THE ADVOCATE 657
VOL. 79 PART 5 SEPTEMBER 2021
Historically, the Advocate, which is a publication of the Vancouver Bar
Association, has been sustained by a subscription set by the VBA and collected
by the Law Society of British Columbia. The exact foundation of this
arrangement is lost to the mists of time, but it has been an arrangement of
practicality for over 50 years. The Law Society holds the most current list of
addresses for the ever-moving, ever-relocating members of the bar. It collects
the subscriptions and shares the ever-changing address list with the
Advocate six times per year. If there were ever complaints about this method
(and there were a few), we would deal with them. Under this system, Advocate
subscriptions are maintained for all, and the only things the editorial
team needs to worry about are producing the next issue and keeping the
subscription rate as low as possible (we kept it the same for close to 15
years).
More recently, however, the Law Society has moved away from the subscription
model and instead now views the Advocate as one of a number of
third-party organizations that must seek funding from the Law Society.
Within this model, the Advocate is in the same boat as the Courthouse
Libraries Society, the Lawyers Assistance Program, Pro Bono Initiatives,
CanLII and the Federation of Law Societies. We are one of six “external
organizations” vying for a slice of the membership fee.2
Two years ago, the Law Society decided that the Advocate’s 12-month contingency
reserve (saved up during the 1980s when interest rates were high)
was too large and that it should be reduced to a six-month reserve. We had
argued that we needed a 12-month reserve because if the Law Society ever
stopped collecting the subscription, we would need at least a year to figure
out how to preserve the magazine (the Advocate’s assistant editor, Ludmila
Herbst, Q.C., and I are full-time lawyers with busy litigation practices, and
in addition to producing a legal journal, fundraising is not something we do
or even have time for). We had zero luck with that argument, and the Law
Society reduced the amount it collected in 2019, forcing us to dip into our
reserve for the first time ever. However, it did commit—in writing—to
restoring full funding once the reserve reached a six-month level. That commitment
now appears to be in doubt.
At the start of our #advocatesuperfan campaign, one bencher took to
Twitter to comment on how the Advocate was coming to the Law Society due
to its “dwindling reserves”. This was frustrating given that the reserve was
“dwindled” by the Law Society, which kept your fees the same in 2019 but
allocated less money to the Advocate. Now that our reserve is all of four and
a half months of expenses, news from within the Law Society is that support
from the Law Society may be coming to an end.