Truth Be Told

My Journey Through Life and the Law

Beverley McLachlin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781982104962
• eBook ISBN: 9781982104986
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Law Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE WRITERS' TRUST SHAUGHNESSY COHEN PRIZE
WINNER OF THE OTTAWA BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION ? Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Beverley McLachlin offers an intimate and revealing look at her life, from her childhood in the Alberta foothills to her career on the Supreme Court, where she helped to shape the social and moral fabric of the country. As a young girl, Beverley McLachlin's world was often full of wonder—at the expansive prairie vistas around her, at the stories she discovered in the books at her local library, and at the diverse people who passed through her parents' door. While her family was poor, their lives were rich in the ways that mattered most. Even at a young age, she had an innate sense of justice, which was reinforced by the lessons her parents taught her: Everyone deserves dignity. All people are equal. Those who work hard reap the rewards. Willful, spirited, and unusually intelligent, she discovered in Pincher Creek an extraordinary tapestry of people and perspectives that informed her worldview going forward.Still, life in the rural Prairies was lonely, and gaining access to education—especially for girls—wasn't always easy. As a young woman, McLachlin moved to Edmonton to pursue a degree in philosophy. There, she discovered her passion lay not in academia, but in the real world, solving problems directly related to the lives of the people around her. And in the law, she found the tools to do exactly that.She soon realized, though, that the world was not always willing to accept her. In her early years as an articling student and lawyer, she encountered sexism, exclusion, and old boys' clubs at every turn. And outside the courtroom, personal loss and tragedies struck close to home. Nonetheless, McLachlin was determined to prove her worth, and her love of the law and the pursuit of justice pulled her through the darkest moments.McLachlin's meteoric rise through the courts soon found her serving on the highest court in the country, becoming the first woman to be named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She rapidly distinguished herself as a judge of renown, one who was never afraid to take on morally complex or charged debates. Over the next eighteen years, McLachlin presided over the most prominent cases in the country—involving Charter challenges, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia. One judgment at a time, she laid down a legal legacy that proved that fairness and justice were not luxuries of the powerful but rather obligations owed to each and every one of us.With warmth, honesty, and deep wisdom, McLachlin invites us into her legal and personal life—into the hopes and doubts, the triumphs and losses on and off the bench. Through it all, her constant faith in justice remained her true north. In an age of division and uncertainty, McLachlin's memoir is a reminder that justice and the rule of law remain our best hope for a progressive and bright future.

PART ONE

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THE STUDENT

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom of association.

—Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 2

CHAPTER ONE

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An Ordinary Girl

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK ME, “When did you decide to become a lawyer? A judge? The first woman chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada?”

“Never,” I reply. And it’s true.

From a very early age, all I knew was that I wanted to do something that wasn’t ordinary. Because for a small girl growing up in a remote prairie town in the 1940s, the ordinary was very ordinary indeed.

I came into the world overdue, plump, and at the cost of great suffering to my mother, as she repeatedly reminded me. The precise locale was a tall, many-roomed red-brick mansion-turned-hospital with white bay windows that stood at the top of a hill looking down on the little village of Pincher Creek, Alberta, huddled in the valley below. The building had once belonged to a family of Quebec merchants who had come to establish a new venture in the tiny town. The Catholic Church had long since acquired it, and when I was born, it was a hospital run by a covey of nuns who swished about in their black skirts and white wimples, clutching rosaries.

An ordinary baby in an ordinary town on an ordinary day. The only portent of an eventful future was the high wind, which, I am informed, swept down from the Rockies with particular force that day. My father had to park the car facing the wind so its doors wouldn’t be torn off their hinges.

After a colicky start—something about rejecting my mother’s milk, the first of my many rejections—I was put on a new diet and flourished. My parents, Ernest and Eleanora Gietz, took me from the hospital to my grandparents’ home on the outskirts of town. But a new baby pressed walls and tempers, and soon my parents moved to a dusty farmhouse in the valley west of town. There I encountered the first landscape of my life: tall grass that waved on the banks of the nearby stream. Pincher Creek.

