Quebec Bar — Summit on the Rule of Law: the doctor, the patient and the pharmacist

The Quebec Bar is convening a summit to « protect the rule of law. » But can you diagnose a crisis of confidence without asking the uncomfortable question: what if part of that erosion comes from the institution itself?

On September 8 and 9, the Palais des congrès de Montréal will host the very first Quebec Summit on the Rule of Law. Roughly 750 people — from the business, legal, political, academic and community sectors — will gather under the theme « Uniting to protect our rule of law. » The event, hosted by Paul Arcand and Marie-Claude Barrette, will take place in the middle of the provincial election campaign. The timing is deliberate: bâtonnier Marcel-Olivier Nadeau said it plainly — the goal is to « get people talking about justice during the campaign. »

The intention is legitimate, and the starting premise is real. According to a Léger poll conducted for the Bar, 43% of Quebecers feel their confidence in public institutions has declined in recent years; barely 4% believe it has improved. Sixty-six percent fear political influence over judicial decisions. Barely six in ten believe the principles of the rule of law are well respected.

These figures matter. The problem is not that the conversation is happening. The problem is who is leading it, and what we choose not to talk about.

I — The diagnosis and the doctor

The diagnosis and the doctor

The Quebec Bar (Barreau du Québec) oversees more than 31,500 lawyers. Its legal mission comes down to three words it repeats often: protection of the public. It is in the name of that mission that it is holding a summit on citizens’ trust.

And here lies the logical difficulty. When an institution presents itself as the bulwark of the rule of law while also being the body that investigates its own members, judges its own peers and manages the fund that indemnifies them, it cannot be the doctor, the patient and the pharmacist all at once. A summit that examined citizens’ distrust without examining the professional order’s role in that distrust would not be a diagnosis. It would be a press release.

II — What hundreds of accounts document

What hundreds of accounts document

Since its creation, the citizen platform EnDroit.ca has received several hundred accounts from litigants. Reading through that body of material — complete case files, rendered decisions, closure letters from the Office of the Syndic — a pattern emerges, and it does not match the usual narrative.

For years we have been told that the crisis in justice is a crisis of delays, of costs, of access. All of that exists. But what these accounts describe is of a different nature. It is not merely that a decision was slow or expensive. It is that, when serious professional misconduct is reported, the very mechanism meant to protect the public shuts down — no hearing, no reasons, no follow-up.

III — Immunity or impunity?

Immunity or impunity?

The distinction is not just a figure of speech. Section 193 of the Professional Code grants syndics, professional orders and the Professions Tribunal a relative immunity: they cannot be sued for acts performed in good faith in the exercise of their functions. That immunity is not absolute. The Supreme Court of Canada said so in 2004 in Finney v. Barreau du Québec: it can be lifted in cases of gross carelessness or recklessness. In that very case, the Bar was faulted for having waited too long to act against a delinquent lawyer — and the country’s highest court held that it had not acted in good faith.

So much for the theory. In practice, the burden placed on the aggrieved citizen is crushing: good faith is presumed, and the vast majority of civil actions brought against syndics are dismissed at the preliminary stage, without a trial on the merits. Immunity designed to protect the independence of the function becomes, seen from below, a wall.

The internal recourse offers no more comfort. When the Office of the Syndic closes a file without filing a complaint, the citizen can turn to the Review Committee. But that committee is made up of three people — two lawyers and one public representative designated by the Office des professions; it holds no hearing, does not meet the complainant, and — it is written in black and white in the Bar’s own procedure — its opinion is not reasoned. You are told yes or no, without being told why.

The contrast with other jurisdictions is instructive. In Ontario, where self-regulation also exists, an independent commissioner can review files closed by the order’s investigation service. No model is perfect. But some, at least, accept that oversight should come from the outside.

IV — The butterfly effect of a norm

The butterfly effect of a norm

When a behaviour is never scrutinized, it eventually becomes the norm. That is the most troubling hypothesis emerging from the accounts received. When members come to understand that their conduct will not, in practice, be examined by the self-regulating syndic; that informal arrangements between lawyers are not the exception but the ordinary way of doing things; that a fault committed at the expense of a self-represented person will most often go unnoticed — then a lawyer can, in practice, become the judge in his own cause.

The most telling symptom is not the fault. It is the reaction to being called out. Several accounts describe professionals offended not at having done wrong, but simply that someone would dare point it out. To them, it is not a fault: it is how they learned to practise. Culture has replaced the rule. And as long as the culture goes unnamed, the Code of ethics remains a text that few people, at the bottom of the ladder, ever see genuinely applied.

V — The forced silence of the honest

The forced silence of the honest

It must be said clearly: the great majority of Quebec’s lawyers are competent and honest. And it is precisely from that milieu that some of the most worried voices come. Law students, young practitioners, seasoned lawyers write to the platform to share their unease. Many add the same sentence: they cannot say it openly.

The reason is structural. The order that could sanction their speech is also the one that controls their right to practise. Lawyers who have been suspended, others disbarred, have also contacted EnDroit.ca to offer their accounts of their interactions during syndic investigations. These accounts, which will be presented alongside the analysis of several decisions, are — the word is not too strong — chilling. They will be published with full respect for the presumption of innocence of the lawyers concerned and the presumption of good faith of the syndics, since only a court can settle these questions. But silence needs no court to do its damage.

VI — The Church reflex

The Church reflex

There is a tried-and-true way to manage an institutional crisis of confidence. The Church practised it for a long time: believing that the solution is to control the information rather than fix the problem at its source. Move the files around, close the investigations, protect the institution before the people. We know how that ends: confidence does not come back — it collapses faster.

And in the age of the internet, search engines and social networks, that reflex no longer even works. It becomes very hard to make a citizen believe this is an isolated case, a single « difficult » person, a vexatious litigant — when hundreds of files document the same pattern. The polls confirm it: the trust is gone, and a growing share of litigants represent themselves not out of financial necessity, but simply because they no longer believe in the legal profession.

Conclusion

The measure of a successful summit

If the answer is the latter, the exercise will not merely be useless. By looking away, it will keep increasing the number of victims. Protection of the public cannot be a formula repeated at a summit’s opening ceremony. It is measured by one thing alone: the number of decisions that aggrieved citizens understand. Today, that number is too low. And no panel, however well hosted, will raise it as long as the institution refuses to take its own place in the dock of the diagnosis.