A lawyer, a cop, and a priest walk into a bar...

In Quebec, one dogma persists despite the scandals: self-regulation. The idea that only members of a profession can judge their peers. A formula supposedly designed to guarantee technical expertise — that increasingly resembles a mutual protection pact.

For the ordinary citizen who wants to file a complaint against their lawyer, the reality is this: they must go to the Bureau du syndic — a branch of the Bar — which investigates Bar members and decides whether a disciplinary complaint should be filed before the Disciplinary Council. In other words, the referee wears the same jersey as the opponent.

No matter how you frame it, the backbone remains the same: at the heart of the system, lawyers still judge lawyers.

And there is more: since April 1, 2020, the same Board of Directors that governs lawyers also manages the insurance fund that decides whether their victims will be compensated. Three roles. One board. No recognized conflict of interest.

The Bar will say safeguards exist. That is true. But these nuances do not change the essential: the primary filtering remains largely internal to the profession. A system can be legal, structured, regulated — and still be deeply unhealthy from the standpoint of public trust.

What actually happens when a citizen dares to file a complaint

They submit their request. They receive an acknowledgement. They wait — months, sometimes over a year. A lawyer decides not to proceed. The citizen has 30 days to bring the matter before the Review Committee. That committee will not meet with them. It will hold no hearing. Its opinion will not be reasoned — the Bar confirms this in its own official texts.

And if that citizen decides to file a private complaint at their own expense — bearing the full burden of proof — and the lawyer is acquitted: the Bar reimburses the lawyer up to $10,000 in legal defence fees. The complainant receives nothing.

By protecting the honour of the profession, the Bar creates — as the Church once did — countless collateral victims: citizens left in financial ruin, lives shattered by professional misconduct that was never sanctioned, files closed with a few-line letter.

The Bar does not publish its complaint rejection rate. This information exists. It is not public. And the government body supposedly overseeing the Bar — the Office des professions du Québec — cannot intervene in individual files and has no direct sanctioning power over the Bar. The watchdog has no teeth. And the watchdog's watchdog simply does not exist.

Quebec itself recognized that something was wrong. For decades, when a police officer killed or seriously injured a civilian, another police force conducted the investigation. The 2012 student strike and its many documented cases of police brutality forced the debate. The government created the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes in 2016.

The very fact that the government had to create the BEI demonstrates something fundamental: it already admitted the old model was no longer defensible. That is more than the Barreau du Québec has ever been pressured to do.

But has the problem actually been solved? Since its creation, the BEI has opened nearly 450 independent investigations. Only two files have resulted in charges from the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions. Not a single one has led to the conviction of a police officer. Zero out of 450. — La Presse, September 27, 2025.

The word "independent" does not automatically erase ties of culture, career habits, reflexes, and professional networks. If a rule exists to prevent a former officer from investigating their previous force, it is precisely because the proximity problem is real. We are no longer in the crude formula of "police investigating police" — but we remain in a logic where the system continues to draw heavily from the same professional universe to examine its own failings.

The parallel with the Catholic Church is not a cheap rhetorical device. It is not about saying all institutions are the same or that all misconduct is equivalent. It is about recalling a very simple institutional lesson: when an organization is granted the privilege of handling accusations against its own members, it almost always ends up minimizing, suppressing, or reframing what should be fully exposed to the public.

The mechanism was identical: the institution filtered complaints, conducted its own investigations, defined its own standards of misconduct, and protected its reputation before its victims. When a family came forward with an account of abuse, they were met by a prelate behind a desk: "This is over. We don't speak of it again." That was not an accident. That was the system.

In the case of the Church, it took decades before anyone accepted the idea that a credible investigation had to be independent. When nine Quebec dioceses published the findings of an independent audit in 2022, that gesture was not proof that the internal system had been working. It was proof that no one trusted the internal system anymore.

That is exactly the point that must now be raised about the Bar. Victims of the Bar's disciplinary system have not yet had their public inquiry. Their stories are scattered. Their complaints, filed away. Their cases, closed with a few-line letter. The difference between the Church of yesterday and the Bar of today is not the structure. It is that the Church's scandal finally came to light. The Bar's has not yet.

The Bar will say it protects the public. Police will say they now have independent bodies. The Church, too, long insisted it handled its own affairs. We know how that turned out.

The real test is not what an institution says about itself. The real test is what oversight structure it agrees to accept. And that structure, today, does not pass. Disciplinary justice should never rest on faith. It should rest on independence that is visible, verifiable, and beyond reasonable dispute. Public trust depends not only on the existence of rules — it depends on the certainty that those rules are not administered first and foremost by those with a stake in protecting the institution's reputation.