A seemingly countless parade of male lawyers before us, but with one other woman representing the Saskatchewan AG, Kyla Lee represented WiCCD last, and was the only woman presenting for the defence or the Appellant’s side at all, among all the parties’ and interveners’ counsel.

What a way for WiCCD to break onto the Supreme Court litigation stage!

Our team beat the big guns to the first to the finish line but WiCCD’s Intervention on HAK has been in the works since our inception.

We do also owe a debt of gratitude to Maija Martin in her foundational role as Litigation Director for WiCCD and to Megan Stephens currently in that role, who has brought that file home finally – that will be heard over a full week!! in March. Maija and Megan are both on that team with two women lawyers from Goldblatt Partners, Danielle Sandhu and Husna Sarwar, all on for WiCCD together with the Schlifer Clinic with whom we jointly intervene there.

I inserted myself into this team on Korduner demanding to coach, because I don’t like to be left out of the fun of oral advocacy in appeals and because I do this ALL the time for anyone on any appeal I am in any way connected to and also because I do so much advocacy teaching and moot coaching every chance I get – at the U of T and with the Rosenberg etc.

It’s like my favourite thing in the world.

That said, this team of four superstars definitely DID NOT NEED ME!!

I have been so fortunate with the lawyers I get to to work with on interventions regularly throughout my career (the brilliant Sarah Rankin and Carter Martell most often but many others as well from time to time) and once again, I had such amazing talent to work with in this team of four – rockstars each and every one.

I’ve worked and published with Caleigh before and I knew how really smart she was, Sweta provided calm, steady support and incisive insight, Megan is a little terrifying with her analysis and elegance and Kyla was the bee’s knees delivering this thing. She was just out of this world fantastic – expressive, passionate, straight-forward and endlessly compelling. She was not interrupted. And she closed out the day!!

Watch the archived webcast if you hadn’t seen it otherwise – worth the price of admission for Kyla alone.

The archived Webcast is now available on the SCC’s Case Information Page under the Webcast Tab

https://www.scc-csc.ca/cases-dossiers/search-recherche/41737/

Kyla got her submissions in at the 5 minute mark ON THE DOT!

Our submissions run from 2:47:49 to 2:52:49, last of the interveners closing out all submissions but for Reply.

For some unknown reason, the SCC struggles to sync their audio with the virtual appearance so that’s mildly distracting but otherwise – this is fantastic!

What a breath of fresh air a woman is in a sea of men like today.

Not to take anything away from the men of course – lots of fabulous counsel making amazing submissions on a difficult case, with an engaged bench – fascinating legal issues.

But still, we brought the power of Women and we brought genuine diversity also in every imaginable way.

Our counsel team is not just all women, but in keeping with WiCCD’s mandate, truly national (with BC and Manitoba and Ontario represented) and diverse by so many other metrics.

REPRESENTATION MATTERS!!

You gotta admit it, WiCCD was a very good idea indeed.

And THIS was a banner day for for WiCCD!

For a history of the case and a link to our Factum, see my earlier blog here:

You can also read our Factum here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kZe3_taOhAnT9i92rDFDlq8KS8GDy_9b/view?usp=sharing