The honourable chief justice Mary Moreau.Supplied
When Mary Moreau was a young lawyer in Edmonton, a client named Luc Paquette came to her office asking for something that did not seem to be available in Alberta at the time: a trial in French, with a French-speaking jury. It was the early 1980s, and Mr. Paquette was facing a charge of cocaine possession for the purpose of trafficking.
Their meeting was fortuitous, for both of them.
Mr. Paquette was standing before the daughter of a pioneering French-Canadian family who had fought since the early 1900s to broaden French-language rights in the West. The case would help launch Justice Moreau as a pioneer in her own right.
She would discover that Mr. Paquette’s goal of a trial in French appeared to be protected by a law predating Alberta’s entry into Canada, known as the North-West Territories Act. And she would fight for six years for a ruling that the protection for French-language rights was still in effect, before winning at the Supreme Court of Canada.
Today, nearly 40 years after she first went to court for Mr. Paquette and the principle of access to bilingual courts, Justice Moreau is the first francophone nominee from the West to the country’s Supreme Court. On Thursday, the 67-year-old is to answer questions from a Parliamentary committee, and she has declined to make any public comments before then. (Mandatory retirement is at age 75.) The hearing’s purpose is to add transparency by introducing the nominee to the public. It remains up to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who nominated her late last week, to confirm her appointment, which would put women into the court’s majority for the first time since it was established in 1875.
Those who have known Justice Moreau over the decades say the Paquette case and other moments from early in her career provide clues to what kind of judge she will be on the Supreme Court.
“I consider her a fighter,” says Brian Beresh, a senior Edmonton lawyer. “I think she’s going to be a big supporter of minority rights.”
He recalls a young Justice Moreau organizing a bus trip for criminal lawyers to Banff, where the province’s law society was meeting, to agitate for greater legal-aid support. By her early 30s, her reputation as a diligent defender led her to be chosen president of an Edmonton group of criminal lawyers.
A mother of four married to another busy criminal lawyer, Peter Royal, she became a trial judge at the young age of 38. She conducted many murder cases, and in her 29 years as a judge – including the past six as Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench – earned a reputation as fair, humane and hard-working.
But her record on constitutional matters is too thin, observers in Alberta say, to assess her legal philosophy. Those who know her do not expect her to be a conservative voice like the judge she is replacing, Russell Brown. But neither do they expect her to be a liberal activist.
Trudeau nominates Alberta judge Mary Moreau to fill Supreme Court vacancy
“She’s very humble,” says Justice Karen Horner, her colleague on the Court of King’s Bench since 2002. “She stays within the lines. I would label her as somebody who is determined to make changes, but within the existing structures.”
Retired lawyer Richard Rand, who was her senior partner from the time she was a year and a half into her career until she joined the bench, stressed her willingness to keep an open mind.
“She’s not a zealot about anything in my experience. She will listen, she will consider both sides and rule from a principled legal perspective as opposed to any agenda – she’s not an agenda person.”
Mr. Beresh recalls the highly charged case of Omar Khadr, convicted by a U.S. military court of being an al-Qaeda terrorist and transferred to Canada. After being released from custody and spending 4½ years under supervision in the community, Mr. Khadr applied to Justice Moreau to be released from supervision the next day. Federal and provincial authorities argued he had another 3½ years to go. But Justice Moreau’s ruling, methodically written, cited then-Supreme Court justice Rosalie Abella on young people’s reduced capacity for moral judgment, and Mr. Khadr’s compliance during the past four years. She released him the next day.
“It was a very brave ruling in a case that was highly politicized,” Mr. Beresh said. He called her a “firebrand” and “fearless in her defence of principles.” Of her nomination he said: “She’s going to add some real pizzazz to that sleepy court. I think she’s going to surprise a lot of people.”
Adèle Kent, a retired judge who has known Justice Moreau for decades, is also familiar with the intensity she brings to cases. “She had so much passion for that case,” Ms. Kent says of the years she spent fighting for Mr. Paquette and the French-language laws.
How did the francophone side of Justice Moreau’s bicultural family end up in the West? Her paternal grandfather, a medical doctor, left Quebec, where his ancestors landed in 1642, to escape a tuberculosis scare in the early 1900s, after a brother died. He planted roots in Hoey, a French-speaking community in Saskatchewan, where he became deeply involved in francophone education.
One of his five children, Joseph – Justice Moreau’s father – was sent off to Edmonton at age 12 to receive a classical education at a Jesuit school, which stressed the importance of being leaders. He became an orthopedic surgeon, professor and school trustee, and pushed for educational and other opportunities for francophones. In recognition, the local Catholic board named a middle school after him – École Joseph-Moreau. (The judge’s mother, born Marie Dobbin, and grandmother, Ellen Mackinnon, were both anglophones.)
Justice Moreau comes from a large family of eight children, and while two of her older brothers became orthopedic surgeons like their father, she chose a different path, graduating from the University of Alberta’s law school in 1979.
From her father she got her commitment to the French language and culture, said her older brother John, a lawyer and arbitrator. And from her mother, who did not speak French, she got a sense of balance – that life is not all work and achievement. Justice Moreau, Mr. Royal and their children would take their VW van and go camping in the mountains. Even after becoming a judge, she coached a children’s basketball team for a season and acted in a satirical play based on a novel by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. She also studied Italian for trips to Italy with her husband.
Mr. Royal would eventually be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease that hampered his mobility. (Mr. Royal, among the province’s best-known litigators, represented Steve Ewanchuk, whose 1999 case of sexual assault is still the defining precedent on consent at the Supreme Court.) Yet Justice Moreau continued with her busy schedule. “She’s very strong, a very strong woman,” her colleague, Justice Horner, says.
“She was outstanding,” Neil Wittmann, her predecessor as chief justice, says. “She was the kind of person that if you asked her to do something ... she would step up. She never complained.”
Justice Moreau also took on international work, helping train judges in Ukraine, Haiti, Morocco and Mexico, with a focus on ethics and communications, according to Ms. Kent.
“She’s up early in the morning – she is somebody who probably has two hours of work done before anyone else,” her brother John said.