Shilling for Judges: Brian Dickson and His
Biographers
Robert J. Sharpe and Kent Roach, Brian Dickson: A Judges Journey.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for
Canadian Legal History, 2003. Pp. xiv, 576.
Reviewed by R.W. Kostal *
An unmistakable sign of a power shift is the sudden proliferation of justificatory
propaganda. Not thirty years ago, Canadian judges were deservedly viewed as
marginal figures in the countrys political structure. (In this regard, professors of law
were not even worth talking about.) Of course the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms1 or, put more precisely, the first phase of Charter interpretation by the
Supreme Court of Canada, changed all that. Suddenly this handful of unelected
lawyers was a formidable political force. Just as suddenly, the Canadian constitutional
law professoriate, once almost comprehensively irrelevant, thrilled to their new role
as public policy experts. But in all this an irony: although judicial law-making under
the Charter has only rarely faced acerbic criticism in Canada, a number of legal
scholars have felt no less compelled to vindicate it, even if in curiously oblique ways.
In recent years, the judicial biography has proved a popular vehicle for this task.
When Canadian judges had little power, their lives remained mostly unwritten.
(Of the fourteen Chief Justices preceding Dickson only one, Lyman Duff, has been
seen to merit a full-scale published study.2) The book under review,3 Robert Sharpe
and Kent Roachs expansive biography of Brian Dickson, is symptomatic of a much
* Associate Professor of Law and History at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of
Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and A
Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
R.W. Kostal 2006
To be cited as: (2006) 51 McGill L.J. 199
Mode de rfrence : (2006) 51 R.D. McGill 199
1 Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982, c. 11
2 David Ricardo Williams, Duff: A Life in the Law (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
3 Robert J. Sharpe & Kent Roach, Brian Dickson: A Judges Journey (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2003) [A Judges Journey].
[Charter].
Press, 1984).
[Vol. 51
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
200
different historical moment. A Judges Journey follows closely on the heels of W.H.
McConnells narrative study of the life and career of William McIntyre,4 and Ellen
Andersons more ambitious treatment of the life and judicial legacy of Bertha
Wilson.5 The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History series of the University of
Toronto Press has recently published a full-length biography of Bora Laskin, its third
such volume in four years.6 It is not incidental that all the extant works are admiring,
sometimes fawning, of their subject matter. They portray the judgeif not as hero
then as exceptionally virtuous champion of the summum bonum of contemporary
Canadian jurisprudence: rights. When these biographers are critical of their
subjects, it is in a perfunctory and detectably regretful way. In Canadian legal circles,
moreover, this reverential stance is regarded as befitting and even meritorious. For its
part, A Judges Journey has garnered high critical praise,7 and a prestigious prize.8 It
was co-written by persons of considerable academic weight. Robert Sharpe is the
widely published former dean of the law school at University of Toronto (and now a
Justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal). Kent Roach is one of the nations leading
constitutional scholars. Both are fellows of the Royal Society. By all accounts and
appearances, then, Sharpe and Roach on Dickson is intended (a subtle disclaimer9
notwithstanding), not as a boardroom decoration, but as a serious work of historical
scholarship. And on this basis it is herein reviewed.
In historical scholarship worthy of the name, scholars advance and sustain
arguments about their subject matter, and its connectedness to other important events.
On this score we encounter the first of A Judges Journeys many material
shortcomings. In the place of explicit theses, Sharpe and Roach are satisfied to
advance a number of general claims, claims not so much argued as repeated. In the
opinion of this reviewer, however, only one of the books central claims is
uncontroversial: that Brian Dickson was a fine man, exceptionally intelligent,
conscientious, and principled. The corollary of this claim, that Dickson was also a
Press, 2000).
4 W.H. McConnell, William R. McIntyre: Paladin of the Common Law (Ottawa: Carleton University
5 Ellen Anderson, Judging Bertha Wilson: Law as Large as Life (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2001).
6 Philip Girard, Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
7 See e.g. Paul Truster, Brian Dickson Down the Middle Law Times (15 December 2003) 8; Kirk
Makin, The Judge and the Juror The Globe and Mail (3 January 2004) D8; Roland Penner,
Defender of the Charter Literary Review of Canada 12:4 (May 2004) 25; Jamie Cameron,
Dicksons Law: Manifestly One of the Humanities (2005) 54 U.T.L.J. 93. The Cameron piece is at
once a review of A Judges Journey and fond tribute to Dickson and his judicial legacy, only
occasionally and superficially critical of the scholarship on display in A Judges Journey.
