A Life Profiled: Beverly McLachlin
“Perhaps, despite the lack of real-world examples, a woman could make a success of law. Maybe it would be a satisfying life – a life that applied abstract principle, the stuff of philosophy, to the concrete problems of people’s lives.” – Beverly McLachlin, Truth Be Told: My Journey Through Life and the Law
Years ago, as I walked through the corridors of the great hall of a law school, I couldn’t help but be immersed in the life stories of the great justices of the Supreme Court (SC), especially those of the United States. I heard the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, and Thurgood Marshall, all men. Then came along a very principled voice for women’s rights; the tough and brilliant Ruth Bader Ginsburg, famously known as “the Notorious RBG”, who became a justice in 1993. While there’s no need for us to look south of the border all the time, truth be told there’s one here in Canada we should get to know more: Beverly Mclachlin who served as the 17th Chief Justice of Canada from 2000 to 2017. She eclipsed RBG for being the first woman to hold that position.
She was born in the little village of Pincher Creek, Alberta on 7 September 1943. She described her coming into the world as “an ordinary baby in an ordinary town on an ordinary day. The only portent of an eventful future was the high wind, which, I am informed, swept down from the Rockies with particular force that day.” Little did she know that she got it all wrong what her future would be like.
Her family was not rich but her parents would always say: “We’ll manage.” So they did, but money worries would always be a big concern. “It wasn’t for lack of things, nor was it for feeling that others had more,” she wrote, “it was the what-ifs that made me feel poor, the constant threat hovering in the wings that our world would suddenly come tumbling down, taking our lives with it.”
Though Pincher Creek is surrounded by the scenic view of the Canadian Rockies, it can be very limiting and lacking in sophistication. As a graduating high school student, Beverly McLachlin was awarded to attend plays and learn about the theatre for a week at Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario. She was excited to see more of Canada beyond Alberta’s borders. “The experience,” she wrote, “did not disappoint. I remember the endless stretch of prairies – vaster than I could imagined – the venerable stone buildings of Winnipeg and downtown Toronto, the tranquil beauty of the River Avon and its grassy banks, the exhilaration of the dramas in the playhouse.”
But the thrilling experience turned into a humbling lesson when she observed that her fellow students knew a lot about the Bard’s plays, even reciting the lines by heart. It proved to her that she “was not merely playing the part of the token country student – I was the country student. The hesitant neophyte from a small town no one had heard of. I sank into the background as conversations I did not comprehend whirled above my head, declaiming this set or praising that bit of elocution.”
Pincher Creek, though, provides a quality of life that strengthens one’s character – everybody develops a work ethic. “From an early age,” McLachlin wrote, “we had chores, as did all kids in Pincher Creek. Bringing in firewood, washing and drying the dishes, sweeping the floor after every meal, helping outdoors on the farm. We worked our way up through the hierarchy of homely tasks – often complaining, but also taking pride in our advancement and fortitude, and in the prospect of adventures.”
For McLachlin, the lessons of work could not be denied. “Work educated us,” she wrote, “not only about how to do the job at hand but also about what we might accomplish with our lives. Work taught me to accept that I could not always do what I wanted to do. It also taught me to organize – the better you organized a task, the sooner it was done – and to improve my performance. I learned that no matter how much you are loved, there is no free ride – everyone is important, and everyone must contribute to the family enterprise. I learned that given enough practice, I could achieve modest competency in certain things. I learned that I could be useful. I learned that I mattered, at least in the small scheme of things. Most important, I learned that what counts in life is finding work that will sustain you and bring you joy.” But to find that lifetime career that would sustain and bring her joy would take a while.
First, she received admission for undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton with two scholarships – an Alberta Hotelman’s Scholarship and a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship – that covered her financial needs. Rather than opting for an educational degree to become a teacher, she decided for an arts degree and enrolled in courses in modern languages, English, history, philosophy, geography, and the mandatory physical education. She struggled with her courses and felt a sense of failure. But instead of buckling under, she added an extra-curricular activity – to write musical and film reviews for The Gateway, the university’s student newspaper. But it was a philosophy professor who straightened her up when he made a positive comment about her essay on Plato’s Republic. From thereon, she gained her determination to succeed, even getting a summer job as a reporter for the Edmonton Journal and as a teaching assistant. She planned to earn a master’s and PhD degrees when she finished her arts degree, but her boyfriend (and future husband) Rory McLachlin asked her, after listening to her plan: “Have you ever thought about the law?”
