Canadian Lawyer

8 O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m \ AT L A N T I C \ C E N T R A L \ W E S T REGIONAL WRAP-UP simple suspicions. In August, Grey also vigorously opposed a new Quebec anti- hate speech bill, during hearings at the National Assembly, that would give the Quebec Human Rights Commission the power to investigate any alleged offence and refer it to the Human Rights Tribu- nal for action. He has been both an important actor and commentator in Quebec's language debate. He successfully represented the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards, which declared some parts of Bill 101 unconstitutional, and he made rep- resentation at the United Nations against then Liberal premier Robert Bourassa's legislation restricting the use of English on commercial signs. He thus became a champion, in the eyes of many, of the Anglophone cause in Quebec. But then he joined his voice to some Quebec nationalists' to defend the law. "Once the most retrograde aspects of Bill 101 were removed, I agreed to the need to protect French; I had seen the sta- tistics and realized what would happen if French had not been protected, the island would have turned into a Louisiana," he tells Canadian Lawyer. "I always find that people cannot be impartial about these things; the very same people who yell and shout at me about my wanting to keep Montreal French want to keep Jerusalem's Jewish majority in the same way. I have many friends who are Zionists and I have many friends who are Quebec nationalists and I find them extremely similar . . . and they are not flattered by the comparison," he adds bursting into laughter. Initially from a Jewish family, he rejects all ethnic, religious, or language identity labels. "I am not a one-issue person, I don't have any group loyalty," he says. He arrived in Montreal from Poland, in 1957, when he was nine. He spoke no French and no English, but that did not prevent him from later earning a law degree from McGill University and then from Oxford University, as well as a mas- ters in Russian literature, completed at McGill while reading law. Literature is central to his life and he refers to it constantly in his legal practice. "The law is as much about Dickens' Great Expectations as a case that was decided last week," he says. "Some judges get impatient, some don't. In the Kindler case [Kindler v. Canada (Minister of Justice), 1991], I have argued all of the literature against capital punishment: Victor Hugo's Le dernier jour d'un condamné, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Albert Camus, Dostoyevsky. . . . I use Shakespeare all the time." Grey worries about the harshness of criminal law under the Harper govern- ment. "[C]riminal law has become an instrument of repression and stigmatiza- tion instead of fulfilling its proper role of defending citizens from danger," he wrote in a Montreal Gazette opinion piece. "People do not know there are many wrongful convictions, that many people plead guilty because they cannot afford the defence, and it destroys you, it follows you forever and they only realize how wrong it is when their kid gets picked up on a charge of smoking something somewhere and Mr. Harper imposes a minimum sen- tence. "If you want to practise in human rights, you've got to stand up for those who are not popular, like prisoners, for groups who are unpopular, like Muslims right now, for people of whom other people say 'there he goes again,'" he says. He fears the recent Quebec anti-hate speech bill will create a system of denun- ciation, which flies in the face of the old virtues dear to him: honour, dignity, the ability to forgive. "It used to be dishonour- able to squeal," he says. "This encourage- ment to report on anybody who offends you is dangerous." Grey is a staunch individualist, yet he is definitely on the political left. For him, economic equality is paramount. "Equal- ity of groups is our obsession, women, gays, blacks, etc. I'm all for it, but it means nothing if there is no economic equality. Take health care for example: Everybody is treated the same, nobody can jump the line, whoever you are, but if you're very rich, you fly to the U.S. to be treated." The result is you get a world in which people are competing for their group; lobbies rule, says Grey. He defended minority rights in courts all his life, yet he opposes multiculturism. "I believe in mixed marriages and integra- tion, and immigrants should be told that this country favours mixing," he says. It also means that the local population has to accept to be changed and be transformed. "In the 1880s in rural Quebec, there was no spaghetti or sushi on restaurant menus," concludes Grey with a smile. — PASCAL ELIE pascalelie636@gmail.com 'There he goes again' Continued from page 7 F or Patricia Stanley, the triggers can be unpredict- able. Recently, it was realtors, not lawyers, who reminded her of the trauma she went through dur- ing a family law matter more than a decade ago during a stressful and upsetting time in her life. Stanley, an Ontario resident who used to live in Texas, had a recent panic attack in her kitchen. "One realtor walked into my kitchen and slapped down all the previous listings over 10 years when I had tried to sell my home, exactly the same way my Texas lawyer would slap down papers on his desk." Stanley describes herself as "having a meltdown" over having to sign documents to list and refinance her home all due to the trauma she endured during her divorce proceedings between 1997 and 2003. "You can't stop the recall process; you just have to wait it out until it goes away. It's easier to do this without people around you," she says. The mental injury people suffer while dealing with the courts can be so great that Karin Huffer, an adjunct professor at the department of professional studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, says protracted litigation is a risk to public health. Huffer, the author of Overcoming the Devastation of Legal Abuse Syndrome, says COURT PROCESS TRAUMATIZING LAWYERS AND LITIGANTS

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