Bora Laskin: Bringing the Law to Life (review)

Philip Girard has written an engaging biography of a fascinating man whose professional career stands out sharply against the private ethos of our business era. Bora Laskin's career was a public one. As a lawyer, law professor, activist in support of the union movement and human rights, labour arbitrator, and judge he made an enormous contribution to the development of public policy governing important spheres of Canadian life. He did so against the odds, which makes his story unusually compelling.

Laskin was a member of the generation that pursued its early schooling in the optimistic years of the 1920s. At his high school in Fort William (now part of Thunder Bay), he excelled academically, and also as an athlete and orator, and then joined the minute percentage of students heading to university, in his case the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the second year of an honours program in law in September 1930. By that time the Great Depression was well launched, accompanying him through his undergraduate degree, three years at Osgoode Hall Law School, and a further year at Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude with an LLM in 1937. Two years later, the Second World War was underway. The times could hardly have been less auspicious for young people trying to develop their lives and careers. Laskin's additional burden to bear was the anti-Semitism rife among Toronto's professional classes. Girard does a particularly fine job of documenting its odious forms in that particular milieu. It was hard to shake. In 1965, when Laskin was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal, the judges of the court were in the habit of playing a rubber of bridge at the University Club at the end of a working day. The club (unconnected to the university) did not admit Jews as members.

Girard's portrait of Laskin's professional life is the great strength of the biography. He consistently sets the particulars of Laskin's career in context, recreating for the reader the worlds of legal academe, labour arbitration, and the bench, and explaining the provenance of the many issues with which this gifted man had to deal. Even the content of the later chapters on Laskin's years on the Supreme Court of Canada, in which Girard tackles his judicial record in some detail, is easy for the lay reader to grasp. A lawyer himself, Girard organizes the material well and writes lucidly about the successes, trials, and tribulations of his subject with humour, grace, and understanding. The chapter on the famous Patriation Reference, 1981, presents the issues at stake clearly but at the same time conveys the drama surrounding the event.

The fly in the ointment is the fact that Girard had no access to the Laskin papers. As he acknowledges at the outset, his is not an authorized biography, and the Laskin family has not been involved in it. In addition, Laskin had a strong sense of personal privacy. Evidently he was not one to reflect openly or even to close friends about himself. As a result, neither Girard nor the reader gains much knowledge about Laskin the man – what made him tick. Girard uses some interpretive common sense about his status as a Jewish outsider and notions about twentieth-century masculinity. Still there are predictable gaps, beginning with his parents. Russian emigrés to Canada who made their home in Fort William–Port Arthur, they raised three successful sons. One would like to know more about the relationship between Laskin and his parents, especially his mother. Another gap is his marriage. On Girard's account it was close and happy one, and yet he can give us very little sense of Peggy Tenenbaum. Nor can he say anything at all about Laskin as a parent. Then there is the war, and the fact that Laskin did not join the Canadian military effort. Girard can only speculate about his views on the...