Where were you born, and when did you move to Toronto?
I was born in St. John, New Brunswick, and we moved to Toronto when I was very young. We were part of the maritime exodus to look for work. My dad moved my family here for a job.
How does the Toronto of today differ from the Toronto you arrived to?
I grew up in the suburbs, so it felt very quiet. And downtown, where I live now, is not like that. I went to Catholic schools until I finished high school, then St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, so this is a very different environment.
What first caught your interest at the University of Toronto?
Urban sociology and urban geography, and when I finished my undergraduate degree, I went on to law school. I was going to continue with urban planning, but I noticed that when I went to conferences, the people who got listened to, whether or not they seemed to know anything about planning, were the lawyers. So I thought: that’s interesting; I could be one of those.
What made you realize your career might not be in planning after all?
Everybody does the same first-year program at the University of Toronto, but I got to second year and took my first land-use planning course and realized, this is not for me. It wasn’t interesting in the way that I thought that it would be. By the time I graduated, I thought I would be a union-side labour lawyer. I graduated in 1978, when there was both a recession and high interest rates, so those firms were not hiring. It’s hard to imagine it in today’s terms, but people starting out in their own law practices, they were paying 20% interest. I got called to the bar in 1980, and I got a job at a civil litigation firm, Shibley Righton and McCutcheon . As it turned out, that firm worked in the area of health law, amongst other things, but that was how I first got exposed to it, and that really captured my interest.
What was it like to be a woman in in law school, when you started?
When I went to law school, from 1975-1978, we were just beginning to have substantial numbers of women in law school. There weren’t yet substantial numbers of women in practice. So to a certain extent, even in law school, people were still trying to figure out what to do with us, or how to take account of us. It was a time where so many things were starting; it was new to not write an exam under your own name. For the first year of that, they gave all the girls names of flowers, and all the boys names of trees. Everyone was trying to do their best!
How was the transition from school into practice?
By the time we got out of law school, women in law was a very new thing. I was doing litigation, so there were even fewer there. It was something that the firms had to figure out how to react to. I was the first female lawyer at my firm, in 1980. My firm was rather small – maybe 20 lawyers. I hadn’t articled there. I was new to them and they were new to me, so with great goodwill they were trying to make me feel part of the firm. Really nice people, but at the same time, people didn’t know what to make of me!
How did your new colleagues welcome you to the firm?
I remember going out to lunch with some lovely guys very early in my career. They talked about sports the whole time; they just talked about what they normally talked about. I knew I had to keep up, but the problem was, I didn’t even know what sport they were talking about! I wasn’t going to let that on though, for fear of seeming out to lunch! I went through that entire meal, I thought, faking it pretty well, but I had no idea what game we were even talking about! Turns out it was basketball. They really wanted to include me, but there was a lot of catching up to do, on both sides!
How did you figure out how to present yourself in the firm?
I was quite aware of status in the firm. I was not going to allow myself to turn into the person who’s sent out to make coffee. So how did I ensure that? Well, I decided that I would just not learn how to work the coffee machine. Then no one could send me to make it! The problem was that, since this was before Starbucks, when you arrive at the office and it’s the weekend and you’re working hard, there’s nowhere to get coffee. And if you can’t make it, well, you have to wait for one of the men to show up! Still, I continued to refuse, and I think in my eight years of practice there I never learned how to work the machine since I never wanted to be the girl they sent to make coffee.
Did you feel different, as a litigator, from the men you presented in court alongside?
Yes, absolutely. People really didn’t know what to make of us. Some let it show that they didn’t think we should be there in that form. There were some simple examples, like someone would report that “Mr. Smith called, and Joan called”. Litigation is not an enterprise where you’re making friends with your opposition either; they’re not there to make your life easy. That may explicitly involve making you uncomfortable. There were also times where the facilities weren’t ready for us. I was in a court in a small town outside Toronto, and the robing room was for men only, so I wound up changing in what turned out to be the broom closet for the janitor!
So the sentiment was not one of camaraderie?
Well no, there were some men who wanted you to move forward, as much as there were men who didn’t want you to succeed. There were also some women who didn’t want us to succeed. Women were starting to be “there” – wherever “there” was. It was new, and they hadn’t figured out that they would need to accommodate women yet. They had never had to think about it! All the women I have spoken to had stories of either being left out, or not being taken into account.
Any cool cases that you worked on, in that context?
I worked on the Justine Blainey case, where we fought for the right for girls to play on boys hockey teams.
Did you have any idea at all, before joining that firm, that health law might be interesting?
I am an entirely accidental health lawyer. When I was at UofT, they had one health law class that I wanted to take but it never fit my schedule. Otherwise, it was never something I told myself I wanted to do. So, I guess, not really! It was fortuitous, really. Lots of twists and turns!
