The Law Society of B.C. has suspended a Surrey lawyer for three weeks, for professional misconduct.
Thomas Harding’s suspension is to commence no later than Aug. 13 and is related to an incident on June 26, 2012 at a Unitow lot which he visited as his mother-in-law’s lawyer to photograph damage to her car. According to a disciplinary hearing document, Harding told a Surrey RCMP non-emergency line dispatcher, after a Unitow employee refused him access to the lot, “…they say they won’t let me in and…I told the lady at the switchboard that I need someone there to talk to these idiots because otherwise, you’ll have to send a police officer, probably to arrest me because I’m going to get a crowbar and smash up the place.”
A hearing panel on June 27, 2014 found the crowbar comment to be an “intemperate overstatement” not made as a threat and decided Harding had not committed professional misconduct but a review board found otherwise, reasoning the lawyer “knew full well what the impact of his words would be” and likened it to yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre when there’s no fire.
“The respondent knew full well that raising the possibility of violence, even if he did not actually intend any violence, would cause the police to attend,” the review board found. “This is wrong, and it is difficult to see how this is not professional misconduct.”
Harding then took the matter to the Court of Appeal, which dismissed his appeal.
The Law Society sought a suspension of six weeks, submitted that this was the fifth time Harding “received or faced discipline for incivility.” It acknowledged Harding presented a letter of apology to the society on May 15, 2013 but found it “falls short.”
He had testified before the hearing panel that he made the comments he did to the police dispatcher out of frustration.
“My impression was I was being gamed by the Unitow people,” he testified. “Then I phoned the dispatch. And this is my second call to the RCMP. So that second call I’m talking to the dispatcher, and I felt like she wasn’t listening, and I was concerned that with the allocation of police resources nobody would ever come, and I wanted to let the dispatcher know how frustrated I was, and that’s all I meant.”
Harding has been ordered to commence his three-week suspension within five months of the March 13, 2018 disciplinary decision and pay $4,744.79 for the sanction hearing before June 30.