8 A Judges Journey was awarded the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize for 2003. The prize is an
annual award honouring a book that contributes to the understanding of Canada and/or its place in
the world.
9 A Judges Journey, supra note 3 at viii. In their Preface, the authors acknowledge that theirs is not
a complete history of its subject (ibid. at xiii). This point is discussed below.
201
R.W. KOSTAL BRIAN DICKSON AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS
2006]
great judge, arguably the most important judge in Canadas history,10 deserves
closer critical scrutiny.
One reason for caution is that the criteria employed by Sharpe and Roach to
measure greatness in a judge are theoretically unintelligible. In this regard, only the
authors biases are clear cut. A Judges Journey relies, to say the most about it, on a
simplistic model of Supreme Court judging. Before Dickson was appointed to the
Court, the authors contend, the Court spent its time dealing with technical legal
questions and resolving run-of-the-mill legal disputes.11 In fact, during this long and
dismal era the Justices were so timorous and befuddled they thought their job was to
apply precedents to the clear letter of the law, leaving questions of law reform and
social justice to the elected legislatures!12 In the early phases of Dicksons judicial
careerhere the authors are brutally frankhe himself embraced this primitivism.
But faithful readers are quickly reassured. Although Dicksons career on the bench
had an unsure start, during his tenure at the Supreme Court, first as a puisne Justice
and then for six pivotal years as its Chief Justice, he found his stride. In fact, in the
authors estimation Dickson ultimately became exactly the right sort of appellate
judge, one whose decisions were (the terms are repeated beyond the point of tedium)
creative and contextual. Dickson, so it would seem, possessed a very special gift.
In sizing up a case, he could discern when the law was out-of-step with the times, and
how best to bring it into line with changing social attitudes and sensibilities.13
Dickson also had an especially keen sense of what human interests deserved to be
fully realized as legal rights, and when these rights were being trod upon by Canadas
antediluvian elected bodies. In this new and heroic era of appellate judging, the
Supreme Court would not hesitate to strike down laws the judges thought infringed
fundamental rights and freedoms.14 Once a cautious and even humble institution,
under Brian Dicksons stout leadership the Court came to be at the centre of political
life in Canada.15
In the hands of Sharpe and Roach, Dicksons (purportedly) uninspired early
career as a judge is employed as a literary device. A Judges Journey is biography as
romance quest. It chronicles how a gifted but somewhat hesitant man overcame a
series of daunting obstacles (his native conservatism being one) finally to achieve his
destiny as a paragon of progressive judicial method during the crucial first years of
the Charter era. If Pierre Trudeau was born to entrench the Charter, Brian Dickson
was born to entrench a robust Charter jurisprudence. And if A Judges Journey has a
unifying thread, it is a total and serene conviction in the value and wisdom of this
jurisprudence. In this account, like a modern-day Saint Paul, Brian Dickson
10 Ibid. at 479.
11 Ibid. at 5.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid. at 444.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid. at 336.
[Vol. 51
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
202
journeyed along a preordained path. He was Canadas first great judicial apostle, the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms his good news.
Sharpe and Roach seem oblivious to the question begging underlying their claims
about the Supreme Court and Dicksons impact on its jurisprudence. The defects of
formalism (their term) both as a judicial practice, and more pertinently as a judicial
practice within a parliamentary democracy, are treated as self-evident. The analytical
and normative content of creative and contextual judging are also left for the
reader to supply. What passes for legal theory in A Judges Journey is a rigid liberal
determinism. In Sharpe and Roachs Canada, social attitudes and sensibilities are
carried forward on a prevailing liberal-progressive current. There are momentary
deviations to be sure, some of which become the subject of litigation. But citizens are
not to worry. When a judge like Brian Dickson, a judge almost mystically in tune
with the national soul, implements a creative and contextual approach to legal
issues, the law inevitably is restored to its right course. For Sharpe and Roach, it is
simply inconceivable that the nations politics might be internally complex and
divisive, or that to be in tune with Canadian society might, now or someday, to be in
tune with social conservatism, or even reaction. It is also inconceivable that some
Canadians might have serious reservations that a coterie of unelected lawyers, secure
in their tenure until age seventy-five, have managed to insinuate themselves to the
centre of political life.
