Canada is not a place that turns up regularly in the poetry, novels, plays or non-fiction memoirs of other cultures. Maybe that is because when foreign writers come here they tend to have immigration on their minds rather than tourism. Once they settle within our vast borders, we embrace them pretty quickly as Canadian authors, even if their palette is Mumbai rather than…
Philip Slayton
Philip Slayton’s latest book is Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life (Allen Lane, 2011).
Articles by
Philip Slayton
Waves of Contempt
What could have been a brilliant legal critique descends into score settling January–February 2012
Twenty years ago I was a corporate lawyer on Bay Street. One of my firm’s clients was Campeau Corporation, a real estate company founded and led by the gifted and excitable Robert Campeau. Bob Campeau was a man of outsized personality and fierce temper. Campeau Corporation had borrowed a lot of money to buy two large…
Dennis Baker rails against Canadian constitutional orthodoxy. He refuses to exalt the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He will not genuflect to senior judges and eminent professors, the Charter’s high priests. He enthusiastically bashes what he calls the “legal elite.” Despite these stimulating qualities, Baker’s Not Quite Supreme: The Courts and Coordinate Constitutional Interpretation is unlikely to make it off university reading lists into main street…
Who was Ivan Rand, who was born in 1884 and died in 1969? Does anyone, apart from the legal history cognoscenti, have the foggiest idea? The lawyer and judge seems like just another bygone establishment figure who quickly faded into obscurity once dead. And yet, William Kaplan—well-known lawyer, arbitrator and author—has written a hefty biography of this historical…
For a farm boy from New Brunswick, George Parkin did pretty well for himself. In his dotage, he once advised a Canadian Rhodes scholar always to travel first class “for the sake of the people one meets.” That’s what Parkin did—always travelled first class, making sure to meet the right people along the way. William…
North End Memories
One of Winnipeg’s great citizens recalls the social energy of earlier times April 2008
After Roland Penner left the Communist Party, he was attorney general of Manitoba (the RCMP kept their file on him open). Then he became dean of law at the University of Manitoba. Along the way, he was a soldier, actor, concert promoter, bookstore manager and poverty lawyer. Now well into his eighties, Penner tells us about this life in an agreeable…
The Call of the Dispossessed
Can land claims in Canada and South Africa be legitimately compared? June 2007
“It’s all about land,” said my friend Lourens, waving through the car window at passing farms as we drove from Cape Town to a village nearby. “Everyone wants his 40 acres.” He added, “And a mule.” (Forty acres and a mule was the compensation awarded to freed American slaves after the Civil War.) Lourens, an Afrikaner, is a lawyer who runs a legal clinic for the…
“When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t inhale and never tried it again.” Bill Clinton’s famous obfuscation was reported by Gwen Ifill in the the New York Times on March 30, 1992.
Clinton was in England from 1968 to 1970, studying at Oxford University. He and I overlapped as students at…