EDITORIAL: Sopinka sought justice for all (11/30/97)

EDITORIAL

Sopinka sought justice for all

When he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988, John Sopinka said he wanted to give something back to the community.

In Canadian jurisprudence, Mr. Sopinka's contribution was enormous. Until his death on November 24, Mr. Sopinka, the third-longest-serving judge on the nine-member high court, wrote 250 judgements - 40 of them dissenting.

On October 31, when Canada's highest court ruled that the fetus has no rights until it's born, Mr. Sopinka called the "born alive" rule a "legal anachronism." On that issue, he was considered a conservative. On others, he was viewed as the leader of the court's liberal wing, pushing for the rights of the accused under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He fought for the rights of defendants, too, as in the decision of Regina vs. Stinchcombe, which gave the accused access to the case against them.

The first non-judge to be appointed to the highest court in the land since 1957, the former Toronto-based civil litigator vowed to eschew the monastic trappings associated with membership in the Supreme Court. He traveled across the country, delivering speeches on myriad topics, including the legal challenges introduced by the Internet, which he addressed in a September lecture in Edmonton.

As the first Ukrainian Canadian appointed to the Supreme Court - and the first to speak in Ukrainian at his swearing-in ceremony - Mr. Sopinka's contribution to his community was equally extraordinary. In 1986 he represented the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (now known as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress) at the Deschênes inquiry into war crimes. Arguing against the deportation of suspected war criminals, Mr. Sopinka said, "If there was only a handful of obscure old men against whom a minor role in Nazi war criminals is alleged, Canada may well be advised to consider less radical action or no action at all, all the more so if the Nazi link to these men's actions appear dubious. ... It is, in my submission, cruel and inhuman to uproot an individual from his family and whatever life he has built in 35 or more years as a productive Canadian on the suspicion that he might have been a war criminal." Despite pleas from the B'nai B'rith earlier this year that he recuse himself from participating in the Supreme Court's hearings on three war-crimes cases, Mr. Sopinka sat.

"He tried hard to decide cases in accordance with principles of law," observed David Brown, a lawyer with the Toronto firm, Stikeman, Elliott, where Mr. Sopinka once headed the litigation section. "He tried to avoid getting his own personal views too heavily involved in the decisions, which, unfortunately, a lot of judges do these days."

Justice Sopinka never hid his loyalty to the Ukrainian Canadian community, however.

He served as legal counsel for an International Commission on the Great Famine in Ukraine and made several trips to Ukraine as a member of a group of foreign advisors to the Ukrainian Legal Foundation. Mr. Sopinka last visited Ukraine in autumn, when his health began deteriorating from a rare blood disease. In Canada, Mr. Sopinka made himself accessible and available to the Ukrainian community. He lent his support to an award for Excellence in Ukrainian Studies administered by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies Foundation at the University of Toronto and recently attended the unveiling of a plaque honoring Canada's first and only Victoria Cross recipient, Filip Konowal, in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster. His continuous wise counsel on issues, legal or otherwise, to this newspaper will never be forgotten.

Justice Sopinka's passing leaves a vacancy on the Supreme Court, which Prime Minister Jean Chrétien will have to move quickly to fill before the scheduled February hearing on the federal government's reference on the legality of Quebec's bid for unilateral separation from Canada. (With some irony, one of the leading contenders for the job, who must come from Ontario, is the province's Court of Appeal Justice Louise Arbour, currently the chief prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.)

But there's no question Justice Sopinka will be impossible to replace, in terms of his brilliant legal mind and his humaneness.

When he was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, Mr. Sopinka paid tribute to his parents, Metro and Nancy, and recalled the reaction of his father, a one-time prisoner of war during the Russian Revolution. "He said, 'Why do you want to go to Ottawa? Haven't you got enough work in Toronto?'

"It says something about this country that although my mother did not attend a day of school and could not read or write in either Ukrainian or English, her son could achieve this office," he underlined.

John Sopinka was one of a kind.

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