More than 50 Law Society of Upper Canada members showed up at the regulator’s annual general meeting last night and overwhelming showing their support to keep its 215-year-old name.

Federal government lawyer Thomas Vincent makes his argument for the LSUC to change its name to the Ontario Law Society last night. (Photo: Omar Ha-Redeye)

The lively debate at Osgoode Hall last night was mixed with passionate comments and bursts of laughter to discuss Federal government lawyer Thomas Vincent’s formal motion in a battle that saw traditionalists and modernists divided.

“I didn’t expect the motion to go forward. But I do think it was important to have that discussion,” says Omar Ha-Redeye, a family lawyer in Toronto and one of the few who supported Vincent’s motion. “From my impression of the debate, the vote wasn’t actually based on merits but rather on tradition, which is disappointing, given lawyers are trained to debate issues on their merits. “

The formal motion to change the law society’s name to the Ontario Law Society was brought by Vincent last month and has been a hotly contested issue among members of the bar ever since.

Vincent argued the law society’s current name created confusion among the public and needed to be modernized to reflect Canada’s current geography.

“Typically law society members are dealing with highly educated and sophisticated individuals and so they may not be aware of people in the general public who might be confused by the name,” says Ha-Redeye. “In this case, I would say the absence of information doesn’t lead to a conclusion and we should study the issue further to see if there truly is a problem and then find the best way to address it.”

Still, Alan Heisey, a lawyer at Papazian Heisey Myers who has been following the debate and opposes the name change, says he was encouraged by the debate.

“I thought the debate was very healthy and it was encouraging to see so many people who knew about the law society’s history,” says Heisey. “I learned quite a bit and I think those who were dissatisfied with the name perhaps didn’t know the law society had such a history. Maybe there should be a component in the bar admission course related to that.”

A formal vote was not taken at the annual general meeting, however, of the more than 50 members who attended, three supported the motion. Those three were Vincent, Ha-Redeye, and past Ontario Bar Association president Lee Akazaki.

During the meeting, it was estimated the cost to the law society to change its name would be between $1.4 and $1.5 million — a figure that would likely come have to come from increases to member’s annual fees.

See Monday’s issue of Law Times for more on this story.

Update: 4:39 p.m. - Clarify that Alan Heisey was not at the LSUC meeting.

Ontario’s family law bar may finally get its wish of a province-wide unified family court system after inter-governmental discussions got underway with a view to expanding the service.

Ontario’s Attorney General John Gerretsen says expanding the unified family court is key to his plans for improving the justice system.

The unified court started as a pilot project in Hamilton, Ont. 35 years ago, and currently operates at 17 sites across Ontario, about one-third of court locations in the province.

The federal government is responsible for judicial appointments to the unified court, and speaking this morning at the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Sixth Annual Family Law Summit, Ontario’s Attorney General John Gerretsen told the audience of that expanding the UFC is key to his plans for improving the justice system.

“I have started discussion with the federal minister of justice Rob Nicholson, as well as other members of the federal cabinet, and there seems to be a willingness to expand the unified family court process across this province on an incremental basis,” said Gerretsen.

Gerretsen said his own time as a sole practitioner in Kingston, Ont., where he did some family law work before he went into politics, gave him an insight into people’s troubles with the current division of powers in most locations.

The Ontario Court of Justice deals with custody, access, child and spousal support, adoption, and child protection applications, but not divorce or division of property matters. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice can decide disputes involving divorce, division of property, child and spousal support, and custody and access, but not child protection or adoption matters.

“If there was one thing people could never understand, it was why they had to go to two different courts to get their family situations dealt with,” Gerretsen said. “I must admit that when I came into the ministry, since we’ve had a unified family court in the Kingston area and most of eastern Ontario since the late 1990s, I had assumed a unified court was pretty well standard across the province.”

The UFC has been a hot topic at previous years’ summits. In 2011, then- attorney general Chris Bentley, LSUC Treasurer Laurie Pawlitza, and Chief Justice Warren Winkler all teamed up to demand its immediate expansion.

“We’ve studied the UFCs enough,” Winkler said in 2011. “We need to spread that right across the province.”

With a 35-year wait already behind them, Gerretsen warned attendees at the summit that their well-exercised patience could be tried further in the future.

“We are currently experiencing a challenging fiscal climate and given that, province-wide expansion may take longer, and may be done in incremental fashion,” he said. “There is no doubt there will be many challenges as we unify more court sites, but the important thing to remember is the unified family court system will allow us to focus on the goal of providing what’s best for the people who are using it.”

Canada’s treatment of mentally ill female prisoners is “cruel, inhuman, and degrading,” says a report released yesterday by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law’s International Human Rights program.

‘The lack of treatment for mentally ill women . . . is to me, still really quite shocking,’ says report author Renu Mandhane (Photo: Heather Gardiner)

The probe into Canada’s corrections system was conducted as a result of the death of 19-year-old inmate Ashley Smith, who died from asphyxiation after tying a ligature around her neck in October 2007 at the Grand Valley Institution in Kitchener, Ont. Smith had been transferred 17 times during approximately one year of incarceration.

“Smith’s death was a direct result of the interaction between her mental health issues and the prison environment, and the failure of the Correctional Service of Canada to respond appropriately to her mental health needs,” states the report.

IHRP director Renu Mandhane, along with 2L students Elizabeth Bingham and Rebecca Sutton, set out to prove that Smith’s case was not an isolated incident. They met with female prisoners at Grand Valley and found they also faced the same kind of “inhuman” treatment.

According to their research, at least one in three federally sentenced women suffers from a mental-health issue and close to half have attempted to harm themselves. Corrections Canada’s treatment of these women is discriminatory and violates the rights to liberty and security of person, health, access to justice and information, says the report.

“The lack of treatment for mentally ill women, especially in light of Ashley Smith’s in-custody death, is to me, still really quite shocking,” Mandhane tells Legal Feeds. “We’re five years out from her death and I can’t believe that things have not significantly changed.”

Mandhane says one of the problems is that the public doesn’t hold Corrections Canada liable. “Corrections tend to operate outside of the public view. They aren’t accountable in the same way as some of the other parts of the justice system,” she says. “[T]here’s so little public understanding of what goes on in our prisons that we don’t hold the government to the same standard as we do in terms of the protection of rights of, for example, accused people in criminal court.”

She is hopeful that the report will spur Corrections Canada to be more accountable to the public for its treatment of mentally ill prisoners, but she’s not overly optimistic.

“[G]iven what I’ve learned through the researching of this report, I really don’t think that the correctional system can be adequately fixed to house mentally ill women without violating their rights,” she says. “If it could, Ashley Smith’s death would’ve prompted that, and the fact that it hasn’t just gives me no faith in their commitment to protection of the human rights of these women.”

Canada

B.C. mushroom farm owner tells inquest 'I'm a victim, too', The Globe and Mail

Lawyer defends firm that allegedly charged 'criminal rates', The Province

46 arrested in massive debit and credit card scam, Winnipeg Free Press

United States

Second masseur accuses John Travolta of sexual assault, Reuters

Jury begins deliberations in Jennifer Hudson family murders, Reuters

International

EU court rules against French fund tax regulation, Reuters

Radical cleric Qatada loses European appeal bid, Reuters