Social Policy in Ontario

There’s no better distraction from a raging pandemic than a 50-minute chat about court decisions and jurisprudence with former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Beverley McLachlin. Trust us.

McLachlin’s first trip to “beautiful” Salt Spring Island was postponed by COVID-19, but in the meantime she zoomed in to talk to Canadian poet George Sipos about a range of fascinating topics in the latest video interview by the Salt Spring Forum. The talk was titled after her 2019 memoir Truth be Told: The Story of My Life and My Fight for Equality.

Speaking from rural Quebec, the justice answered questions about her role in increasing access to Canadian courts and rethinking how we deliver justice.

“The law gives people certain benefits, rights etcetera in every area of life, and people weren’t able to realize any of those because they couldn’t get access to the courts,” said the justice who retired in 2017. “And this is not right.”

Many people can’t afford legal challenges, and the legal system is perennially backlogged.

“Justice shouldn’t be some sort of abstract principle,” McLachlin said. “It shouldn’t be there just for the well-heeled and corporations and that kind of thing. It ought to be there for ordinary Canadians.”

The interview also includes conversations about how to think about progress, the role of the judiciary and the legal system in society, the politicization of the Supreme Court in the U.S. over several decades, and what McLachlin meant when she used the word “cultural genocide” in 2015 to describe Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/11/19/Law-According-Beverley-McLachlin/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=231120