I was a biddable child, content with the world, but given to unexpected frolics that sent my parents into panics. My first clear memory—I must have been two—is of being fitted into a new dress and sunbonnet, all covered in tiny pink flowers. Slipping out the door, I made my way down the path to the creek. I bent to touch the water—how black it was, how strangely it moved in swirls and patterns—then found myself walking up the hill to the big road that led to town. I was nearly at the top when I heard my mother’s cries behind me. She scooped me into her arms. Flailing, I waved the fist that clutched the dime I had stolen from the kitchen table. “I’m going to town to buy an ice cream cone,” I wailed as she hauled me back to the house.

My father, who was on occasion given to exaggeration, boasted about my accomplishments. His stories remain in family lore, but no one fully believes them—how I talked at eight months, was toilet-trained before a year, and said “Rumpelstiltskin” (my father even claimed I could spell it, which cannot have been true) at two. Of this, I remember nothing.

The snatches of my early existence that I do remember are more prosaic. Two brothers, Irvin Leonard and Conrad Wayne, came along in short order, rending the quiet of the valley with their wails and putting an abrupt end to the parental doting and prating that my parents had once lavished on me.

Len, as he came to be known, was a sensitive child who railed against the world into which he’d emerged by crying all night and refusing to eat. With a sister in her terrible twos and a soon-to-arrive brother, he had to make do with shows of affection from my mother’s younger sister, Doreen, and Grandma Gietz, who, as he grew older, would slip him dimes from her little leather purse. I recall feeling jealous that Grandma held Len on her knee longer than me—not that I really wanted to be on her knee, which was all fat and satin so shiny I might shoot off at any instant—but I came to understand that she sensed his unease in the world and was impelled to offer comfort. In time, Len adapted to the pains and injustices of life, covering them with a wicked and ribald sense of humour.

Conrad railed against existence in a different way. The third of three children in close succession, he, like Len, felt ignored and overlooked as our harried mother struggled to manage her increasingly burdened life. Even my father’s custom of holding Conrad on his lap at mealtimes could not entirely reconcile my brother to the world, which he regarded as fundamentally unfair—particularly when I (always a hoarder) still had chocolate in my desk drawer at the end of the week, long after Conrad’s had been devoured. On one occasion, that state of affairs undermined his toddling control to the point that he bit me on the leg.

Like most children, I didn’t give much thought to my parents. They were just there—my lively, talkative mother and my more taciturn father. Mom and Dad. Mom had charge of our day-to-day life: bathing us, dressing us, assigning chores like washing dishes or bringing in wood for the fire. Each Sunday, she tacked to the kitchen wall a chart on which she recorded our sins and omissions. The theory was that our sins would be counted on Saturdays, with a penny docked from our twenty-five-cent allowance for each one. But in the flurry of getting three kids out of the house, Mom usually forgot to check her sheet and would just sigh and hand out the quarters when we got to town.

Sunday was reserved for church and visiting relatives. But every other day of the week, Dad was away from dawn to dusk, working on the farms his parents had bought when they came to Pincher Creek from Poland in 1927 with five daughters and four sons. (Their eldest daughter, Alma, had married and remained in Poland until after the Second World War, and their eldest son, Edmund, was going to college and stayed behind to complete his studies.) Unlike most of his brothers, my father rejected high school in the new country and never went to university. Maybe (as a wicked cousin once whispered in my ear) he had “fallen on his head” as a kid; maybe he was a bit off in some difficult-to-define way. Or perhaps he was simply an iconoclast by nature. Whatever the cause, my father decided he didn’t like school and could do better on his own. By day, he taught himself to ride, box, and play the trumpet. And by kerosene lamps in the evening, he embarked on a program of self-education. By the time he was twenty, he could read and write two languages, English and German, and converse in Polish and Russian. (Proud of his linguistic skill, he studied French much later in life, too.)