If the claims made in A Judges Journey are dubious and dogmatic, its stance
toward historical sources is even more problematic. In the Preface to A Judges
Journey, the authors, if inadvertently, supply readers with at least two reasons to have
serious misgivings about the basic motivation and character of this work. Sharpe and
Roach explain that many of the most important and original sections of A Judges
Journey, especially those relating to the decision-making process at the Supreme
Court of Canada, are based on the authors exclusive and unrestricted access to the
Dickson archive, a large cache of private judicial papers and recorded interview
material deposited in the National Archives of Canada in 1995. The archive includes
previously undisclosed case files, memoranda, judicial conference notes, out-of-court
deliberations, and the research briefs and notes of his law clerks. Here Sharpe and
Roach rightly suggest that this is a rich and unusual resource16 for scholars. But two
further revelations raise alarm. Before he came to work on the Dickson biography,
one of the authors, Sharpe, had a long and close association with his subject. In the
1980s (as the authors make clear), Sharpe was an executive officer at the Supreme
Court of Canada. In these years he became an intimate of Dickson, and a trusted
retainer to the Court as a whole. In the early 1990s Sharpe undertook extensive
recorded interviews with Dickson, and with Dicksons co-operation began a
biography. After his death in 1998, Dicksons personal archive was closed to
everyone save Sharpe. Not accidentally perhaps, Sharpe (with his chosen co-author)
continued to enjoy exclusive access to these papers. From the point of view of the
16 Ibid. at ix.
203
R.W. KOSTAL BRIAN DICKSON AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS
2006]
scholarly objectivity of the project, this fact is worrying enough. But then some
further information about the integrity of the archive itself. Before he turned over
these materials, Sharpe and Roach reveal, Dickson carefully vetted every file and
removed any material that he thought should not be disclosed, even under the
restrictive terms he imposed.17
The authors express qualms about these matters, but for historians they are
decidedly the wrong ones. Nothing is said about how Sharpes professional
relationship, perhaps friendship, with Dickson might have influenced the nature and
content of the book. With respect to the Dickson archive, the authors main
preoccupation is with the sanctity of confidentiality at the Supreme Court. In writing
the book, Sharpe and Roach were particularly concerned that a profligate use of
Dicksons notes might impair out-of-court deliberations between Justices. On this
point Sharpe and Roach actually express relief that Dickson had been meticulous
and cautious18 in culling his archive, minimizing the chance that its use would injure
ongoing operations at the Court. (Many historians would have taken a different view
of Dicksons evidence tampering.) The authors frankly concede that the fact that the
archive has been compromised weakens [their] ability to present a complete
historical account.19 It would have been a larger concession, alas, from historians
who had begun the project committed to telling the whole story. In the result, the
Sharpe and Roach study suffers from a deficit of critical detachment, not source
materials.
Neither the Foreword to A Judges Journey (a pro forma blurb written by Peter
Oliver and Roy McMurtry), nor the authors Preface confront the really pertinent
questions about the motivation, genesis, or methodology of this project. Why, for
instance, did Dickson entrust his archive to Sharpe and Co.? On what criteria did
Dickson hold back specific documents, even from friendly biographers? How might
these decisions have skewed the information that remained? More generally, what is
the appropriate stance of scholarly biographers toward their subject matter? Finally,
and vitally, was A Judges Journey the critical inquiry of independent scholars or, in
effect, an authorized biography by scholars handpicked for their admiring
predilections toward Dickson and his career?
When the most plausible answers to these questions are collated, they support the
latter view. Why did Dickson entrust his archive to Sharpe and Co.? The only
sensible inference is that Dickson felt confident that Sharpe would write just the kind
of book that he in fact has written, a book which would celebrate his career and
especially his Charter jurisprudence. This, from the very outset of the Dickson
project, before the first box was opened and document read, was the books foregone
conclusion. A more intriguing question is why Dickson took pains to encourage such
an undertaking, going so far to provide exclusive access to a selective private archive.
17 Ibid. at xii.
18 Ibid. at xiii.
19 Ibid.
[Vol. 51
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
204
Here the answer must be more conjectural. It seems fair to suggest, however, that
after his retirement in 1990, Dickson harboured nagging doubts about public
acceptance of judicial review under the Charter, and about his own contribution to
this dramatic development in Canadian law and politics. Despite the exuberant
enthusiasm of much of the press and the legal professoriate for judicial review under
the Charter, Dickson worried that the country did not yet fully accept the idea that
judges should be at the centre of Canadian politics. With characteristic shrewdness,
Dickson believed that a sympathetic biography of his career could only enhance the
prestige of the Supreme Court and its Charter jurisprudence, if only in more elite
circles. This speculation squares with the fact that, as Sharpe and Roach describe at
some length,20 one of Dicksons primary goals as Chief Justice had been to increase
the public profile and status of the Supreme Court.
