CL Talk

Harvey Brownstone: Canada's first openly gay judge speaks without prejudice

May 19, 2026

Harvey Brownstone made history in March 1995 when he became the first openly gay judge in Canada. Twenty-six years later, he retired from the Ontario Court of Justice – and he's now free to say exactly what he thinks about the system he served. In this episode, Brownstone speaks with Canadian Lawyer managing editor Tim Wilbur about his new memoir, Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge (ECW Press, May 2026), tracing a life that spans a French-Algerian Holocaust survivor mother, years on welfare after being thrown out of the house at 19, a career built fighting homophobia, and a 26-year judicial career that included presiding over family and criminal courts, officiating hundreds of same-sex weddings, and a blocked bid for chief justice he describes as "a fiasco." The conversation covers the old boys' club he walked into on his first day on the bench — including colleagues who arranged a lap dance as a form of conversion therapy — and how the judiciary transformed over his tenure. He also makes an unsparing argument about why Canada's family court system is structurally broken: child custody disputes, he says, should be treated as a health care problem, not a legal one, and the adversarial model serves no one — least of all children.