The election had become a microcosm of the culture wars, with lawyers feuding over the role of the law society not just in professional regulation, but in its approach to equity, diversity and inclusion, and other issues that some lawyers felt were too “woke.”
And Levitt became a bencher when Julia Shin Doi was appointed to become a justice of the Superior Court of Ontario. That opened up a spot for a new bencher within Toronto, and since Levitt had the most votes, he received the position. “That doesn’t mean that everybody who ran the Good Governance slate is necessarily pro-woke, so we might have some support there that’s unheralded at this point,” said Levitt.There are hundreds of employees at the law society, said Levitt, and he believes this is the sort of staffing size that leads to an expansion of the law society’s mission.