Of the content of the materials Dickson held back, we are told and (for now) can
know nothing. But the only viable supposition is that Dickson culled documents that
might have further underlined the political contingency and contentiousness of
Charter interpretation at the Supreme Court. Dickson wanted us to have some insight
into this process, but not more than was good for us. In the event, however, A Judges
Journeys much ballyhooed inside look at decision making at the Supreme Court,
while not uninteresting, too often amounts to an inside look at how Dickson
overcame self-doubt, and the resistance of lesser men and women, to get things,
especially the big things about the Charter, just right. If this is an implausible picture
of Dicksons Supreme Court, it is a convincing picture of the Charter propaganda
machine at full throttle. Here another point about A Judges Journey can be made
without qualification. If I am wrong in my central contention about the book, if in fact
it is the product of open-ended inquiry, it remains the case that it does not read as
such. On the contrary, A Judges Journey reads as an elaborate contrivance, as if the
Dickson archive, and in a sense (if with his collaboration) Dickson himself, has been
disinterred in order to justify cherished dogma about recent Canadian constitutional
history and interpretation. These judgments are fully born out by the books structure
and component parts.
The first chapter, an examination of Dicksons approach to the Morgentaler
cases, lays down the pattern for the remainder of the work. In the first Morgentaler21
case (decided in 1975), Dickson is said to have relied on his conservative instincts
that courts should follow clear precedents and defer to clear expression of legislative
will.22 In these years Dickson still was unwilling or unready to adopt the creative
approach to judicial lawmaking23 exemplified by Bora Laskin. Some ten years later,
and in the wake of the Charter, the second Morgentaler24 case reached the Supreme
20 Ibid. at 289-92.
21 R. v. Morgentaler (1975), [1976] 1 S.C.R. 616, 53 D.L.R. (3d) 161.
22 A Judges Journey, supra note 3 at 10-11.
23 Ibid. at 13.
24 R. v. Morgentaler, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 30, 44 D.L.R. (4th) 385.
205
R.W. KOSTAL BRIAN DICKSON AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS
2006]
Court. By then Dickson and many of his co-Justices on the Supreme Court had
discovered the secret of good judging: they had become more creative.25 Dickson
himself wrote a judgment striking down Parliaments abortion law. In the interceding
decade, the authors exuberantly contend, the crusty old formalist finally had come to
realize that the Supreme Court of Canada was not merely a court of law, but the
nations moral compass.26
And so the mould is set. Subsequent chapters concerning Dicksons tenure as a
judge in Manitobas trial and appellate courts are treated as a long prelude to his
apotheosis as Canadas great moralist and Charter champion. In the early years
Dicksons judging was meticulous but uninventive and cautious. He still lacked for
the fully worked out theory of equality27 that (it is alleged) was the trademark of his
mature judging. The seventh chapter of the book charts how during his first five years
on the Supreme Court in the 1970s, Dickson remained stubbornly comfortable in the
mainstream of a Court that was criticized [justly, the authors imply] for resolving
disputes by applying precedents and deferring law reform to the legislatures.28 Still
under the thrall of the Courts habitually narrow and legalistic approach, Dickson
continued to resist Laskins creative approach to lawmaking29 and Wishart Spences
liberal and creative approach to judging. But lest readers should grow impatient
with Dicksons slow and cautious start at the Supreme Court, they are soon
comforted. During the late 1970s, Dickson was quickly gaining ground and
becoming significantly more [you guessed right] creative in his approach to judicial
lawmaking.30
The death of Laskin in 1984 presented Dickson with the opportunity to become
Chief Justice, just as the first Charter cases reached the Supreme Court. This was a
job which Dickson wanted, sought, and got. Sharpe and Roach are forthright in
stating that Dickson brought a missionary zeal to the first Charter cases. In fact the
Chief Justice made no secret of his … determination to breathe life into [the
Charters] vague and general language.31 If the constitutional language was open
textured, Dicksons conceptual bent was not. He endorsed the trio of assumptions that
now underpin much of Canadas Charter orthodoxy. Dickson was certain, first of all,
that from the seemingly vague and obscure language he could divine the Charters
true philosophical essence, its underlying principles.32 Second, he was confident in
his ability to discern the specific needs of an evolving Canadian reality. Finally,
having correctly identified what Canadians wanted and needed from the law, Dickson
believed that he could craft legal decisions to answer these needs. It seems not to
