| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 |
|
| Comment: Ward v. City of Vancouver |
|
(An edited version of the following comment first appeared in the August edition of Common Ground magazine).
.....
I felt I was watching history being made on April 17, 1982, the day I saw Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Trudeau sign the new Canadian Constitution on the front lawn of the Parliament Buildings. As a second year law student attending the University of Ottawa in 1982, I realized that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was an important new piece of legislation that would redefine many aspects of Canadian life. However, I had no inkling that some 28 years later I might be making a bit of Charter history myself.
On July 23, 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its decision in Ward v. City of Vancouver, unanimously declaring that Canadians may have the right to sue for monetary compensation if their constitutional rights are violated. How did I, a Vancouver civil litigation lawyer, end up as a party in a case some commentators are hailing as a significant development in the law pertaining to civil liberties?
To answer that question we must go back to the evening of November 25, 1997. I received a call at home from a client who said she was in jail in Richmond, having been arrested in connection with the APEC summit at UBC, and would I please come quickly to help? It turned out that my client was one of dozens of people arrested at UBC that day by overzealous members of the RCMP, who had pepper-sprayed and detained student demonstrators who were alarmed that their campus was playing host to the likes of President Suharto of Indonesia and President Jiang Zemin of China. Many speculated that Prime Minister Jean Chretien (“Pepper? For me, I put it on my plate”) or his aides had been responsible for the police crackdown and two years of high-profile public hearings ensued.
I continued to act as legal counsel for many of the student complainants and as a result of the attention the case received, I became something of a lightning rod for those with grievances against the police. My practice changed, and I found myself frequently representing the families of those who had died at the hands of the police or those who had been injured by police conduct. A year later, for example, I found myself representing those injured by police batons at the so-called “Riot at the Hyatt”, which was not a riot at all, but one of the most egregious examples of police brutality I have witnessed. A squad of Vancouver crowd control police emerged from the breezeway under the Hyatt Hotel on Burrard Street and began indiscriminately clubbing protesters who had congregated there to protest a speaking engagement by Prime Minister Chretien. I also represented the families of Jeff Berg, Tom Stevenson and Robert Bagnell, men killed by Vancouver police in separate unrelated incidents.
more>>
