would seem like a frontal attack on self-regulation. If only you could maintain the formal disciplinary power and mechanisms of the law society but weaken the legal impact of any such proceedings to asymptotically approach meaninglessness….
At first you are flummoxed. But then you dig deeper and invoke, of all things, administrative law. First, you abolish the internal appeal mechanism within the law society and provide an appeal as of right to the court of superior jurisdiction. Few of the counterpart law societies in other provinces and territories have such an internal appeal mechanism, and so this change in itself may not be too controversial. Indeed, this change still leaves the law society power over an initial disciplinary determination.
Something is nonetheless missing. The court on that appeal will defer to the disciplinary panel on both questions of fact and questions of mixed fact and law. There may be some risk that the court may intuitively and implicitly defer to the disciplinary panel’s interpretation of its home statute. In a stroke of brilliance, you set the standard of review to correctness. This one word does not interfere with the law society disciplinary process itself, which still proceeds and becomes a matter of public record. The outcome of the disciplinary process, however, is now really besides the point. On appeal, the court substitutes its decision for the decision of the disciplinary panel of the law society. While the law society still sets the rules of professional conduct, their application and interpretation become remarkably far from final. Indeed, this deft step is the closest the legislature can realistically come to abolishing hearing committees and law society disciplinary jurisdiction. Your work here is done. And because the foundation of the whole enterprise is a one-word matter of administrative law, it should attract little if any attention. Even if readers and commentators notice it, it will seem mundane if not banal.
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Clearly I should not write fables or homilies. Indeed, at some level I might even be a little jealous: I am fairly confident that this administrative-law approach would never have occurred to me.
My overly belaboured point is that these kinds of legislative provisions are among the ones that a canny lawyer would propose to achieve the express goal of weakening the self-regulatory powers of a law society. While this may not necessarily be the goal behind this kind of legislation, such legislation would look identical or remarkably similar if that had been the goal.
There is of course no way of knowing the true motivation for recent legislation on the self-regulation of the legal profession. Indeed, in all fairness I assume that the motivations are not nefarious. I also assume that all provincial Attorneys General, past current and future, acknowledge and fulfill their professional obligation to encourage public respect for the administration of justice.[1] Indeed, they might even believe that degrading self-regulation will improve the administration of justice. Nonetheless, regardless of motivation, the legislatures of both British Columbia and Alberta have fundamentally undercut the self-regulation of the legal profession.
Lately there has been a fair bit of attention to Canadian Premiers attacking the judiciary and judicial independence.[2] And rightly so; indeed, I wish there was more such attention – although in my view the shortcomings of those Premiers are less concerning than the shortcomings of their Attorneys General. Regardless, these attacks pose a serious danger to public confidence in the administration of justice.
There has been less attention, however, to Canadian politicians weakening law societies as independent regulators of the legal profession. These steps also have the potential to undermine public confidence in the administration of justice, as well as public confidence in the legal profession itself.
The most striking example of these efforts is British Columbia’s 2024 Legal Professions Act, which would abolish the provincial Law Society in favour of a new regulator for lawyers, notaries, and a new category of regulated paralegals.[3]
But a slightly more subtle – and perhaps even more concerning – example comes from a pair of recent statutes in Alberta: the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act and the more blandly titled Justice Statutes Amendment Act.[4] These statutes do many things and could be the subject of many columns, but here I focus on these changes to law society governance and discipline. The Justice Statutes Amendment Act abolishes the internal appeal to the benchers of the law society and sets the standard of review to correctness for the appeal to the Court of King’s Bench.[5]
While maintaining respect for the administration of justice primarily involves courts and judges, it also relates to public trust in the legal profession and in the law society as its self-regulator. Like attacks on judges, attacks on the law society tend to threaten public confidence in the administration of justice. Indeed, if we invoke David Dyzenhaus’s classic formulation of “deference as respect”,[6] by proposing and making these changes the governments and legislatures of these provinces are showing remarkably little respect to the law societies and their work.
Yes, the law society wields only the power delegated by the legislature in statute. Yes, the legislature remains free to amend that statute and revisit or reshape that delegation. Nonetheless, these changes are problematic in themselves and as future precedents. I am not arguing that these three statutes foretell the downfall of self-regulation of the legal profession across Canada. But the de-sensitization to incursions on self-regulation is worrisome.
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[1] Federation of Law Societies of Canada, Model Code of Professional Conduct (Ottawa: FLSC, 2009, last amended April 2024) [FLSC Mode Code], r 5.6-1, online: <https://flsc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024-Model-Code-of-Professional-Conduct.pdf>: “A lawyer must encourage public respect for and try to improve the administration of justice.”
[2] Editorial, “Premiers need to discover the virtue of silence” The Globe and Mail (22 December 2025), online: <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-premiers-need-to-discover-the-virtue-of-silence/>.
[3] Legal Professions Act, SBC 2024, c 26 [“Bill 21”].
[4] Regulated Professions Neutrality Act, SA 2025, c R-13.3 [“Bill 13”]; Justice Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, SA 2025, c 22 [“Bill 14”]
[5] Legal Profession Act, RSA 2000, c L-8, s 75(3) [standard of review], as amended by Bill 14, supra note 4, s 6(15).
[6] See e.g. David Dyzenhaus, “Dignity in Administrative Law: Judicial Deference in a Culture of Justification” (2012) 17:1 Rev Const Stud 87.
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