25 A Judges Journey, supra note 3 at 16.
26 Ibid. at 25.
27 Ibid. at 128.
28 Ibid. at 136.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid. at 157.
31 Ibid. at 310.
32 Ibid. at 313.
[Vol. 51
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
206
have occurred either to Dickson or to Sharpe and Roach that at best these
assumptions are problematic and debatable, at worst, fatuous and arrogant.
In A Judges Journey the theoretical problems raised by Dicksons Charter
jurisprudence are mainly disregarded. But the authors do acknowledge that Dickson
struggled with the seeming contradictions raised by Charter interpretation. No sooner
had Dicksons decisions begun to convey the profound message of the Charter33
when it occurred to him that it was daunting business to be (in Dicksons own words)
the John Marshall of Canada.34 Rights, undoubtedly great things, only awkwardly
could be treated as absolute entitlements. Somehow rights claims had to be
harmonized with the legitimate objectives and incursions of legislative bodies. As
Sharpe and Roach document, there were moments in the 1980s when Dickson was
much perplexed about how judges might accomplish this task without looking like
politicians. His answer was the Oakes test.
Sharpe and Roach describe R. v. Oakes35 as Dicksons finest hour. They contend
that his decision in that case contains five of the most important pages ever written
in Canadian constitutional law,36 the veritable Rosetta stone of systematic Charter
interpretation. But while the case unquestionably is historically significant, the
authors do nothing to recover the juristic controversy that underscores its
significance. Clearly not all contemporary commentators regarded Oakes as a
breakthrough case, either for Charter rights or for Charter jurisprudence more
broadly defined. Although cogent arguments have been made that the main effect of
Dicksons tests was to obscure the inherently contingent and value-laden character
of Charter interpretation,37 these are nowhere to be found in the pages of A Judges
Journey. While the authors approve of contextual judging, they are not similarly
interested in contextual history.
In the opinion of Sharpe and Roach, Dickson successfully rationalized and
systematized Charter interpretation. But Dicksons actual record as a Charter diviner,
so thoroughly and admiringly set forth in A Judges Journey, betrays the project as all-
too-human. Although Sharpe and Roach are disinclined squarely to confront their
own evidence on this point, Dickson himself was sometimes flatly inconsistent in his
Charter decision making. In Oakes, he posited a stringent standard for the
infringement of Charter rights. Then, in R. v. Edwards Books and Art Ltd.,38
apparently rattled by critics of the Supreme Courts power-grab, Dickson qualified
33 Ibid. at 323.
34 Ibid. at 325.
35 R. v. Oakes, [1986] 1 S.C.R. 103, 26 D.L.R. (4th) 200.
36 A Judges Journey, supra note 3 at 334.
37 As one commentator remarked soon after the case was decided, Oakes was an ultimately
unsuccessful attempt to mask the arbitrariness of the Courts exercise of its new found power
(Andrew Lokan, The Rise and Fall of Doctrine under Section 1 of the Charter (1992) 24 Ottawa L.
Rev. 163 at 164).
38 [1986] 2 S.C.R. 713, 35 D.L.R. (4th) 1.
207
R.W. KOSTAL BRIAN DICKSON AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS
2006]
this position.39 Sharpe and Roach, always on watch for the reputation of their man, do
not attribute this (and other flip-flops) to the incoherence of the Oakes test, not even
to a failure of nerve. Dickson sometimes changed his mind as a function of his natural
pragmatism and prudence. A similar tack is taken with regard to Dicksons shifting
jurisprudence on capital and labour. Although Dickson helped bestow generous
Charter protections on business corporations, he found it more difficult to make up
his mind about the Charter rights of labour unions. This seeming contradiction is a
useful bridge to a number of important issues regarding Dickson, social justice, and
Sharpe and Roachs constricted and unconvincing treatment of these subjects.
If Sharpe and Roach emphasize one theme in their book, it is that Dickson ought
to be remembered as the socially progressive champion of a socially progressive
constitutional instrument. But in this regard a number of apposite questions are
deflected or ignored. By what manner of social progressivism do private business
corporations bear rights under the Charter? Why was Dickson so ambivalent about
the Charter claims of labour unions? What did Dickson mean by the term equality?
