EVEN CRIMINALS SENT HIM CHRISTMAS CARDS
Oppal respected for his fair-minded approach to law
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians. Even to a murderer he put behind bars, Wally Oppal was known as a fair and likable judge.
The criminal who admired Oppal was Elery Long. In 1975, Long was convicted of fatally shooting a Delta police officer. He was the last man sentenced to hang in the country. Oppal, a young criminal lawyer, prosecuted Long.
A year later, the death penalty was abolished and Long escaped the noose. For years afterward, Long regularly sent Oppal Christmas cards from prison.
“He knew I had a job to do and when I was appointed as a judge in County Court, he sent me a card of congratulations,” Oppal told Doug Ward in The Vancouver Sun in 2005.
“He said: ‘I know you put me here, but you were always fair. PS: Don’t forget I made you famous.’ ”
After County Court (which has since been abolished), Oppal was appointed in 1985 to the B.C. Supreme Court. In 2003, he became the first Indo-Canadian justice on the B.C. Court of Appeal.
But instead of continuing a career as a judge, he changed direction and entered politics. As a B.C. Liberal, he ran in Vancouver-Fraserview, won and was appointed provincial attorney general in 2005.
One of his biggest cases while heading the province’s justice system was the unsuccessful prosecution of Winston Blackmore and James Oler, the fundamentalist Mormons in Bountiful, for polygamy.
Years later, Oppal headed the Missing Women Commission Inquiry, which looked into serial murders of women by Robert Pickton in the Downtown Eastside.
Born in Vancouver, Oppal grew up in Lake Cowichan and Duncan. He is the son of Hari Oppal, who emigrated from India in 1918.
Oppal’s given name at birth was Taroo. He decided he wanted an anglicized name and so adopted Wally, the name of a Chinese-Canadian neighbour.
He wore a turban until he was eight years old. At school, he was teased wearing one of the religious symbols of Sikhism. His parents didn’t object when he decided to cut his hair and stop wearing a turban.
A few years later, when he was 10, his father died.
His mother Gurdial worked as a housekeeper, making 50 cents an hour. She also bought a cow and sold milk to support her family.
After getting a job as a DJ playing music at night for a Nanaimo radio station, he realized broadcasting wasn’t going to be his career. He enrolled at the University of B.C. and worked summers in a Vancouver Island sawmill to earn enough money to put himself through undergraduate and law schools.
He went into law in part because of his skin colour, he told the CBC in 2015. Going into a profession meant being independent.
“I faced the reality that people who are South Asian were not going to be presidents of large national corporations,” he said. “We had to work harder.” When Oppal announced he was going into politics, he was praised for his courage by chief justice Allan McEachern.
“I wrote back (to McEachern) saying that there is a very thin line between courage and insanity and that I don’t know which side of that line I am on,” Oppal said.