“Not to Be Bought, Nor for Sale”: The Trials of Joseph Edward Bird

Joseph Edward Bird (1868–1948) gained a reputation as a radical lawyer after he established a law practice in Vancouver in 1902. Few city lawyers of his generation maintained a 36-year practice involving significant labour, civil libertarian, and criminal cases. Bird is best known for his legal defence of 376 passengers from India aboard the Komagata Maru, blocked from landing in Canada on 23 May 1914, a case few other lawyers would handle because of public hostility toward Asian immigration.¹ Bird took the unpopular stand at the time because he was “a committed socialist and attacker of injustice,” his grandson Richard Bird told the Vancouver Sun newspaper many decades later.² Bird also represented several trade unions, including organized coal miners in the 1913 Vancouver Island miners’ dispute and leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike. He exposed government corruption during a trial connected to the Janet Smith murder case, and in another instance, freed a First Nations man from state execution after a successful appeal and re-trial. A founding figure among BC’s labour and human rights lawyers, Bird broke significant legal ground. Yet his work has not been fully acknowledged, unlike the subsequent generation of like-minded BC lawyers, John Stanton, Harry Rankin, and Thomas Berger, who published compelling memoirs but without detailed historical context. This biographical account aims to enrich the generational connections in Vancouver’s legal and labour communities by presenting a wider perspective of Bird’s work as a progressive lawyer and examining court cases that impacted on social class and racial issues in the early 20th century.

Launching a Law Practice in Pre-war Vancouver

Bird began his legal career in Ontario where he worked for nine years, following legal training at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He was employed in two city law firms, eventually moving to a branch office in Rat Portage, later re-named Kenora. Bird was familiar with small town living, having been born in Barrie, Ontario on 16 July 1868, the fifth of Henry and Elizabeth Bird’s seven children. While practicing law in Rat Portage, he met Caroline Irwin. He was 31 years old and she 28 when they married. They had two sons, Henry in 1900 and Edward in 1901.³

Bird’s sister Elizabeth and her husband Lyman Duff succeeded in encouraging Bird and his family to move to the BC coast in 1902.⁴ Bird’s brother-in-law was practicing law in Victoria and later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. Bird made financial investments for Duff over the ensuing years – though not all were successful. Still the two men were always “cordial” according to Duff’s biographer, who also noted Bird was “well-meaning but incurably optimistic.”⁵

Vancouver had a population of about 29,000 and had only been incorporated 16 years when Bird was admitted to the BC bar.⁶ He practiced law in an era of expanding bureaucracies as capital became more concentrated. Lawyers arriving in the city before him had built secure practices by century’s turn and many were financially successful with their own business investments.⁷ Bird had always been a Liberal, but shifted his support to the Socialist Party of British Columbia (spbc) formed in 1901. He advertised his legal services in the Canadian Socialist (later re-named the Western Clarion) in August 1902 and continued to advertise within its pages for the next six years.⁸ The spbc was a marginal but influential group; a precursor to left-wing parties, including the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf). In 1904, the party merged with other groups to form the Socialist Party of Canada (spc). Bird and other members, many of them trade unionists, maintained a moderate socialist stand, despite a revolutionary mandate. spc candidates in provincial elections garnered an impressive percentage of the popular vote. On the eve of World War I the spc was estimated to have 3,000 members in BC.⁹

Joseph Edward...