656 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 5 SEPTEMBER 2021
It has been made clear to us that there are some within the Law Society
who want to either reduce or stop funding of the Advocate altogether. We’ve
been cautioned that the fate of the Advocate will be considered by the Law
Society in the next couple of months. Apparently “no one under 40 reads
the Advocate” and “it is outdated and irrelevant.” We have made extensive
written and oral submissions to the Law Society for several years on every
issue they have ever raised with us; however, we are now warned that the
anti-Advocate sentiment brewing within the halls of the benchers at the Law
Society may be the dominant view. If this is so, and if any are really wondering
why there are so many Advocate “superfans” out there, I thought that,
instead of me positing a bunch of self-aggrandizing theories, I had better
start asking around.
After sending a few e-mails and making a few posts on social media, I
quickly received (over a period of just two days) most of the images that
appear on this month’s cover. Having saved the photos into a folder on my
phone, I was later taken aback when, on opening the folder, a wide variety
of people greeted me in a single collage. Before me was an array of students,
clerks, associates, partners, librarians and even retired members all sending
heartfelt statements about how important the Advocate has been and continues
to be to them.1 There was no one ethnicity, no particular age demographic,
no specific gender, no single region of the province—indeed, there
were submissions from other provinces and even some from overseas! Here
was, in just a few photographs, a slice of British Columbia’s legal profession
and how it currently stands: students poised to take on the world, law clerks
squirreled away in libraries, in-house counsel, seasoned litigators, sole practitioners,
big-firm partners and even those who have now handed the reins
over to others. It was a powerful moment.
The very first handful of submissions also revealed something profound
that I had never really considered. Rather than people saying things like “I
love Bench and Bar” or “Entre Nous is always a good read” or words to that
effect (although they did say those things), one concept kept cropping up:
community. The Advocate, it seems, is central to people feeling connected
to something beyond their own practice—a collegial bar of professionals.
Some people proudly displayed their entire collection of Advocates they
have maintained on their shelves since being called to the bar. Others held
aloft the latest issue on their iPads (as nearby as Victoria and as far away as
The Hague). Clearly this thing we call the Advocate resonates with (and
indeed is a foundational force within) the community of British Columbian
lawyers. The other revealing aspect of the responses was that a lot of people
under 40 do read it, and it is indeed exceedingly relevant to them.