Passionately religious, Dad dreamed of becoming a minister. He took time away from the farm to go to bible school, where he won prizes for his oratorical skills and came home with a fine suit and an elegant Harris Tweed winter coat, determined to become a preacher. He returned from a clerical stint in southern Manitoba with a black Nash car (bestowed by my mother’s wealthy uncle) that left the jalopies of Pincher Creek in the dust. But his dreams of being a churchman came to naught. Behind a façade of religious conformity, he harboured a deep distrust of organized religion that got in the way of church dogma and duties. Although he filled in as a lay preacher throughout his life, it was not to be his career. He returned home—a home strangely quiet. Brothers Ed, Bill, and Otto were off at university. Married sisters Alma, Martha, Adele, and Olga lived in distant towns. Selma had joined the army; Alice had gone south to pursue dreams of a fashion career; and Millie, who had been born in Canada, was off to art school. Alfred returned from a conscripted stint in the army moody and depressed. My father came home to help his aging parents run the family farms. The son who stayed behind.

When I was four, that first house in the valley of my earliest memories was replaced by a log house on a high foothills property acquired by the Gietz family as summer grazing land. The plan was that my father and his brother Fred would harvest the tall jack pine that clothed the hills. An old photo shows me, shortly after we moved in, improbably seated with my brothers at a tiny table in a sea of grass, Table Mountain looming behind us. I loved the ancient house, built of huge round logs with a porch stretching across its front; I loved the hill, which I could descend at the speed of light; I loved the sweetness of the mountain air and the dark velvet of the nights. Mom read us the story of Heidi, who found herself dropped in the Swiss Alps with only a hermit for company, and who came to relish the high clear air and mountain vistas. Just like us, I thought, as I ran through the grass in the summer or rolled in the snow in the winter. Our mountain retreat was the first of those special places that have touched me and become part of my soul.

One day, a man from Quebec came to help log the property. Dad and Uncle Fred marvelled at how trees seemed to melt at the touch of his “swede saw,” as bow saws were called then (in those days, chainsaws were not common). Clearly, I concluded, French Canadians were a special lot. This inference was cemented when Frenchie, as we affectionately called him (those were different times), decided to carve a rocking horse for me from a huge piece of wood. Each evening for months, I watched him create its legs, its torso, its head and eyes and ears, before setting it on two carved wooden rockers. Finished at last, he righted the horse and placed me on it. I rocked and shrieked with glee.

I woke up the next morning to find everyone gathered around the horse. Tears sprang to my eyes when I saw why: a crack had widened across the horse’s back, a deep, irreparable wound. I threw myself on the broken back and wept. “I rocked too hard,” I cried. My first encounter with guilt—misplaced, in hindsight, as guilt often is.

My mountain idyll lasted less than two years. My restless father lost interest in the sawmill, and the time had come for me to go to school. A home closer to town was required. And so we moved into a two-storey house—my third—clad in grey asphalt siding, east of the town of Pincher Creek. The kitchen, dining room, and living room were on the first floor, and four bedrooms, one of which would become a bathroom if we ever got plumbing, were upstairs. I remember exactly the pattern of the wallpaper I was allowed to choose for my room—an arrangement of diamonds and roses. In the summer, we roamed the three acres of land with the neighbour children—there is not an inch I don’t recall—and in the winter, we sat by the fire in the living room and read or played games.

It was a child’s paradise of a different kind. No one paid us children much heed. The inexhaustible work of keeping bread on the table (my father’s department) and keeping three young children fed and clothed (my mother’s duty) consumed all available adult energy.

I recall, as a five-year-old, thinking about numbers. I found my mother frantically sweeping some mess off the kitchen floor.

“How long would it take to count to a hundred?” I asked.

She brushed me away.

I persisted. “Five minutes?” Brush, brush, brush. “Ten minutes?” Brush, brush, brush, brush. “An hour?”

“Yes,” she said in exasperation and with a swish of the broom that shoved me out the door.

