Globe and Mail have been covering the issue here:
On LinkedIn lawyers are suggesting everyone agrees that The Court should offer a choice to interveners – let them return in person like the parties, if they wish.
I personally disagree.
Not because I don’t love appearing in person in the Supreme Court. I absolutely do!
Here is one post from LinkedIn today by a law professor linking to the Globe piece
My response on that Platform and here are the same – and this is it.
With the greatest of respect to all the other fabulous lawyers who take the view that the Supreme Court of Canada | Cour suprême du Canada should allow interveners to return to the court in person or even offer that choice, it is absolutely NOT the case that EVERY single lawyer thinks the current policy is wrong-headed. The AGs think that and some well resourced habitual interveners think that, but loads of other lawyers and litigants disagree.
I’m a lawyer who frequently appears in that Court and I actually support the Chief Justice and the Court on its current policy precisely for the reasons they cite. The mandatory virtual only policy for interveners levels the playing field among interveners AND reduces cost thereby increasing access to justice for intervener groups representing unfunded groups of marginalized communities.
It has allowed me to include up to three additional junior lawyers and other colleagues from across the country as part of my counsel team on every appeal, offering mentorship and experience to them. There is literally no way that any of my peer advocacy organizational clients could afford to pay four lawyers to travel to Ottawa and stay there even over one night.
Or one lawyer for that matter. In 2005, after I had my second child, I took the midnight bus to Ottawa and showered at the YMCA before appearing in the Court and then the bus back, while nursing an infant and pumping milk for the 18 hrs I was away. We don’t have cash to burn on the Chauteau Laurier.
While habitual interveners such as the @CCLA or @Criminal Lawyers Association can afford to fund disbursements like travel and hotel and food and stuff, or the lawyers who act for them can, there are poverty and social justice advocacy organizations with zero funds for these luxuries and legal aid lawyers who assist them most often pro bono who cannot pay out of pocket to cover disbursements.
If only the big gun habitual interveners appear in person while the little people are on Zoom, that exacerbates the disparities and further marginalizes those with lived experience, usually.
In my own view there are also bigger fish to fry when it comes to troubling trends respecting intervention so I consider these escalating calls to allow in person appearances to come from a place of privilege that clouds the real issues about substantive access to justice for the poorest and most disenfranchised among us, who desperately need and deserve to be heard directly by our nation’s top court.
We will agree to disagree on this. Some of the best and the brightest in the profession and I are at an irreconcilable impasse on the issue but I thought given the media coverage and the escalating support for the advocacy on the issue, it was time I found my spine and publicly supported the SCC’s policy as is.
anitaszigeti 