What are we to make of the fact that in his legal career Dickson was pervasively
linked to that key bastion of social inequality, the private business corporation? What
are we to make of his life of uncommon personal wealth and privilege? Can a lifelong
ally of corporate capitalism also be a credible champion of equality and human
rights? At the end of the day, just how progressive was Dicksons progressivism?
To its credit, A Judges Journey provides readers with plenty of intriguing clues to
these questions, if not even one critical insight or judgment. We are informed that
Dickson was born to a modestly prosperous40 family, the son of a prairie bank
inspector who spent the Depression foreclosing on bankrupt farmers. This work was
regular and remunerative enough that Dickson was able to finish secondary school
and attend university in 1932. In the 1930s, as Canada was coming apart at the seams,
Dickson completed undergraduate and legal studies. He graduated with a good deal
of his banker father in him. His articles, undertaken in Winnipeg during the height of
the Depression (a city divided by class and politics), mainly involved collections,
mortgage foreclosures, and tax sales.41 This was an unpromising beginning for a
social progressive. But, Sharpe and Roach maintain, the experience of wounds and
comradeship during the Second World War shook Dickson from his bourgeois
complacency. We are informed that he returned to civilian life with a vision of
Canada as an inclusive society.42 Well, perhaps. But the record presented in A
Judges Journey might fairly lead one to different conclusions.
At the wars end, Dickson appears to have had a few pretty noninclusive projects
on his mind. With his wife, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, Dickson worked
very hard to become a prominent member of the Winnipeg legal, business, and social
39 A Judges Journey, supra note 3 at 357.
40 Ibid. at 31.
41 Ibid. at 41.
42 Ibid. at 62.
[Vol. 51
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
208
establishment.43 In this he succeeded admirably. In the years before he became a
judge in 1963, Dickson was a man (Sharpe and Roach are insistent) of steadfastly
progressive views, but none which prevented his seamless integration with
Manitobas WASP social and business elite. Dicksons early legal career, while there
were some laudable charitable activities, was largely devoted to the formation of
corporate capital and the consolidation of social position. In this era, Dickson signally
was not leading the battle for collective bargaining, socialized medicine, and old-age
pensions. Arguably, in fact, if Dickson himself was a great proponent of these
policies, he was allied professionally and socially to those who were not. During the
crucial political and social struggles of the 1950s, Dickson was on the sidelines,
leading a life of uncommon affluence and privilege. During his prime as a Supreme
Court Justice in Ottawa, the Dickson family lived on a country estate with a stable of
horses, full-time farm manager, and two domestic servants.44
Strangely, there is nothing in A Judges Journey to suggest that Dicksons position
of marked class inequality, or his lifelong alignment with Canadas corporate and
social elites, was a source of inner conflict or anxiety. Nor is it a matter of comment
by his biographers. There is a way, of course, in which this makes sense. In many
ways, as honourable as it was, Dicksons judicial career exemplifies the ideological
blinkeredness of Canadas leading Charter proponents. It nicely paralleled the period
in Canadian political history in which the progressive left largely abandoned
systematic criticisms of capitalism and class for the less inconvenient manifesto of
rights. This is a progressivism that costs the bearer nothing. It is the progressivism
that permits the smooth transition from Supreme Court clerk to Bay Street associate.
It is the progressivism that permits its well-dressed devotees to advocate for
multinational banks and mining companies one day, same-sex marriage the next. It is
a progressivism that permits Sharpe and Roach to hold up Brian Dickson as a great
proponent of equality.
But this is to digress. If its anemic vision of equality were the only thing the
matter with this book, it would not bear mentioning. In that case the reviewer might
rightly dwell on the fact that it is an otherwise well-written and even interesting
account of an important Canadian life. Regrettably, however, there are more
consequential things the matter with A Judges Journey, beginning with the fact that it
is an up-market exercise in legitimation. Dicksons life is not critically evaluated so
much as it is used to consolidate a political position. Every chapter and paragraph is
calculated to convince readers of something external to the life and career of Brian
Dickson: that judicial review under the Charter is the most welcome innovation in
Canadian politics since Confederation, and that the people should rest easy with the
empowerment of elite judges.
43 Ibid. at 65.
44 Ibid. at 140.