What was the first area of the field that piqued your interest?
Professional regulation. The firm that I worked for acted for one of the self-regulating bodies. I also did some professional malpractice work.
And at what point did you choose to return to academia?
I left my practice when I was in my 7th or 8th year, so I practiced for quite some time, and I really liked it. It was a civil litigation practice. Part of it was health law but health law was then, and still is, kind of a niche area, so people tended to do that plus other things in their practice. We also acted for what was then the Toronto Board of Education, which was also fascinating in terms of the types of issues that would come up. The thing about the private practice of law is – you do what comes in the door. It’s not that those files are not fascinating, especially when you have carriage over them as you move ahead in your practice, but I got to a point where I wanted to focus on particular questions of interest in law. Graduate studies let me do that.
Did you ever think you might want to leave Toronto?
I articled in Ottawa to see, and I realized I didn’t! I really liked Ottawa actually. I articled for a firm there, Nelligan Power, and I was fortunate enough that I was able to rent a little one-bedroom cabin in Gatineau park for the first part of the year. It was terrific, I literally could commute 15 minutes, and go from being in the middle of Gatineau park with deer in the backyard to the office in downtown Ottawa.
It’s hard to imagine a property like that now!
It was a little cabin that was only wood-heated, and I actually didn’t discover that, until I had to move back to the city in the middle of winter, when you heat with wood smoke, you also smell like wood smoke! So I didn’t discover until after I got back into the city to live, that the wood smoke had imbued everything!
Did you receive any comments?
No! Very polite people that I practiced with. Thankfully wood smoke isn’t an obnoxious smell!
So you articled smelling like a campfire?
Only for half a year! Well, only for the beginning of the winter. It was a quieter and less formal time for articling! It’s hard to imagine that happening now, on Bay Street!
You came back to Toronto to practice. The questions you wanted to answer – do you remember what they were?
Oh, this is really dating myself! I started practicing law before there was a Charter of Rights; that came into force when I was already in practice, and there were really interesting questions that I wanted to think about in that regard. And it probably got sparked in particular, one of the cases that I acted on at the appellate level was the case of Justine Blainey, who was a 12-year-old girl who wanted to play hockey on a boys team and couldn’t. At that time, the OHRC said that in amateur athletics it was okay to discriminate on the basis of sex. A friend of mine had acted for Justine in her challenge at the first level, and the firm that I was working at took on the case. It was so interesting, since s. 15 didn’t get to come into force until 1985, so this is very shortly afterward. It was really interesting to think about those issues, but it was also really hard to find time to think about them more broadly. I’d had time to look at the American jurisprudence about girls in school who wanted to play golf and football. I wanted to have more time to look at those questions that were of interest to me, but broadened out to include my focus, which is health law.
What institution allowed you to pursue those answers, and why did you choose it?
Stanford is a really, really good school! The Canadians who were down there would get asked why we chose it, and we’d give the usual reply of “oh it’s great for constitutional law,” and so on. But we’d also secretly whisper to each other, “and have you noticed the weather?!”
You really escaped the cold then!
Yes! At that point I had a four year old and a one year old, and my husband, as we were thinking about graduate school and so on, said that he would much prefer to be with the kids in a warm climate as opposed to somewhere like Boston Common in the middle of January, with little ones in snowsuits and dealing with lost mittens and so on. So, off we went! We did only stay for a year though, my husband wasn’t working so we just stayed long enough for me to fulfill the course requirements. We then moved up to Victoria for two years, and then back to Toronto!
You have two kids?
Yes, two boys – one is in Toronto; the other is in Australia, in Sydney. I’m hoping that he comes back. I think it’ll be a few years before he’s back anyway. I’m hoping it’s not permanent!
What is he doing?
He was in medical school, and this weekend he’ll be finishing his internship, which is something they still have in Australia as part of their medical program.
Have you ever visited?
Yes, I don’t go nearly as often as I’d like, but they also come back here.
What’s your other son up to?
Well, he’s a lawyer, at McCarthy’s!
You didn’t talk him out of it?
No, I wouldn’t want to. I truly think law is an interesting area to work in, and to think about. The problems are worth spending time on.
What keeps you going? Do you have a piece of advice to give to anyone that will listen?
Professionally, it’s that I really like the law, and thinking about it and wrestling with problems, and talking to others about issues. And more generally, and personally, be open to different twists or bends in the road. I had a really interesting practice, and then I switched to academia which has also proven to be a tremendously satisfying way to spend my time, and I think and hope that I’ll be able to help students launch their lives in law, too. That means a lot to me.