John Conroy

For almost 40 years, John Conroy has been working on the frontiers of legal reform in Canada. His pathbreaking work has pushed forward on many fronts, from prisoner rights to harm reduction for addicts. John’s work has helped to take the rule of law behind the prison walls of Canada, leading to improved conditions and a reduction of prison violence.

 

Today, with a “law and order” Conservative government in power, his work remains as challenging as ever. As usual, John is hard at work on a flashpoint case, defending the Insite safe injection site in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside against federal government attempts to shut it down.

 

John Conroy did not always envision for himself a career with Lady Justice. Growing up in colonial Africa in the 1950s, where his father was consultant on tobacco farming, he was “mostly a jock”. Attending British boarding schools in what are now Malawi, Zimbabwe and the Congo, John spent his adolescent years playing rugby and cricket – and swimming, which was his real passion.

 

In 1963, his family moved back to Canada, and ended on the west coast in Vancouver. They then moved out to Abbotsford, when his father got a job with the BC Ministry of Agriculture.

 

John enrolled in the University of British Columbia and, while competing on the school’s swim team, obtained a degree in physical education. “At the time, my focus was on planning to teach or to run a community centre,” he explains.

 

His program at UBC required him to take some courses on administration. Once such class dealt with torts, people injuring themselves and taking legal action against a facility. This got John interested in the law, “although at the time, having grown up in English boarding school, I thought you had to know Latin and Greek to be a lawyer.”

 

As it happens, John had taken some Greek and Latin, but he didn’t think he had done too well in those subjects. Nevertheless, with some gentle prodding, John eventually applied to law school, enrolling in the turbulent year of 1968 or 69. He quickly became politicized, participating in a legal aid society created by older students. 

 

After a short stint working at a big downtown firm, John decided to moved back out to the Valley, taking a job at Siemens & Company in Abbottsford. In the spring of 1973, John and his wife bought 40 acres in Mission. “People called it a hippy commune,” John jokes, “because we had a number of different buildings on the property and lots of different people living out here.” John and his family still live on this property in Mission. 

 

 

Finding civil law in the Valley dull – “nothing but debt collections and foreclosures” – John starting taking more criminal cases. Marijuana charges were a big issue in those days. Simple possession often resulted in long prison sentences.

 

This was just a couple of years after the infamous ‘Gastown Riot’ of 1971, when police broke up a mass gathering of young people in protest of a series of drug raids and arrests. Around 2000 had assembled – many at the urging of the then new, radical Vancouver paper the Georgia Straight -- when police responded by clearing the area by using force. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association and the B.C. Federation of Labour denounced the heavy-handed response by the authorities.

 

This incident focused new attention on the province’s drug laws, and John used the courts to fight against the heavy-hand of the authorities. John relates a simple story which describes the hypocrisy of the severe penalties that were then commonly meted for marijuana possession: “We had a judge who would go down to Sumas for lunch, quaff some martinis and pop a valium, and the in the afternoon he would lecture everyone about the use of marijuana.”

 

Decades later, John would return to the cutting edge of drug and addiction legal reform. But, in the interim, the urgent work of prison legal reform beckoned.

 

 

The early 1970s in B.C. were marked by a brief stint in office for the New Democratic Party (NDP) under premier Dave Barrett. One of their myriad initiatives were community law offices, giving more local autonomy to legal aid services. John started his own legal firm around this time, but spend most of his time running the Abbotsford law office – the first of its kind in the province.

 

In this role, there was a lot of demand on John’s time from prisoners. “Abbotsford is the Kingston of the West,” he explains. “We’re surrounded by prisons.” Given this, John and his colleagues established Prison Legal Services as a separate branch of the legal aid system.

 

John’s first big case was as defense counsel for Dwight Lucas, who was involved in the hostage-taking crisis at the old B.C. Penitentiary in 1975. One of the 15 hostages, Mary Steinhauser, a prison guard, was inadvertently shot by another guard when the vault where the hostages were being held was stormed.

 

Prisoners had long faced notoriously brutal conditions at ‘the Pen’, as it was known. A number of men had been held in solitary confinement for years, and were involved in a civil suit to have their conditions ruled “cruel and unusual.” They were not allowed to attend Court for their own case, and they were facing a return to solitary.

 

“We put the prison system itself on trail,” John explains. “The argument was a necessity defense, that the evil they committed was a lesser evil than the one the government was committing by subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishment… and that they had exhausted all their peace remedies.”

 

The jury for the case was out for five days of deliberation before returning a guilty verdict on one of the counts. Nevertheless, the trial had put a spotlight on prison conditions. In 1981, the B.C. Pen was closed for good.

 

“The attitude in those days was that if you were in prison you were legally dead, that you lost everything,” John explains. “So we did all kinds of litigation to try and established that you only lost what Parliament expressly took away, or by necessary implication.”

 

The challenge was to make the rule of law extend behind prison walls. “Back in those days, there were lots of riots and hostage takings, a prison was a dangerous place to be for the staff as well,” John explains. “Our view was that you had to give these people a remedy, a peaceful remedy.”

 

Through a series of cases, John helped establish “the duty to act fairly” towards prisoners and the right of petition and grievance for inmates. “This began a sort of ‘paper war’ in the prisons – and this was a hell of a lot safer than the old days.”

 

John sums up the result of his efforts: “What we ultimately established on the liberty front, in a free society, is that it’s not all or nothing – it’s a relative concept. I think prison conditions substantially improved over a long period of time.”

 

John wrote the prison law in Canada – literally. Butterworths first published his Canadian Prison Law in 1980, and updated it semi-annually until 1993. “We’re now in the process of wikifying it,” John explains, clearly amused by the high tech neologism he has used to explain that the contents are available at http://canadianprisonlaw.com/ and that they are in the process of setting the site up to be available for multiple lawyers to update.

 

Over the decades, John has appeared in the courts at all levels including several appearances before the Supreme Court of Canada. In addition to the BC Pen hostage taking, notable cases and clients have included the ‘Squamish 5’, Renee Boje, Marc Emery, Michelle Rainey, Watermelon, Philippe Lucas, Ken Hayes and Randy Caine.

 

 

A current notable case involves the right of drug addicts to safe places to use and seek harm reduction. Always managing to find the new frontier of the law, John has been counsel for the Vancouver Area Networks of Drug Users (VANDU), who have been, together with Portland Hotel Society, operating Insite, a safe injection site for drug users. First opened in 2003, it has been in an almost constant court battle to maintain its funding and existence.

 

Insite’s mandate is described thus: “a safe, health-focused place where people inject drugs and connect to health care services – from primary care to treat disease and infection, to addiction counselling and treatment.” In other words, precisely the type of place that would irk the “law and order” Conservative government in Ottawa.  

 

John outlines his view of this wrong-headed approach to the troubled Vancouver neighborhood’s drug and addiction crisis: “They are using the criminal justice system to chase after sick people…Why do we have an epidemic [of Hepititis C, HIV] in the Downtown Eastside? Because of the law, not because of the addiction… Using the prohibitionist approach achieves the exact opposite outcome of what is intended.”

 

John Conroy continues in myriad ways to fight for legal reform – a crucial front in the larger fight for a just society. He is a member of Amnesty International, and a board member at Pivot Legal Society. He is also counsel to the BC Compassion Club Society, the Vancouver Island Compassion Club Society and the West Coast Prison Justice Society (that runs BC Prisoners legal Services).

 

John has been recognized for his work: in 1992 he received the Commemorative Medal for the 125^th anniversary of Canadian Confederation for “significant contributions to Canada, his community and fellow Canadians.” In 1996, he was appointed Queen’s Counsel.