Lawyer who grew up a CFL fan tackles dark side of the sport
VANCOUVER Robyn Wishart loved the game. As a young girl growing up in Winnipeg, she sat in the endzone seats at Blue Bombers games with her parents, soaking up the synergy between the city and its football team.
“Swatting the bugs, cheering on Chris Walby, Chicken Delight (a Winnipeg value lunch institution),” Wishart says. “That’s how I grew up. I’ve loved the CFL my whole life.”
At the University of Winnipeg, where she played intercollegiate volleyball as Robyn Palmer, she studied sports psychology under Cal Botterill, a renowned consultant with Canadian Olympians and NHL players.
“Sports taught me how to not let hurdles stop you from achieving your goals,” says Wishart, now a 44-year-old Vancouver lawyer with a focus on brain and spine cases. “It taught me the mental strength to take on something difficult and see it through. Commitment.”
When she graduated from law school at the University of Victoria, Wishart never imagined herself becoming the focus of a one-women crusade that goes beyond the usual type of cases she deals with at the plaintiffs’ bar — car accidents, throws from a horse, injuries from unsafe work conditions.
That changed when veteran CFL receiver Arland Bruce III — suffering from a checklist of lingering concussion symptoms sustained in a 2012 game while playing for the B.C. Lions — walked into her office two years ago “still feeling as if I’d been in car accident,” he says.
Unable to find work, pathologically given to re-arranging the furniture daily in his Surrey home for no apparent reason — Bruce didn’t suspect he was on the verge of initiating a landmark case: the first claim brought against the CFL for brain damage.
“He had nobody else to turn to,” Wishart says. “He was alone.”
In March this year, Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson of B.C. Supreme Court finally issued a ruling in the case: Bruce, then a member of the CFL Players’ Association, should have gone through a grievance procedure set out in the collective bargaining agreement, an option both the player and the lawyer considered a “dead end.”
Game 1 to the CFL. But not set and match.
“I got my ass kicked,” Wishart admits. “It was my fault. I was going down the wrong (legal) path. But as in football, if you’re being shut down, you don’t come back in the second half with the same plays. You’ve got to have that athletic mentality as a lawyer.”
Now, Wishart and Bruce await a judgment from the B.C. Court of Appeal, which is combing through the legal aspects of Hinkson’s ruling. Even if that decision goes against the plaintiff a second time, Wishart says she’s prepared to take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada. An Ottawa lawyer has volunteered to take the ball if it comes to that.
“We’re going all the way with this,” she says.
With the Bruce case as a lightning rod, more ex-CFL players are coming forward in a separate class-action lawsuit Wishart is spearheading in Ontario. “Right now, that’s being held up by what’s happening in B.C.,” she says.
The roster of “historical players” with long-term cognitive deficiencies is more than 200 and growing. Some are ex-players who can’t publicly come forward for fear of job loss. All are players who gave up their bodies and brains to football, not knowing the risks to their physical and mental well-being.
“People say the CFL is broke, it has no money,” Wishart says. “Well, they do have insurance.”
Working on a contingency fee basis — she is building a case by dipping into her own pocket — Wishart has travelled around North America to interview and videotape exCFLers, men whose lives and identities have been irrevocably altered by playing a violent game.
Wishart says: “I’m not afraid to ask the questions: ‘Have you ever sat in your garage with the engine running? Have you destroyed all your memorabilia? Ever feel like you just want to kill yourself and the feeling passes?’
“They tell me, ‘Omigod, how did you know that?’ It’s not about losing your car keys, about forgetting someone’s name at a party or your wife’s birthday. I wish that’s what it was. In that case, I wouldn’t have started a lawsuit.”