By Eva van Loon
Colossal blunder.
That’s the kindest phrase that comes to mind about the City’s having a Victoria law firm send nasty letters to three citizens about alleged libels of Council.
It’s not simply the prospect of good classic defenses to defamation: truth, privilege, or fair comment.
It’s not the damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead attitude of those letters, which ignore the issue of whether municipalities can sue citizens with their own money.
It’s not even the prospect of enriching lawyers, at the expense of the defendants and citizens.
It’s much worse.
Six weeks after that wonderful community meeting over a sustainability charter-what I called a “phoenix conversation” for Powell River-when City reps declared Council prepared for a new public openness, this threatening act by Council confirms the worst fears and suspicions of many. It hints at a quasi-military mindset prepared to wage legal battle to preserve what the public perceives as allegiance to corporatism and outside interests, rather than till the soil of community fairly and squarely alongside the citizenry.
Those we’ll-sue-you-for-saying-that letters were an exertion of raw power. Mr. Brown’s apology, wrung from him as surely as if he’d been physically threatened, sends tears of humiliation down our public face. We are exposed as naked, weak, stripped of the civic power we had assumed to be our birthright. It doesn’t take much fear-mongering to destroy free speech.
Litigation seldom, if ever, serves as a tool for growth. It often serves as a poison-tipped weapon-or at the least, a klaxon herald of war. Litigation is not good for children and other living things and should be relegated to weapons of last resort, like nuclear bombs and depleted uranium. Virtually any settlement does less damage than a lawsuit.
Naturally few litigation lawyers can make a living without litigating. Once one realises that the true mark of success in a lawsuit is winning costs against the opposing party, a scorched-earth policy is the obvious choice. There is little incentive within any law firm to use the ploughshares of alternate dispute resolution rather than bomb the other side to pieces, cut off their heads with the sharpest legal sword available, and display the heads along the road to the mythical Palace of Justice.
I have known cases where innocent, wronged parties were so vigorously engaged in legal battle that the very grounds of their lives, literally and figuratively, were left blasted and poisoned forever.
Don’t worry about my being sued-as one of BC’s first holistic lawyers, I fall into the category of most-broke professionals. Holistic law, a real movement by real lawyers since 1989, is still small enough to be safely belittled. The invariable reply to my self-description as a holistic lawyer has been, “Holistic law? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
The public has long ago sensed the toxic soul of litigation. It’s no surprise that some research shows litigation lawyers to be some of the unhappiest people alive. It’s true enough. I saw it. I lived it. I see friends die doing it, soldiers to an empty god.
This suggests a solution to the dilemma. Why, pray tell, did Council use an outside law firm? Why is at least one of the defendants choosing an out-of-town law firm? Why are outsider legal-beagles collecting our money for messing with our town?
Because that’s the way it’s done, Stupid, the voices of legal wisdom sneer. All local lawyers would have conflicts. In small towns, everybody knows everybody. Besides, real experts are in the Big City.
No doubt. But consider the obverse of this truism. If local law firms had been consulted on these alleged libels, in today’s techno-wonder world its lawyers could just as readily have popped out an up-to-the-minute opinion as the “experts”. The Law Society of British Columbia itself holds to the fiction that any lawyer anywhere in the province is no better than the next. And you can run a Vancouver lawsuit from here, if you have to.
Conflicts or no, a local firm would have local expertise. A local lawyer might have said, “Sue Mr. Brown? Are you nuts? Can you imagine how that would play?”
So easily this tempest-in-a-teapot could have ended, with a meeting, a handshake and a glass of blackberry tea. We’d have our ploughshares back, and our town could once again wear its expression of friendly faith in sustainability, partnership, and open government.
As Tony Blair famously said, “Will someone save these people from themselves?”