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CROSS EXAMINED An offi cer and a lawyer Y Canada's judge advocate general has a job comparable to that of the attorney general of a mid-sized province. BY RICHARD CLEROUX oung Blaise Cathcart was expected to follow in the proud Cape Breton military tradition of his father whose name he shares as the family moved across the country on military bases. He did follow his father, but he did it as a lawyer, rising through mil- itary ranks on his legal skills. Today he is Brig.-Gen. Blaise Cathcart, judge advo- cate general of the Canadian Forces. From his corner office at National Defence headquarters, Cathcart has a commanding view of the city below. He talks fast and clipped, and has a sharp sense of humour. His answers are blunt. No time for courtroom niceties around here. Cathcart practises law on behalf of a country caught up in the longest war in its history. One minute he's on the phone with legal advice for the minister of National Defence, and the next he's on the line with the chief of the defence staff. And then another legal crisis in Afghanistan or another general in trouble. Judge Advocate General office law- yers are everywhere: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, on bases all across Canada; there are Canadian military everywhere. Consider the JAG a legal sys- tem that stretches around the world. It has 158 full-time military lawyers, 53 reservist lawyers, four military judges, and lawyers on contract as needed. Cathcart's job is comparable to that of an attorney general in a mid-sized province, except that he has to administer two completely separate justice systems — military and civilian — and they often overlap around the globe. On the field of battle, in places such as Afghanistan, JAG lawyers work right beside battle commanders giving legal advice. They often deal with life and death issues: when to shoot, when not to shoot, when to take prisoners, what to do with them — all things a parliamentary com- mittee will later second-guess. His battlefield lawyers must be blunt. "Talking to commanders, we say, 'This is the law on that. Got it?' And com- manders, not the JAG, make the deci- sion," says Cathcart. Commanders can take legal advice or leave it. Just like a boss in the corporate boardroom. And if things go wrong, or there's comeback, the com- mander takes the rap, not the JAG lawyer. About 80 per cent of the JAG's work is giving advice to military officers. Another 10 per cent is administrative law, and the rest is court martial and military disci- pline. The operational law is the exciting part. "Eight legal advisers in Afghanistan right now — seven for us, one for the Afghans," says Cathcart. "Rule of law projects for them, use of force issues for us. We have targeting issues," he says, "and sometimes civilians are killed accidentally." Not exactly moot court. As a long-haired teenager in Nova Scotia, Cathcart didn't see himself going into either law or the military. He want- ed to teach. He took liberal arts and English lit at the University of Ottawa and Saint Mary's University. Then law attracted him, so he chose Dalhousie University, home. He close did litiga- tion for a year in Halifax, but hav- ing absorbed the 18 OC T OBER 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com Brig.-Gen. Blaise Cathcart, judge advocate general of the Canadian Forces. to "military culture" of his dad, an old regi- mental sergeant major with the Princess Louise Fusiliers, he joined the JAG in 1990 combining both law and the military. "I had a passion for service to Canada." He admits it sounds gooey, but insists it was his motivation. It was just about the time the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was coming to the military, he says. "I saw it as a challenge," he says, and plunged into it. When he was appointed judge advocate general, his mother teased him: "I didn't know you'd ever gone to judge's school, son." Actually he went to the London School of Economics and Political Science for a master's degree in public international law. He got the best marks in the class and credits his mentor, professor Christopher Greenwood, who is now with the International Court of Justice.