Canadian Lawyer

got out of there we could compete with anyone at any school. So they drew us to the maximum of our capabilities." Those capabilities took Charron through Carleton University (BA), the University of Ottawa for her law degree, private practice in civil and crimi- nal litigation with Lalonde Chartrand Colonnier, 10 years as an assistant Crown attorney in Ottawa, as well as lecturing in the French common law section of the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law. By the time Charron was appointed a District Court judge and local judge of the High Court of Ontario in 1988, she Charron says the judges meet as soon as possible after the hearing. When she was first named to the SCC, the court had a practice of hearing from each judge according to their seniority. "Initially, when I got here the court was still fol- lowing a pretty set procedure where the most junior judge would speak first and then we would go in reverse order of seniority. . . . It put quite a burden on the junior judge but I thought it made a lot of sense as well because you could have your opportunity to give your views on a case." Over time, the court adopted a less formal process and now begins its delib- I WOULD BE CAUTIOUS ABOUT ABSOLUTES BUT IT IS CERTAINLY A VERY IMPORTANT PART OF THE FUNCTIONING OF THE COURT THAT WE HAVE BOTH LANGUAGES AND IF YOU'RE FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO BE FULLY BILINGUAL WHEN YOU ARRIVE HERE THEN ALL THE BETTER, IT IS LESS WORK FOR YOU. IF YOU'RE NOT, WELL THE EFFORT IS PUT IN AND YOU LEARN. was only 37 years old. In 1995, she was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal and by 2004, at 53, she was sitting on the Supreme Court of Canada bench. Among the lessons she learned back in Sturgeon Falls that helped along the way were organization, discipline, and intellectual rigour. "Being good enough was never good enough," she recalls. "Doing it well. You had to have the drive for excellence and I appreciated that." On the Supreme Court, however, Charron had to adapt to the reality of the job. Because judgments are divvied up among judges and can take months to fine tune, there is always unfinished work. "I had to mentally adjust to the fact that I could not clear my desk. Some peo- ple might not be bothered by that and I was. I had to think differently and accept it as a fact that it would be like that." While the public tends to focus on the hearings where scarlet-robed judges lis- ten to the arguments and pepper counsel for each party with questions, Charron says much of the work takes place well before the panel files into the courtroom. "There really is a huge amount of prepa- ration because when we do get to the hearing and we hear the argument and we walk out and the door closes, we are ready to decide the case." eration with an open discussion, says Charron. "With a general discussion you have the benefit of hearing the people's views . . . then we go back to each in turn [and] we give our views on how we think we would dispose of the case and why." Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin then asks for volunteers to write the judgment but the judgments are only assigned to judges at the end of a two-week session. If there is going to be a dissenting opin- ion, the dissenting judges decide among themselves who will write it, but it is only written after the majority opinion is final- ized, Charron points out. Charron, who has written in the majority more than any other member of the court, says the process of drafting a decision then getting the agreement of up to eight other judges can sometimes take quite a bit of time. However, she has always welcomed other viewpoints. "For example, a colleague of mine would say, 'I agree with you on the result and I don't see any problems with how you dealt with that issue. But on the first issue I'm concerned with what you are saying here Read justice Louise Charron's ruling in at at paragraphs 12 to 15 because it might close the door on other matters that weren't truly before us so perhaps you should state it more narrowly.' That's very useful when someone detects that it may not be interpreted the way we intend." In fact, thinking wide and writing nar- rowly is often key to writing a judgment, says Charron. "It is important to think wide, but write narrowly because usu- ally the issue that you are called upon to decide is rooted in a particular fact situa- tion and can be viewed narrowly. It's not that you just look at it that way. You can't. You have to think about how it fits in the big picture." One of her rulings Charron believes made an impact on Canada's justice sys- tem was her 2009 judgment in R. v. McNeil, a case of third-party disclosure in which an accused was trying to obtain disciplinary files concerning misconduct by an arresting officer. "I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to set it up. I wanted it to work. I wanted it to be functional. I did find that my experience as a litigator, as a Crown, as a trial judge helped me in knowing a bit how it works," she says. "I'm sure that one had an impact on practice, how things would happen afterwards." PREPARATION MATTERS successful lawyers understand two key things. "I put it very succinctly — it's called preparation, preparation, prepa- ration. And know your court." The retired judge says most of the C lawyers she saw plead before the Supreme Court had done their homework and the level of advocacy was "good if not excel- lent." However, that wasn't always the case in the lower courts. "I have seen the error done more at the appellate level when I was at the Ontario Court of Appeal by some experienced law- yers, who are smart and great litigators, but they think they can bypass prepara- tion because they have 20-some years behind them and they are so used to pleading before the Court of Appeal. And it was obvious, from minute www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com A PRIL 2012 29 harron says in her experience when it comes to pleading before the Supreme Court — or any court for that matter — the most R.v. McNeil tin yurl.c om/r-v-mcneil.

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