Two Firsts by Constance Backhouse

Author:Constance Backhouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Second Story Press
Published: 2019-02-12T00:57:17+00:00

Supreme Court of Canada conference room.

When L’Heureux-Dubé entered a room, she greeted people effusively, embracing and kissing each on the cheeks in the traditional Québécois manner, causing some of her anglophone colleagues to shrink back in discomfort.32 Her colourful and occasionally overwhelming mannerisms were attributed to her ethnicity. Some described her as a match for Lamer, with both Quebec judges perceived as “vivacious,” “flamboyant,” and “Latin.”33 But the reaction to those attributes was gendered. People saw Lamer as an outgoing man, displaying jovial bonhomie. L’Heureux-Dubé was understood as transgressive because of her gender.34

Responding to the chilly climate

Wilson was well aware that as the first trailblazer, she would be closely watched. A formidable work ethic was one means she used to prove herself.35 Her gruelling pace brought her in early and kept her immersed in preparation on the weekends. She drafted decisions in the morning, debated the law with her clerks in the afternoons, and then combed through countless legal references for hours.36 One law clerk described her as “the most disciplined worker” he had ever seen, a judge who began each morning with a row of freshly sharpened pencils and then worked them down to dull stubs through rigorous editing of draft decisions she had dictated the day before.37 L’Heureux-Dubé was notorious for burning the midnight oil.38 She would get up at 6 a.m. swim, eat breakfast, and then work at the court from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. She astonished her colleagues by moving a cot into her chambers. As she confessed to the press, she needed “very little sleep—just four hours a night.”39 Matching work ethics would eventually win both of them grudging recognition from their colleagues.

Whereas Wilson was seen as scholarly and reflective, L’Heureux-Dubé was perceived as mercurial and rebellious. Wilson took a deliberately cerebral, philosophical approach to judging. Reflecting a very different approach when asked how she decided cases, L’Heureux-Dubé pointed at her gut and said, “It comes from here.”40 Even their gift-giving habits were polar opposites. L’Heureux-Dubé provoked generalized astonishment when she bought a lacy Christian Dior negligée for her female law clerk. Wilson politely shook hands with her male clerk and handed him a box of shortbread.41

Wilson’s philosophy was never to make a frontal attack on the culture of the court, but to work as “constructively as possible,” refusing to let the “regrettable behaviour of others” influence her and trusting that things would “change over time.”42 One of Wilson’s law clerks sensed that she might have been angered by the lack of respect from her colleagues, but never let it show. The same female clerk speculated that Wilson “shut down” parts of her persona in order to survive. It was a “sad” even “tragic” consequence of being “the first woman to shatter the glass ceiling,” she added wistfully. “I remember thinking, there’s just no soft landing here.”43

Observers perceived that L’Heureux-Dubé “battled against that culture” more overtly.44 One law clerk recalled that “things could get a little nippy at times,” when Lamer and L’Heureux-Dubé exchanged “unpleasant emails, the judicial equivalent of Armageddon.

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