She was intrigued about the prospect of becoming a lawyer, so she wrote a letter to the dean of the faculty of law at the University of Alberta, asking for information about the study of law. She received instead an admission response without her doing the required Law School Admission Test (or LSAT). On 3 September 1965, she was back in the campus of University of Alberta. She wrote: “Now I was about to venture on a different path – a path beaten smooth by the footsteps of men but seldom trodden by women. The odds were not good, but maybe this time I would get lucky. Maybe this time, I would finally learn what I needed to do with my life.”
She loved the law and graduated at the top of her class in April 1968 with the Horace Harvey Gold Medal. In spite of her excellent grades, the law profession still belonged to men. She articled with Wood, Moir, Hyde, and Ross, a law firm known for employing women. She was admitted to the bar in May 1969 and became a full-time lawyer with Wood, Moir for three and a half years. She decided to join her husband Rory in Fort St. John in British Columbia and got a job at Levis and Herdy after getting her BC practice certificate. The McLachlins decided to move to Vancouver and Beverly landed a job with Bull, Housser, and Tupper. As a side, she began teaching first-year civil litigation at University of British Columbia (UBC). She loved the campus atmosphere so she decided to quit her position at Bull, Housser and became a tenure-track associate professor with UBC in 1974, teaching evidence law and contracts law and other supplemental subjects such as copyright and creditors’ mortgages. “What I loved most of all was,” she wrote, “helping my students learn to think like lawyers – the ultimate object of legal education. Good lawyers develop a unique analytic ability to figure things out, to take the complicated situations humans create, analyze them, and disentangle them so that they can be understood and managed. Laws change. The world changes. Learning a mass of facts about the current state of law won’t get students far in the real world. What they need to learn is how to think like a lawyer – to pick out the relevant facts, apply the appropriate legal principles, and come up with an answer.”
Life never stops challenging. On 11 May 1976, Beverley became a mother to Angus. She struggled being a parent to a point of suffering from depression. She decided to win her life back by not being a full-time mom. “I needed my work” she wrote, “and its intellectual explorations. I needed the law like I needed food and water, without it, I withered and sank into sadness.” She felt guilty not being in charge for raising Angus. But she had to accept the reality of her situation. She hired a full-time caretaker for Angus and went back to teaching law five days a week. “I might not be a perfect mom,” she wrote, “but together, our little family would move forward.”
Not only did her family situation get resolved but her law career shot up as well. On 22 April 1981, she was sworn in as the second woman in the County Court of Vancouver. Five months later, she was sworn in as a judge of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in September 1981. Then she became the first woman to sit on the British Columbia Court of Appeal – the highest court in the province – in 1985. In September 1988, she received a call from Prime Minister and offered her the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia. At the urging of her husband Rory, who by then was on the brink of death due to cancer, she accepted reluctantly. On 14 September 1988, Rory died at age forty seven. “The months after Rory’s death,” she wrote, “were difficult. Physically difficult. Nights when I could not sleep. Days when my mind wandered absently and my memory failed me.”
While on a trip to Sydney, Australia with her son Angus, hoping to ease her pain of losing a husband, Prime Minister Mulroney called her once again. On 17 April 1989, she was sworn in as the sixty-fifth puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Canada and the third female member. Then after ten years, she was sworn in as the seventeenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada on 7 January 2000. Because of the mandatory age requirement to retire at age seventy five, she chose 15 December 2017 to end her law career, a span of forty-eight years.
“I love the law,” she wrote. “I have loved the law from the first day of law school, and I love it still…The law I love is there for everyone, high and low, imposing obligations to be sure, but also offering protections and benefits.” She continued: “The law is the framework for productive human activity, a buttress for human creativity. The law is more than the embodiment of one person’s will; it is the collective wisdom of countless sage people over great stretches of time. It secures us and allows us to move forward in peace and harmony. In age of unravelling, it offers stability and a principled way to face the problems that surround us. It is, quite simply, our best for the future.”
23 March 2022