Canadian Lawyer - sample

24 N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m sk Denise Dwyer what drew her to study law and she recalls a moment with her father when she was a girl in the early 1970s. "A lot of it has to do with the home I grew up in — we had the [Canadian] Bill of Rights followed by the [Canadian] Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] on our family room wall," she says. Her father was a union rep who worked for a large automotive company at the time. "It wasn't a very diverse workforce, so he always had some experiences that were fairly unique to someone who was black and male," she says. "He would tell us about advocating for your rights." She remembers well the spring of 1973. He was off with a back injury and as an eight-year-old girl she was heading outside to play one day when her father stopped her and said, "There is something important happening in the world right now — it is called the Watergate scandal — the Con- gressional hearings are on television and you should really be watching them so you understand the politics of the United States and how it affects the politics of Canada." Dwyer sat down and together they watched the Watergate hearings. "I remem- ber him telling me that [counsel to Richard Nixon] John Ehrlichman was not a very good lawyer and that I could be a much better advocate than he was. I look back and realize I grew up in a home where my father really respected the law and felt it was the avenue for you to express your rights and you shouldn't be afraid to do so," she says. "I feel those were the drivers. It all seeped into my consciousness from a lot of his own words." Dwyer, who is an assistant deputy min- ister at the Indigenous Education and Well Being division at the Ontario Ministry of Education and founder of the Black Female Lawyers Network, would go on to study economics and political science, earning a bachelor of arts degree from McGill Uni- versity, and then going on to graduate from the University of Windsor Law School. Her career in the Ontario public service began in 1991 as assistant Crown attorney at the Ministry of the Attorney General and later expanded to conducting drug prosecutions for the federal Department of Justice. In 2006, she became counsel for the Ministry of Community Safety and Correc- tional Services and, three years later, was promoted to legal director. Before going to the Ministry of Educa- tion in 2016, Dwyer was assistant deputy minister, Public Safety Training Division, at the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services. Her role included oversight of the Ontario Police College C R O S S E X A M I N E D Leading change within government Denise Dwyer is using her racialized experience to find solutions for black and indigenous youth By Jennifer Brown A

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