CANADA COURIER: John Sopinka's final judgement (12/14/97)

CANADA COURIER

by Christopher Guly

John Sopinka's final judgement

One of the privileges of being a journalist is meeting extraordinary people. Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Sopinka, who died in Ottawa on November 24, was one of them.

My relationship with him extended beyond the several interviews I conducted with him in his judge's office. Immodestly perhaps, I should mention the fact Mr. Sopinka told me he followed my career, particularly this column, sometimes encouraging me to write about topics with which he was involved. The attention was high praise from someone whom The Ottawa Citizen recently and rightly observed had an influence on the nine-member court's general direction that "may have been greater than any other individual justice's." Certainly, Justice Sopinka insisted on living by the credo that judges share their opinions and beliefs freely. On a few occasions, he spent considerable time with me explaining the intricacies of the law and the court's rulings.

Last year, out of the blue it seemed, Mr. Sopinka invited me to lunch. We rode in his chauffeur-driven car to The Mill, a restaurant along the Ottawa River Parkway dividing Ontario from Quebec. There, over a glass of white wine and chicken, he spoke about Ukraine, his career, the possibilities of accompanying him on a trip to Ukraine to meet with Ukrainian jurists and lawmakers, and about several issues that the country's top court had either dealt with or in specific cases was about to hear.

A consummate intellectual and jurist, Mr. Sopinka was also competitive. He was a jock in the courtroom, refusing to be swayed from his principles by agendas or interests.

In a recent Supreme Court decision, Judge Sopinka and a slim majority ruled for the first time that police need a judge's warrant before forcibly entering a home and making an arrest. "Any price to society occasioned by the loss of such a conviction is fully justified in a free and democratic society which is governed by the rule of law," wrote Mr. Sopinka in his judgment. The judgement threw out the evidence against a British Columbia man who had been convicted of bludgeoning his 86-year-old neighbor to death.

Justice Sopinka was also a jock in the real sense of the word. A terror when holding a racquet, Mr. Sopinka boasted about beating the pants off members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery at the annual squash tournament. As team captain of the bureaucrats' team, Judge Sopinka never lost a competition.

One look at him painted a different picture. Wearing big eyeglasses and sporting a mustache, Judge Sopinka appeared almost meek. A stoop that accompanied his gait suggested fragility. But he was nothing of the sort.

Playing professional football to supplement his law studies at the University of Toronto, Mr. Sopinka was born with Ukrainian Prairie stubbornness for success.

In 1981, nurse Susan Nelles was charged with four counts of first-degree murder after infants in the pediatric cardiac unit at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where she worked, died mysteriously. After the Crown prosecutor decided against taking the case to trial, Ms. Nelles retained Mr. Sopinka as her counsel in launching a civil suit against Ontario's attorney general and Metro Toronto Police alleging malicious prosecution. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1991, it ordered the Ontario government, which had already covered Ms. Nelles' legal costs for the criminal preliminary hearing, the malicious-prosecution proceeding and the earlier inquiry, to pay her an additional $60,000 for the "anguish she had suffered."

Mr. Sopinka considered that case his most satisfying as a lawyer. "It is not every case where you feel you have really done something good for a human being," he said. "Susan Nelles is a wonderful lady who suffered badly." At his passing, many of Judge Sopinka's colleagues recalled how wonderful he was.

"John was the best and maybe the last of the all-time generalists," Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci told The Globe and Mail. "More than anybody I know, he could blend the practical with the academic. His loss is immense." Alan Gold, president of the Criminal Lawyers Association, said, "You have no idea how highly regarded he was among the litigation bar."

Touted as a future chief justice by his own colleagues, Mr. Sopinka had many more miles to go, said Ramon Hnatyshyn, Canada's former governor general who, as attorney general, appointed Mr. Sopinka to the Supreme Court in 1988. In fact, it was Mr. Hnatyshyn who notified this journalist about Mr. Sopinka's passing. Still shaken at hearing the news, Mr. Hnatyshyn couldn't emphasize enough how much he would miss his close friend.

John Sopinka is irreplaceable in so many ways. The Supreme Court and all of Canada have suffered a great loss.

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