Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/642579
"Where did it all start?" Susan Ursel, legendary human rights and labour rights champion, takes a second to answer. "It started with my grade 11 history teacher who didn't do the usual dry history but talked about workers' rebellions and peasants' revolts and got me interested in the history of working people and the trade union movement." Growing up in a comfortable middle class family in Mississauga, these weren't issues normally discussed around the house. "There were many dinner table arguments about this," she says, laughing. "I was a little offside of the family culture." Since 1986, Ursel has devoted her legal career to acting for under-represented and marginalized members of society. She has argued and helped win landmark Charter cases at the Supreme Court of Canada. In Egan, of which Ursel is especially proud, she represented the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in a challenge to the opposite sex definition of spouse in the Old Age Security Act. In a more recent victory before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, Ursel represented a trans woman in a challenge to provisions of the province's Vital Statistics Act, which required that transsexual surgery be performed before sex designation could be changed on a birth certificate. "That to me is the epitome of inhumanity and bureaucracy gone mad," she says. "That case made me particularly proud because I knew what my client had been through and how utterly appalling it was to require surgery just to get a letter changed on a piece of paper." A senior partner at Ursel Phillips Fellows Hopkinson, Ursel still bursts with enthusiasm when she talks about her work – ten percent is pro bono in any given year. Find a niche that suits you, she urges her fellow lawyers, and contribute your time and expertise. Every bit makes a difference. "Our community needs to make legal services available to everybody. Otherwise the system of rule of law is completely delegitimized." Susan Ursel 6 FLIP YOUR WIG