Remaining Vigilant - barbara findlay KC and Douglas Elliott
02/29/24 • 78 min
Trail-blazing penny droppers. Julia welcomes two iconic figures from within the CBA and the legal profession: barbara findlay KC and Douglas Elliott. Gay lawyers from when there were no gay lawyers. They co-founded SOGIC, now SAGDA, and are partly responsible for many of the rights the 2SLGBTQIA+ community has achieved over the last forty years. To quote barbara: "what was gained in a generation could easily be lost in a generation". And Douglas wrote: "we are experiencing a terrible backlash right now where the very concept of human rights is under attack and ‘DEI” is under sustained attack." Following their lead, we are Remaining Vigilant.
Cases discussed in this episode:
2003 BCSC 1936 (CanLII) | Vancouver Rape Relief Society v. Nixon et al. | CanLII
1995 CanLII 98 (SCC) | Egan v. Canada | CanLII
1998 CanLII 816 (SCC) | Vriend v. Alberta | CanLII
1999 CanLII 686 (SCC) | M. v. H. | CanLII
2004 SCC 79 (CanLII) | Reference re Same-Sex Marriage | CanLII
2007 SCC 10 (CanLII) | Canada (Attorney General) v. Hislop | CanLII
Trail-blazing penny droppers. Julia welcomes two iconic figures from within the CBA and the legal profession: barbara findlay KC and Douglas Elliott. Gay lawyers from when there were no gay lawyers. They co-founded SOGIC, now SAGDA, and are partly responsible for many of the rights the 2SLGBTQIA+ community has achieved over the last forty years. To quote barbara: "what was gained in a generation could easily be lost in a generation". And Douglas wrote: "we are experiencing a terrible backlash right now where the very concept of human rights is under attack and ‘DEI” is under sustained attack." Following their lead, we are Remaining Vigilant.
Cases discussed in this episode:
2003 BCSC 1936 (CanLII) | Vancouver Rape Relief Society v. Nixon et al. | CanLII
1995 CanLII 98 (SCC) | Egan v. Canada | CanLII
1998 CanLII 816 (SCC) | Vriend v. Alberta | CanLII
1999 CanLII 686 (SCC) | M. v. H. | CanLII
2004 SCC 79 (CanLII) | Reference re Same-Sex Marriage | CanLII
2007 SCC 10 (CanLII) | Canada (Attorney General) v. Hislop | CanLII
Previous Episode
Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions
Criminal defense attorneys Tony Paisana and Tyler Schnare from the CBA Criminal Justice Section geek out with Julia about the recently updated CBA Collateral Consequences Toolkit. For clients, it presents a comprehensive overview in fairly plain language about the fall-out of a criminal conviction. For lawyers, to quote Tony, "there are serious consequences to not advising of the consequences...".
This updated resource aims to help lawyers, clients, and judges gain a better understanding of the impact of criminal convictions on offenders before the courts.
The consequences can have an impact on everything from employment to housing, from family to financial considerations, from immigration to pardons.
Collateral consequences have the power to affect an individual – forever.
Next Episode
Actionable guidance on EDI in the face of a growing backlash – Charlene Theodore and Nikki Gershbain
Julia welcomes two of Canada’s top experts on EDI in the legal workplace: McCarthy-Tetrault’s current and former Chief Inclusion Officers, Charlene Theodore and Nikki Gershbain.
Before moving to McCarthy-Tetrault, Charlene Thedore worked as in-house council in the education sector and, in 2020, she was the first black person to become President of the OBA. Charlene has also worked for the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination and is a member and former director of the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers.
In addition to her pioneering work on EDI at McCarthy and starting her own consultancy firm, IDEA Consulting, Nikki Gershbain is a long-time pro bono advocate and family law practitioner and has served as Executive Director of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and National Director of Pro Bono Students Canada. In 2021, she received the Canadian Bar Association’s LGBTQ Hero Award for her work on trans workplace inclusion.
This is an episode full of practical, usable, advice on achieving true equity, diversity, and inclusion, at work and everywhere else. It includes concrete examples of effective and beneficial workplace EDI policies and offers some terrific all-purpose life lessons and memorable, usable, quotes.
Charlene, Nikki and Julia discuss everything from the business case for EDI to Elon Musk's twitter beef with Mark Cuban, the need for active leadership on human rights and why trans inclusion matters; how cultural trends and current events in our increasingly polarized political and historical realities impact us at work; that “the truth is always more complex, because none of us is either totally oppressed or completely privileged" (Nikki Gershbain), and that "no one has a monopoly on being wrong" (Charlene Theodore).
Charlene Theodore | McCarthy Tétrault
Law & Disorder Inc. - Law & Disorder Inc. (murraygottheil.com)
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