Canadian Lawyer

Legal Ethics by Philip Slayton No end to the circus I s there no end to the Lori Douglas circus, an apparently interminable saga of personal and institutional misjudgment? In case you've spent the last few years in a cabin in the woods cut off from what passes as civilization, or on Mars, let me explain in brief what's been going on. Lori Douglas is the associate chief justice of Manitoba. Before she was appointed to the bench in 2005, salacious nude photos of her were posted on the Internet by her husband, Jack King, apparently without her knowledge, although she later discovered what he had done. It is alleged that King, a practising lawyer, also tried to 16 F e b r uary 2014 www.CANADIAN arrange for Douglas to have sex with one of his clients, who then claimed he had been sexually harassed. To cut a long and depressing story short, the Lori Douglas affair ended up before the Canadian Judicial Council, the national body charged with disciplining judges. That is when it went from being a titillating narrative of questionable individual conduct to an alarming example of judicial dysfunction. This past November, after more than two years of messing about, members of the CJC inquiry committee considering the complaint against Douglas resigned en masse, giving angry written reasons for why they were quit- L a w ye r m a g . c o m ting. Back to square one. The doomed inquiry committee was appointed in September 2011. It wasn't long before Douglas' counsel, Sheila Block, went to Federal Court alleging the committee was biased and seeking judicial review of its proceedings. The law seemed to require the commission be represented by the attorney general of Canada, but the attorney general had a problem. How could he get involved at this early stage when, as minister of Justice, he would eventually have to deal impartially with the committee's recommendation, perhaps asking Parliament to remove a sitting judge? Eventually, the attorney general announced he intended to "remain neutral" and take no position on the merits of Douglas' judicial review application. Douglas and her various allegations were therefore, in effect, unopposed in Federal Court, and she obtained a stay of the inquiry committee's proceedings. In its resignation reasons, the committee castigated the attorney general. "The AGC's decision to remain neutral means that the judicial conduct process and an inquiry committee's role in it will never be able to be defended since this same conflict will arise every time a judge brings a judicial review application against an inquiry committee. . . . If the process is allowed to be sidetracked in this way, a knowledgeable public would think that a judicial conduct process has been created which is, by its nature, doomed to delay, wasted costs, confusion, inconsistency and perhaps, in the end, failure. And it would be hard to disagree with them." The committee members quit in a snit. They thought it was better for everybody — particularly them — if Dushan Milic The Lori Douglas affair makes the judiciary look bad to the person on the street.

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