Advocating for a Worthy and Honourable Profession
by Kenneth Walton

I thank you for the privilege of leading you over the coming 12 months. I will do my best to promote the interests of our worthy and honourable profession.

Speaking of the latter, lawyers have taken something of a beating over the past few months by members of the fifth estate. “Lawyers are Rats” screamed the cover story on a national magazine. While having my cheese, I read the lead article. What I found was, of course, gross distortion. Our profession was vilified by a few sensationalist stories which were said to be a proxy for lawyers as a whole. It was like someone taking the very few successful medical malpractice suits as representative of the standard of medical practice generally.

In the “West Wing,” fictional White House Communications Director, Toby Ziegler advised fellow staffer Josh Lyman never to get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. While that was no doubt wise advice, the result is that the press has the freedom to distort with little consequence.

Tragic stories like the defamation of a good and honest Deputy Attorney General (Vogel v. CBC (1982), 35 B.C.L.R.7 – see especially paragraphs 260, 262, 284 and 285) illustrate what an enormous chore it is to correct a wrong made by a media giant.

Sometimes pitifully poor reporting is an advantage to lawyers. Years ago my client was unhappy with a recently activated ball diamond 60 feet from his apartment building. Beer leaguers preferred to urinate in his parking garage and thought nothing of damaging his windows or his tenants’ cars with foul balls. A local reporter wrote that my client’s suit had failed, when in fact it had been adjourned to add a party. That night the celebrating beer leaguers attended the diamond and in a drunken huff treated the tenants to a barrage of bottles and foul language. When court resumed with affidavit material exhibiting the inaccurate article and a dozen letters from offended tenants, counsel for the municipal commission agreed that the diamond would be removed to its former location.

I’d like to say that this particular example of inept journalism is an exception to the rule. Sadly, in my experience, more often than not, it is the norm.

I could go on about Neanderthalic pieces written about our judges being soft on crime. I could write about ill informed media types who criticize a judge’s ruling that our border guards do not dwell in a Charter free zone. I could rage on about open mouth radio where the object seems to be to stir listeners into a frenzy by spouting outrageous distortions on legal issues and then asking listeners to comment.

In the end, it is the duty of each and every one of us to write letters to the editor, or otherwise inform our fellow citizens that our judges generally do a good job and the application of this or that law is not as is distorted by the press.

We can do little about journalists who are inaccurate. The best that we can hope for ourselves is to provide our fellow citizens with timely, correct information, so that they will not be misled into believing that Canada’s very good rule of law is poor.

Keep up the good work. I wish you success in your professional and personal endeavours.

This article was published in the October 2007 issue of BarTalk. © 2007 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.