I must have looked disappointed—an hour in my child’s mind was an enormous stretch of time. Mom paused in her sweeping. “You’ll soon go to school,” she said. “They’ll teach you everything you need to know.” Her face softened, and she launched into her own memories of her one-room prairie school. “I loved school,” she said. “It was the best time of my life. But I had to leave before I finished . . .” Her voice trailed off. “The rest is history.”

They’ll teach you everything you need to know—the phrase preoccupied me. What did I, a girl, need to know? Not much, I thought, looking at my mother: how to cook, clean, shop, and look after the kids. But there was a wistfulness in those other words she spoke. I was too young to realize what my mother had given up just because she had made the choices expected of a girl. But the germ of a query fixed itself in my juvenile brain: Could there be more than what girls were expected to do? Other dreams? Other possibilities? I was too young to fully articulate the question, much less answer it. But it would never let me go.

CHAPTER TWO

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Pincher Creek

PINCHER CREEK, A TOWN of two thousand souls, was the sun around which the lives of the local farmers and ranchers revolved, the source of all things exotic and enticing. As a young child, I yearned all week for Saturday afternoon, when my parents took us to town. Town: a marvellous metropolis filled with ice cream, my weekly chocolate bar, and Cracker Jack popcorn.

Pincher Creek’s wonders continued to reveal themselves as I grew older. The hospital, where we raced when disaster struck—as when Conrad drank a can of kerosene—and were miraculously made whole. Shops with windows full of lovely dresses and watches and tooled leather saddles, to ogle if you could not buy. The Co-op, where at age twelve I stood mesmerized before the first television image I had ever seen. More churches than even the most self-respecting town required—Catholic, Anglican, United, Baptist, Mennonite, and more. Schools, both Catholic and Protestant, elementary and high. And the Pincher Creek Municipal Library, which loaned me two books a week to tide me over from Saturday to Saturday. A pool hall, a skating rink, and a curling rink. Beer parlours, viewed only from the outside and afar. A bawdy house, it was whispered, to which lonely cowboys could repair on Saturday nights. You never knew what marvels Pincher Creek would unveil.

In reality, the town of Pincher Creek was nothing more than a modest cluster of houses and businesses dotting a dusty main street that paralleled a small stream flowing from the Rocky Mountains, twenty-five miles to the west. Legend has it that someone lost a pair of pincers, or pliers, in the water of the creek when the RCMP was establishing a horse farm in the 1880s. The irate loser dubbed the creek Pincer Creek, which no one could pronounce. So it became Pincher Creek.

After the town’s incorporation in 1906, the Calgary Herald published an editorial advising it to change its name immediately if it had any hope of respectability. As the Herald’s editorialists noted, “The diminutive character implied in the word ‘creek’ is sufficiently damaging without the ‘Pincher’ before it. Together they make as poor a name for a town as exists in Western Canada.” Precedent dictated a change of name. “Rat Portage is glad it changed its name to Kenora,” the newspaper declared, while “Regina was once Pile of Bones, a name which would have been sufficient to spoil its future.” But being slightly off the groove never bothered Pincher Creekers.

The people who lived in and around Pincher Creek even before its incorporation were a diverse lot. The Piikani (formerly referred to as the Peigan), one of three nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy, had for centuries pitched their teepees on its banks and hunted its ravines. Scrounging in the creek’s upstream canyon just west of town in the 1940s, a kid might unearth ancient arrowheads or—if really lucky, like my father once was—a beaten copper bracelet.

By the 1870s and 1880s, occasional settlers in covered wagons were crossing the stream, followed by whisky traders, the Mounties (to shut down the whisky traders), and the clergy. Father Lacombe, the famed friend of the Cree and Blackfoot, and a liaison between them and the settlers, came and stayed for a while in the 1880s. A few decades later, a Catholic school was established in Pincher Creek, along with a church and a convent. The Catholics were betting that the railway would pass through Crowsnest Pass and Pincher Creek, and that Pincher Creek would house the province’s first university. They were woefully wrong, but remnants of their dreams remained.

Late ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Part One: The Student
• Part Two: The Lawyer
• Part Three: The Judge
• Part Four: The Chief Justice
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the author
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright