Former Court of Appeal judge on being ‘dragged west kicking and screaming’ and loving where she landed
The Honourable Alison Harvison Young may joke that her career has “dragged her kicking and screaming west along the 401,” but the journey gave her a principle she now passes to every junior lawyer she mentors: don’t over plan your destination; keep an open mind and go where your interests and skills take you.
From her roots in Montreal and her time in Kingston to her arrival in Toronto and recent move to McCarthy Hansen & Company LLP, Harvison Young found she left each stop reluctantly.
“The surprising outcome is that everything I’ve loved to do has taken me in a direction that I’ve loved at least as much,” she says. “When opportunities came along, I’d think long and hard and then jump off the cliff. It’s turned out pretty well for me.”
The long road west
Harvison Young’s career started with a gamble. A young mother to a three-year-old daughter, she borrowed daycare money from her brother and enrolled in law school at McGill University. The stakes couldn’t have been higher, but she had “intense motivation” on her side. She gave herself until Christmas to prove she belonged.
“I told myself I’d quit then if I wasn’t in the top half of the class; I couldn’t afford to put good money after bad,” Harvison Young recalls.
She didn’t need to worry. After the first year, scholarships made law school financially viable and she graduated in 1983. By this time a single parent, she clerked for Justice Willard Estey at the Supreme Court of Canada. She almost didn’t apply for that position, assuming she wouldn’t get it.
Estey was old school and a proponent of tough love, hiring clerks with views different from his own so they could challenge each other. Once Harvison Young understood that, “we had a wonderful relationship.”
“He would occasionally yell — this would be completely unacceptable today — but I learned he respected my view when I didn’t just say yes, Your Honour, yes, Your Honour. He wanted to know what I thought.”
After her time at the SCC, Harvison Young practised law for two years before pursuing graduate studies at Oxford, where she earned her B.C.L. in 1988. She returned to join the faculty at McGill, where she taught for a decade and served as Associate Dean from 1993 to 1995. She was happy to remain there, but Queen’s University Faculty of Law, then at an important crossroads, came along with a very attractive opportunity.
Again, Harvison Young took the leap. She served as Dean from 1998 to 2004 before moving even further west to Toronto, where she sat on the Ontario Superior Court until 2018, and then on the Court of Appeal.
When sharing her experience with younger lawyers, Harvison Young doesn’t sugarcoat what her journey demanded.
“There’s no shortcut to the reality that it’s really hard work especially in the first few years, and you have to essentially like what you’re doing,” she says. “If you’re not sure after about a year, give it another. If you still absolutely hate everything, think about a change. But there’s no shortcut to the work and commitment involved.”
McCarthy Hansen: A deliberate choice
Harvison Young recently announced her latest career move: joining the ranks of McCarthy Hansen as counsel and mentor, while simultaneously launching a mediation and arbitration practice this October. Available to parties and counsel outside the firm, the practice draws directly on nearly two decades of experience on the Ontario bench.
Harvison Young says McCarthy Hansen’s “energy, dynamism, and creativity really impressed me,” and was particularly drawn by the complementary leadership the firm’s name partners demonstrate. She’s been watching the boutique family law firm’s lawyers for years, observing Martha McCarthy’s success in M. v. H. — the landmark SCC ruling that extended spousal support rights to same-sex partners — and tracking Heather Hansen through the ranks as well.
“They stand out as smart, reasonable, always prepared, very articulate, never wasteful of the court’s time, and very good with other counsel — including self-represented parties, which is important in family law where more and more parties are unrepresented,” Harvison Young says.
Harvison Young’s connection to the issues the lawyers were arguing ran deeper than the bench. During her years at McGill, Harvison Young wrote extensively on how the law was failing to keep pace with the plural realities of modern family life. The law was stuck in the nuclear family.
“There was no script for same-sex or blended families, for example, and that was blown open by several cases — including, of course, M. v. H.,” she says.
The social policy part was what got Harvison Young interested in family law at the beginning of her career, and it’s part of the reason McCarthy Hansen makes sense now. The firm handles the full spectrum of family law, from marriage contracts and cohabitation agreements through to complex, high net worth litigation.
One aspect of that work Harvison Young found particularly striking is that the vast majority of lawyers at the firm are women yet a disproportionate number of their clients, particularly in high net worth matters, are men.
“These are serious advocates who take on challenging cases and clients and advocate fairly and fearlessly for them,” Harvison Young says, adding that the welcome so far has been “nothing short of overwhelming and warm.”
A practice built on the bench
As a judge, writing decisions and long appeals aligned with Harvison Young’s previous role as an academic. The settlement and case conferences called upon skills developed during her administrative experience at McGill and Queen’s, where she used to joke “you’re often trying to make unreasonable people act reasonably — or herd cats.”
The judicial vantage point, she says, is a specific asset in mediation. A judge is trained to identify the right legal result, not advocate for a side. Harvison Young will bring that neutrality to bear on McCarthy Hansen’s cases with an approach she describes as a mile-high perspective.
Harvison Young remembers one cohabitation case, over 20 years ago, where a couple, despite not being together long and having very few assets, were headed to court. At the case conference, Harvison Young quickly realized the entire case hinged on the dog they shared. She suggested a week-about agreement, which was enough to end the conflict and the litigation.
“Any separation is highly emotional. Sometimes there are particular drivers and if you can understand what the issue is, you can sometimes cut to the chase early and deal with it.”
Harvison Young’s role at McCarthy Hansen extends beyond dispute resolution, and she says part of the real joy of her post is interacting with young lawyers again. Rejecting the term mentorship as too formalistic, she frames this aspect of her role as “paying attention to people as human beings moving through different stages of their lives and careers, stages that don't always align neatly with professional timelines.”
“A family death doesn’t necessarily happen at a convenient moment,” she says. “Women often have children at critical times in their careers. We must find ways of recognising the ebbs and flows of life and the relationship that has with careers. It’s something I’ve always cared about, and McCarthy Hansen does it well.”
Letting the next chapter unfold
As for how the balance of her new role works out, Harvison Young is content to let that unfold the way every previous chapter has, by following what she loves and trusting it will take her somewhere worth going.
She does know one thing: her goal is to make a positive difference at McCarthy Hansen. It’s a standard she borrows from Ian Scott, the former Ontario Attorney General she describes as a wonderful lawyer, who observed that anyone working in an institution, public or private, should aim to leave it better than they found it.
“McCarthy Hansen is a great firm,” she says. “I hope I’m seen as a positive factor in whatever direction they go.”
This article was produced in partnership with McCarthy Hansen.
