Explain This Phrase to Me: « When Institutions Are Attacked, Who Protects Democracy? »

The Quebec Bar asks, in its rule-of-law campaign: “When institutions are attacked, who protects democracy?” The question is legitimate. But read closely, it contains a tension no one should let slide.

The Quebec Bar has launched its Quebec Summit for the Rule of Law, and one of the campaign images poses a striking question: “When institutions are attacked, who protects democracy?”

It’s a fine question. It deserves to be taken seriously — and turned over in every direction, because read closely, it holds a tension no one should let slide without pausing. Let’s begin with what is true.

I — What is true

Yes, the rule of law is genuinely under threat

It must be said plainly, without hedging: around the world, the rule of law is suffering real attacks. Judges are threatened. Court decisions are openly defied. Disinformation seeks to delegitimize justice itself. Those attacks are real, and they are serious. A society that stops respecting its courts and the primacy of law is heading down a dangerous path.

On that ground, the Summit’s goal is not only legitimate, it is necessary. Defending the idea that no one is above the law, that court rulings must be respected, that judicial institutions deserve protection against violence and contempt: yes, a thousand times yes. The problem, then, does not lie in the intention. It lies in a single word.

II — The word

“Attack” is an elastic word — and that’s where everything turns

Notice the choice of vocabulary. The campaign does not say “when institutions are questioned,” nor “when institutions must account for themselves.” It says “attacked.”

Yet “attack” and “criticism” are not synonyms. The first word evokes aggression, illegitimacy, chaos. The second describes a perfectly healthy democratic exercise. And between the two lies an enormous grey zone where a citizen who demands transparency, points out the failings of a syndic, documents a questionable decision, or denounces an abusive closed-door hearing can suddenly find themselves filed — through a slip of language — among those who “attack.”

This is not a question of intention. It is a question of effect. When you protect “institutions under attack” without distinguishing the illegitimate attack from legitimate criticism, you hand yourself — deliberately or not — a convenient shield against accountability.

III — The core

An institution is not democracy

This is the heart of the paradox. The slogan subtly implies that attacking an institution amounts to attacking democracy. That is a confusion worth naming.

An institution — a professional order, a syndic, an administrative tribunal — is not democracy. It is a structure created to serve it. It is a tool, not an end. Demanding that it be transparent, that it admit its mistakes, that it respect its own rules, is not an assault on democracy: it is precisely what democracy asks for.

And here the phrase reverses completely. Democracy does not merely permit the criticism of institutions. It depends on it. It survives only because that right exists. A system where institutions were placed above all suspicion, where documenting their errors became a threat to neutralize, would have a name — and it would not be democracy.

IV — The distinction

Three things that must never be confused

For the Summit’s phrase to hold up, three realities must be distinguished — realities the word “attack” tends to melt into one.

First, genuine attacks on the rule of law: threats, contempt for rulings, disinformation. Real. To be fought.

Second, criticism of how institutions are governed: asking questions, demanding accountability, calling for transparency. Healthy. Necessary. It is the immune system of a free society.

Third, the danger of confusing the two. Because the day legitimate criticism is treated as an attack, we no longer protect democracy: we protect the institution against democracy.

Conclusion

The real question

What weakens the rule of law is not citizens who ask hard questions. It is opacity. It is an institution’s inability to acknowledge its own failings. It is the corporatist reflex of wrapping oneself in a noble cause to avoid answering on the merits.

So yes, let us protect the rule of law. But let us remember what it truly means: it applies to everyone, including those who are its guardians. Democracy is not silence before institutions. It is the right to question them, the demand for transparency, and the refusal of any monopoly over speech and information.

The real question, then, may not be “who protects democracy when institutions are attacked?” It is rather: are we capable of telling an institution being criticized apart from a democracy being attacked? Because on that distinction depends, in fact, the whole of the rule of law.