CHIEF JUSTICE TELLS UNIVERSITY CROWD THAT CANADA IS DEFINED BY INCLUSION
Beverley McLachlin never once said Donald Trump’s name.
But then, Canada’s famously discreet chief justice didn’t have to.
McLachlin was at the University of Alberta on Wednesday to deliver the department of philosophy’s annual public lecture.
Ostensibly, the lecture was about landmark moments in Canada’s 150-year constitutional history.
But McLachlin, who steps down as chief justice of Canada’s Supreme Court this December, delivered an implicit rebuttal to the spirit of xenophobia abroad in the world these days.
You might call her speech the subtweet to end all subtweets.
Some nations, McLachlin told her audience, define themselves by exclusion — by borders, by walls. In contrast, she insisted, Canada defines itself not by walls but by bridges.
The chief justice traced that ethic back to Canada’s foundation in 1867 as a multi-ethnic bilingual federation, the union of two very different European peoples who had been engaged in warfare for generations.
Such inclusion and accommodation, she argued, were radical ideas 150 years ago.
“Canada still defines itself by inclusion, by what it embraces, not exclusively, by what it rejects,” McLachlin told her Timms Centre audience.
“Diversity, to me, is not a good or an end in itself. It’s a fact.”
The test, she said, isn’t whether Canada is diverse. Many countries are. Instead, what makes us Canadians, she suggested, is how we manage our diversity — how we squabble, how we listen, how we come to respect the individual rights of people who are not like us.
“If we’re ever in doubt on a particular issue, we should move in the direction of inclusion.”
Before 2017, those might not have seemed like radical words, or even very interesting ones. They might have sounded like safe Canadian bromides. But against the international political atmosphere of the last few months, her speech rang like a clarion call.
For McLachlin, this trip to Edmonton and to the University of Alberta campus was a homecoming.
Although she grew up in Pincher Creek, the daughter of devout Pentecostal German immigrants, she spent her formative intellectual years here. She graduated from the U of A with a BA in philosophy in 1965, then graduated with a master’s degree in philosophy and a law degree in 1968.
McLachlin rarely grants media interviews — so carefully coded and calibrated speeches are a rare opportunity to hear her personal thoughts and get a sense of her wit.
She’s spent 28 years on the Supreme Court, 17 as the chief justice. She wasn’t the first woman on the Supreme Court — Bertha Wilson and Claire L’Heureux-Dube came before her. But she was the first woman chief justice, and the first woman in the Commonwealth to host such a post. No Canadian chief justice has served longer. She has quietly shaped the way the rule of law works in this country, whether the issue was treaty rights or gay rights or the right to a fair and timely trial. Never has she backed down, either, from her efforts to preserve the independence and integrity of the court system.
McLachlin was first appointed to the B.C. courts by then-Social Credit premier Bill Bennett and to the Supreme Court by thenprime minister Brian Mulroney, a Conservative. But she was elevated to chief justice by thenprime minister Jean Chretien, a Liberal. She doesn’t fit neatly into a right-left binary. Her views have always been strongly libertarian, whether the issue is free speech or the right to die.
The Americans, avid believers in the cult of personality, have turned their Supreme Court justices into celebrities. Google Ruth Bader Ginsburg and you get 479,000 results, including links to buy Notorious RBG coffee mugs and T-shirts and throw pillows, not to mention the latest casting news about the upcoming Bader Ginsburg bio-pic. There are no Beverley McLachlin tote bags or T-shirts. (“You’ve given me an idea for my retirement!” she said jokingly Wednesday.) But despite her lower profile, McLachlin has been every bit as much a legal pioneer.
Without Americanizing Canadian legal traditions, McLachlin has been trying to make the court’s workings less mysterious. She hasn’t just allowed TV cameras into the courts, she’s now having many court proceedings live-streamed online, too.
“You can turn on CPAC and watch us in action,” she said. “Well, ‘action’ may not be the right word, but you can watch us.”
And yes, there’s a Supreme Court Twitter account, too.
“We’re careful about what we tweet,” she noted. “You won’t see any 4 a.m. tweets from me.” Oh snap. And that’s as close to a partisan comment as a Canadian chief justice, even one on the brink of retirement, is likely to get.