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The case against Canadian Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin Copyright: Peter Zohrab 2003

 

Beverley McLachlin, as it happens, was sworn in as Chief Justice of Canada by another woman -- the then Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, Anne McLellan -- see the webpage: http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/news/nr/2000/doc_24736.html . However, the case (for now, at least) against this woman judge involves the following court cases in 1997 and 1999 -- before she became Chief Justice.

1) Winnipeg Child and Family Services (Northwest Area) v G (DF) [1997] 3 SCR 925 (SC); and

2) Dobson (Litigation Guardian of) v Dobson [1999] 2 SCR 753 (SC).

The cases are judged on the basis that they are about the rights of unborn children versus the rights of mothers. Without going into unnecessary detail, the point I am making is that, in each of these two cases, nine judges (yielding a combined total of eleven (11) different judges, two of the nine in each case being female) discussed the rights of the unborn child and the rights of the mother -- without the rights of the father even rating a mention ! Needless to say, the father would be/have been legally obliged to support the child if/when born, whether through child-support payments or otherwise. As far as these judges are concerned, a father is a person with responsibilities towards his children -- but no rights.

On the page Winnipeg Child and Family Services (Northwest Area) v G (DF), a search for "father" only results in two hits -- one of these being from another case entirely. The only time that the word "father" crops up in the case itself is in connection with the duties, not the rights of the father (i.e. his volunteered duty to support the addict mother). The word "mother", on the other hand, appears so often that I stopped counting at 20 ! The phrase "mother's right(s)" appears three times. The term "father's right(s)" does not appear at all.

On the page Dobson (Litigation Guardian of) v Dobson, a search for "father" also only results in two hits. The word "mother", on the other hand, appears so often that I again stopped counting at 20 ! The phrase "mother's right(s)" appears once. The term "father's right(s)" does not appear at all.

I invite interested readers to read the judgements and trace the authority (if any) for the "rights" that these judges describe women as having -- quite apart from the issue of the total ignoring of the rights of fathers.

These cases have obvious implication for custody and access decisions in the Canadian (in-)justice system ! It is clear that bias against fathers is a pandemic which infects the entire Canadian legal system -- indeed, the whole of Canadian society, in my opinion.

Beverley McLachlin was one of the most vocal of the judges in these two cases, and she is now Chief Justice. I draw the following conclusions:

• it seems that grotesque anti-father bias is not a bar to promotion in the Canadian judicial system -- in fact, it may even be an aid to promotion there;

• in her capacity as Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin can be expected to have made judgements, administrative decisions, and extra-legal pronouncements on divorce-related matters, and even to have pontificated on how misguided Men's/Fathers' groups were in their allegations of anti-male bias in divorce cases (see http://fact.on.ca/facthome/fact_not.htm), so the above cases are concrete evidence of how anti-male and lacking in credibility the Canadian divorce system -- not to mention the justice system generally -- is.

N.B. I do not see Canada as being significantly different from any other Western country, as regards the issues mentioned above.

 

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