The 10th anniversary of Beverley McLachlin’s appointment as chief justice of Canada will come early next year, on Jan. 7, but commentators are already taking stock. They increasingly speak of the “McLachlin court,” and try to pin down ways she’s changed or influenced the court’s direction. Her formal powers are limited—the most significant is determining the size of a panel (five, seven or nine judges) hearing a case, and, if it’s less than the full complement of nine, deciding the panel’s composition. But as the court’s titular head and public face, her informal ability to influence the other judges and set the tone is considerable. To the country, and to the world, she is the Supreme Court of Canada. She is often described as the most powerful person in the land. But what do we know about Beverley McLachlin, and how has she measured up in high public office?
There was nothing remarkable about McLachlin’s life until she began her dizzying climb to judicial power. She was born in 1943, in Pincher Creek, Alta. It’s a town of about 3,600, two hours south of Calgary—a place with few Aboriginals or visible minorities, where almost everyone owns the house they live in. McLachlin was the first of Ernest and Eleanora Gietz’s five children. The family worked a ranch southwest of town and a sawmill, and her parents were fundamentalist Christians; she has described them as “fervent believers” and of “high moral value.” As a child, she attended a Pentecostal church.
McLachlin speaks of a deep affection for Pincher Creek and its values: “You had this sense of privilege that you were living in this very special place, even though it was remote and not very important.” In a 2004 interview, she said that her small-town, old-fashioned background had a considerable effect on her work as a judge. “I think I have a very strong sense of a connection between people and place. Understanding that is important to the law. Much of the law has to do with where people want to be, what kind of culture they want to have the right to further, geographically, culturally and so on.” She has said that she thinks of her hometown every day. A painting by Robert McInnes called Pincher Creek, showing wheat fields and a farmhouse, hangs in her Supreme Court office.
McLachlin followed a conventional path after high school, with little along the way to suggest future eminence. She went to Edmonton in 1960 to study philosophy at the University of Alberta with the vague and traditional idea of becoming a teacher. In 1965, B.A. in hand, she enrolled in the University of Alberta law school and, three years later, graduated at the top of her class. In between, she married Rory McLachlin, a biologist and environmental consultant, whom she met on campus. She once said: “He was the type of man who smoked his own salmon, made his own wine, cut his own wood.”
McLachlin practised law for just five years, in Alberta and then in B.C., before joining the law faculty of the University of British Columbia as an associate professor. In April 1981, at age 37, she was appointed to the Vancouver County Court. She has acknowledged that being a woman may have helped. “Gender may have been a factor because at that time, there were very few women on the courts and they were looking for more, and there weren’t a lot of women out there to choose from.” This was when she began to learn French, a sensible thing to do for an Anglophone aspiring to higher office. Within just a few months, she was appointed to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. “I think I got carried along in this huge crise de conscience—we have no women judges, what are we going to do about it? And there was one that looked not too bad so they pushed me up very quickly.”
By 1985, she’d been elevated to the Court of Appeal, and just three years after that, her 12-year-old son Angus picked up the phone one September evening and took a message from the prime minister. Brian Mulroney was calling to offer his mother the job of chief justice of the B.C. Supreme Court. Three days later, her husband Rory died of throat cancer. “He put his career on the back burner and put mine first . . . Rory did a lot of the child-rearing. Every time Angus had to go to emergency, it always seems it was Rory with him. It liberated me to do other things.” Within six months, Mulroney was calling again, this time to appoint McLachlin to the Supreme Court of Canada. The president of the Law Society of British Columbia commented that she’d made it through the court system faster than most cases.
McLachlin’s first decade on the Supreme Court defies easy characterization. Several of her more important judgments appealed to those on the right—the 1995 RJR-MacDonald case, for example, where she held that a federal ban on tobacco advertising was an infringement of the right to self-expression. But many of her judgments were attractive to the left—the 1998 Vriend decision, for instance, in which she said that the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms required Alberta human rights legislation to protect gay rights. She was not afraid to dissent; an academic study found that in her first decade she agreed with the majority less than half the time. Some considered her a judge for all seasons, not rooted in any particular view of the law, but all agreed she had poise, common sense, and an impressive work ethic.
And she was a woman. When, in 1999, Antonio Lamer announced he would resign as chief justice at the beginning of 2000, her phone rang once more. This time it was prime minister Jean Chrétien calling. In announcing her appointment as chief justice, Chrétien said, “It was a great opportunity to have, for the first time, a woman as chief justice of Canada.” Professor emeritus Peter Russell, a long-time commentator on the Supreme Court, has said, “I think Chrétien, like Mulroney, loved the political spin factor.”
