Pro Se Association of Canada

BC Bill 21 and the Sleazebag Society

When the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982, section 24 granted anyone—including non-citizens—the right to challenge the constitutional validity of statutes in Canada and to seek remedies for violations of Charter rights. These remedies are primarily designed to address legal injuries, meaning situations in which a legal right has been infringed without causing physical harm or measurable financial loss. For example, if a citizen is unlawfully denied the right to vote but their preferred candidate wins the election anyway, a legal injury has occurred even though no tangible damage can be shown.

However, the majority of unforeseeable incidents that affect people in their daily lives do not fall neatly into the category of mere legal injury. Instead, they almost always involve concrete physical harm or financial loss, such as injuries and property damage resulting from a car accident. These situations belong to the realm of private tort law, where individuals’ rights are directly violated by the actions—or omissions—of other private actors.

The desire for revenge is deeply embedded in human nature and operates as an instinctive response to wrongdoing. When an individual is harmed, the impulse to retaliate against the wrongdoer arises almost automatically. In modern civil societies, however, this instinct is deliberately restrained and redirected. Instead of seeking personal vengeance, individuals turn to institutional mechanisms such as the police and the courts to pursue civil actions against those who violate their inherent rights and to obtain punishment that is fair and appropriate.

This impulse toward retribution is not a modern invention; it has characterized human civilizations for millennia, dating back to the earliest social groups and persisting since modern humans first appeared on Earth. What distinguishes contemporary societies is not the absence of this instinct, but the attempt to civilize it by transferring the administration of justice from private hands to public institutions, thereby maintaining social order while curbing extreme retaliation.

Many private torts possess an undeniable public dimension and can indirectly affect the rights of far more individuals than the immediate parties to a case. Claims involving police misconduct, racism, or institutional abuse are clear examples: although a single individual may initiate the lawsuit, the outcome can produce broader systemic consequences. Such outcomes may be positive and rights-enhancing—for instance, successfully challenging institutional abuse and bringing it to an end. However, they may also be negative and harmful, particularly when a case is poorly handled and the final decision ends up entrenching or even exacerbating the very abuse it sought to challenge.

Crucially, all of this can occur through the actions of a single litigant, without the need to plead public-interest standing. In theory, lawyers—who present themselves as possessing specialized knowledge, skill, and professional judgment—ought to take the lead in prosecuting claims where the public interest is clearly at stake. In practice, however, this ideal frequently collapses.

Whenever there is a convergence between a public issue affecting a group of individuals and an attempt by those individuals to seek legal protection, the response from those claiming such “special knowledge,” rigor, and professional responsibility is often silence or inaction. Yet, paradoxically, when the public attempts to act on its own, a tax-funded private club suddenly comes to the surface to intervene—not to advance justice, but to protect its own institutional interests, absurd grandiose, and unnecessarily written down exclusive privileges. That club is the Law Society (or Bar Association), which too often positions itself as the gatekeeper of public justice while systematically failing to serve the public itself.

The Law Society’s stance toward litigation advanced by self-represented litigants—who often raise genuine and substantial public-interest issues—is not one of support, but of systematic obstruction. Rather than facilitating access to justice, its conduct frequently amounts to sabotage by any means available to them. These efforts are aimed at preserving a delusion-based position for both the institution and its members—a position they cannot earn through demonstrable public service or merit, but instead through the protection of hollow statutory frameworks, such as legal profession acts.

This position has been maintained not through accountability or contribution, but through structural privilege and, too often, psychological intimidation. Former members of the profession, now occupying judicial roles, routinely mistreat and marginalize non-lawyers, reinforcing professional exclusivity for their own benefit rather than in service of natural justice. The result is a system that disfavors self-represented litigants not because their claims lack merit, but because they threaten the profession’s carefully guarded monopoly.

In this sense, law societies function as parasitical entities: they draw sustenance from public resources, enjoy public funding and deference, yet provide little or no meaningful contribution in return. Worse still, their interventions often produce long-term harm by suppressing legitimate public-interest litigation, entrenching institutional abuse, and normalizing exclusion under the guise of professionalism and regulation.

On May 16, 2024, the NDP government of the Province of British Columbia introduced a new Legal Professions Act (Bill 21), which effectively outlaws the inherent right to self-representation. Although the Act was publicly framed as a mere administrative reform—combining the regulation of lawyers and notaries public into a single regulatory body—its true purpose appears far more troubling.

Section 35 of the Act defines the “practice of law” as taking legal action for the benefit of another person, or at the request of another person. This formulation raises an obvious and fundamental question: what about acting for one’s own benefit? If someone damages my property and I wish to sue them, must I now identify “another person” to benefit from my claim? Or am I expected to recruit my granny, train her, and have her initiate legal proceedings at my request and for my benefit? The absurdity is self-evident. How can a legal system plausibly claim to outlaw self-representation?

Yet this is only the beginning of the Act’s incoherence. Section 37 goes further by prohibiting the practice of law in British Columbia by anyone who does not hold a “licence” (whatever that even is) sold by the government. Under this scheme, even if my granny were willing to bring a lawsuit on my behalf, she would first need to purchase a government-issued “licence.” This raises a far more serious issue than mere bureaucratic overreach: access to justice is transformed from a fundamental right into a privilege contingent on purchasing a piece of paper from the government.

