Can Law Society truly reduce racism?

Re Law Society is dedicated to countering

systemic racism, Opinion, Nov. 22 I fully agree that racism must have no part of our Canadian society but I disagree that questionable statistics be used to make the argument.

Law Society president Paul Schabas opposes racism by writing that “only 18.6 per cent of lawyers identified as racialized, compared to 26 per cent of the Ontario population.”

It is ridiculous that every profession or trade must numerically reflect the makeup of our society.

What if a higher proportion of professionally oriented, racialized persons, being more altruistic or selfless than others, prefer to ignore the artificial world of the law and instead want to serve society by being nurses, dentists, GPs, surgeons or teachers?

Or what if they want to enter a profession that requires a higher level of mental ability than lawyers, such as engineers, physicists, mathematicians or computer software or hardware designers? Jacques Konig, Toronto What is the evidence that requiring lawyers and paralegals to create the Law Society-desired individual equity “statement of principles“would actually achieve anything to reduce any problems that any lawyer or paralegal might be facing from any racism in the Ontario legal profession?

It’s really too bad that the Law Society’s benchers (directors) have come up with this well-meaning but misguided requirement.

Unless the benchers pull back on this quickly, there will be ongoing uproar in the Ontario legal profession over this requirement for the foreseeable future (until the requirement is knocked out by the courts, or the 2019 bencher elections produce a new set of benchers), instead of early united redoubled efforts to take actually useful action to continue eliminating the residual racism that no doubt still lurks in the profession. John F. Fagan, barrister and solicitor, Willowdale