Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey (review)

This biography of the chief justice responsible for stickhandling many Charter cases of first instance through the Supreme Court is indispensable, both for those interested in Canadian legal history and general interest readers. It is, as one would expect, impeccably researched by Robert J. Sharpe (former University of Toronto law dean and now a leading appellate judge) together with Kent Roach (University of Toronto professor of constitutional law). The book profits from the authors' unrestricted access to Dickson's archives and ample research support supplied by a stable of students and law clerks. Sharpe and Roach can and do deliver crystalline legal analysis of Dickson's key judgments to make their case that Dickson was one of Canada's greatest judges.

Dickson's wartime wounding under friendly fire and his dramatic return to Canada within hours of the birth of his first child is memorable and moving. These early anecdotes, and others, establish the dignified courage Dickson brought to a life of stellar accomplishment while enduring sustained pain. Regrettably, we get much less sense of Dickson as a person at the peak of his judicial career. But more regrettably, we also get relatively little sense of how personal life experience shaped Dickson's characteristic stance of compromise. Yet compromise is the approach which Sharpe and Roach consider characteristic both of Dickson's greatest judgments and of his judicial leadership of the Court during the crucial years when fundamental Charter jurisprudence evolved.

Sharpe and Roach hang their theme of compromise on Dickson's ability to construct legal 'halfway houses.' By this term applied jurisprudentially, they mean judgments capable of accommodating disparate and opposing rules of law while valorizing the principles contained in each of them. Sharpe and Roach deftly develop Dickson's distinctive 'halfway house' jurisprudence from his days as a trial judge and on the Manitoba Court of Appeal through the pre-Charter years to the height of his powers on the Supreme Court.

Sharpe and Roach assert, with respect to Dickson's leadership role as chief justice during the early Charter years, that his open-minded willingness to listen to the views of all meant he achieved compromise on the bench as well. Some colleagues attest that Dickson's skill eliminated unseemly lobbying on the Supreme Court - a perspective sharply contrary to that held by Madame Justice Bertha Wilson, who served on the Court during Dickson's tenure. Dickson's halfway house of compromise, say his biographers, characterized his style with respect to other policy concerns in which Dickson also took a leadership role, including the Meech Lake debate, the structuring of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and Quebec secession issues. But common sense tells us that compromise, whether political or personal, is most often a messy business - the very reason for the double connotation the term has acquired.

Sharpe and Roach might have considered more fully just how the architecture of Canadian jurisprudential halfway houses is made possible and even rendered necessary because of its legal foundation, those infuriatingly difficult-to-interpret balancing provisions which structure our Charter and were themselves born of compromise. Canadians R Compromise because Canadian rights can never be absolute: all our rights are subject to reasonable limits demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. If in the Charter Canadians have created a constitution uniquely suited to our society, continually evolving in response to changes in that society, then arguably Dickson's halfway house of cautious but principled compromise is dug deep into the Canadian psyche itself.

That Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey leaves us wanting to travel further along the path blazed by this eminent chief justice is, of course, ample indication of just how important a biography Sharpe and Roach have written. A halfway house signals that we have not ended the journey but are only partway there. Compromise is not the abandonment of principle but wise and temporary accommodation of a multiplicity of principles: Sharpe and Roach demonstrate that Dickson knew...