When combined with the already prohibitive costs of litigation in British Columbia—court filing fees, service costs, Adobe subscriptions for document formatting—the system becomes openly exclusionary. Nowhere does the Act clearly explain on what basis, or according to what criteria, such licences will be issued. Nor does it explain what legal responsibility, or accountability such a licence actually confers. One is left to wonder whether this licensing regime serves any real purpose beyond extracting money from the public—much like ICBC schemes that monetize compulsion while offering little in return.

Even more alarming is the constitutional confusion embedded in the Act. Section 38 states that the prohibition on practising law without a licence (section 37) does not apply where such practice is authorized by an enactment of Canada [the Charter] or an enactment of British Columbia—the very same Act. This circular logic sends the reader back to section 35, where legal practice is permitted without any licensing requirement at all. The result is just another stupid statutory loop that renders the law internally inconsistent and practically unintelligible.

If the reader is not already sufficiently disoriented, section 40 delivers the final blow: it reserves the title of “lawyer” exclusively for “lawyers.” The implication is stark. Even if an individual were to waste money obtaining a government-issued good-for-nothing licence, that licence would still not entitle them to a trial unless a “lawyer” is involved. In effect, the licence is a legal nullity—incapable of granting standing or access to a trial.

This exclusionary ideology is not new. It traces back to a centuries-old conception of legal monopoly, often attributed to Edward Coke of damn memory in the early 1600s—a framework that elevated professional gatekeeping over substantive justice. Bill 21 does not modernize the legal profession; it entrenches an archaic power structure that prioritizes institutional control over access to justice, while disguising that control behind regulatory jargon and legislative smoke and mirrors.

Just a few hours after the government introduced the bill, the Law Society of British Columbia was first through the doors of the court registry, filing a 21-page, 96-paragraph Notice of Civil Claim challenging the Act on the grounds that it jeopardizes the independence of the bar (whatever that means) and is therefore unconstitutional.

Leaving aside the question of how any rational observer is expected to believe that an organization which claims it was neither consulted on the legislation nor aware of its contents—an Act comprising more than 300 sections, no less—somehow managed to read, analyze it, and draft a 21-page absolute BS overnight, the substance of the Law Society’s claim is even more vacuous than the Act it purports to challenge.

The 96 paragraphs ultimately reduce to a handful of tired buzzwords and recycled anxieties: the archaic of bench president, team, 14,000, mental health attack, Cullen, and similar empty abstractions. Reading the document offers no legal insight, no principled constitutional analysis, and no meaningful engagement with the text of the legislation itself. It is, quite simply, a total waste of time—long on volume, short on substance, and entirely devoid of intellect, like a trash out of the trash bin.

At no point in its so-called Notice of Challenge does the Law Society address the most serious issues raised by the Act—namely, the sale of licences and the deliberate confusion surrounding what appears to be the outlawing of self-representation. But why should it care? Why should it even give a crap to public interest?

Instead, what the Law Society chose to do was initiate litigation that serves as an open invitation to siphon even more tax dollars from public resources through an obviously devoid, vague, and vexatious “legal challenge.” The objective is transparent: to funnel public money into the pockets of its members while signaling a middle finger for the very public it claims to protect. There is no principled constitutional concern here, no genuine effort to defend access to justice—only institutional self-preservation dressed up as public advocacy. Nothing about it rises above the level of a total sleazebag maneuver.

The litigation was so blatantly an exercise in stealing public money that even some members of it publicly objected, calling on the Law Society to abandon the case (See: B.C.’s legal system is failing to serve the public interest by Peter A. Gall). They warned—correctly—that the matter could unnecessarily and unjustifiably escalate through the Court of Appeal and ultimately to the Supreme Court of Canada, compounding the financial harm by dragging the public into yet another round of expensive, needless litigation. In short, this was not a defense of constitutional principle, but a textbook example of how public funds are squandered under the guise of institutional righteousness.

The Law Society’s so-called constitutional challenge nevertheless proceeded to a summary trial—perhaps because they did not have the reserved status. During that summary process, the Law Society had the audacity to portray itself as a “ship in the night,” as if no one could see it rushing to the court registry just hours after the bill was introduced to file a 21-page, 96-paragraph pile of nonsense, middle finger to the tax-payers. One would have to be willfully naive to believe that this filing appeared out of thin air or was the product of anything other than premeditated mockery of the public.

This kind of litigation serves no legitimate legal purpose. Its sole function is to siphon public resources under the respectable cover of legal fees. The pattern is obvious, the motive transparent, and the outcome predictable, a win-win game for the thieves. The Law Society has effectively converted the institution of the court into a money-laundering mechanism for its members, where taxpayer funds are recycled into “professional” pockets through pointless, self-serving proceedings.

We will continue to expose the Law Society, its members, and their schemes for what they are: organized efforts to extract money from the public treasury under the guise of constitutional concern, while offering nothing of value in return to the public they assert to serve.