Beverley McLachlin, as it happens, was sworn in as Chief Justice of
Canada by another woman -- the then Minister of Justice and Attorney-General,
Anne McLellan -- see the webpage: http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/news/nr/2000/doc_24736.html
. However, the case (for now, at least) against this woman judge involves
the following court cases in 1997 and 1999 -- before she became Chief
Justice.
1) Winnipeg
Child and Family Services (Northwest Area) v G (DF)
[1997] 3 SCR 925 (SC); and
2) Dobson
(Litigation Guardian of) v Dobson [1999] 2 SCR 753 (SC).
The cases are judged on the basis that they are about the rights of
unborn children versus the rights of mothers. Without going into unnecessary
detail, the point I am making is that, in each of these two cases, nine
judges (yielding a combined total of eleven (11) different judges, two
of the nine in each case being female) discussed the rights of the unborn
child and the rights of the mother -- without the rights of the father
even rating a mention ! Needless to say, the father would be/have been
legally obliged to support the child if/when born, whether through child-support
payments or otherwise. As far as these judges are concerned, a father
is a person with responsibilities towards his children -- but no rights.
On the page Winnipeg
Child and Family Services (Northwest Area) v G (DF), a search
for "father" only results in two hits -- one of these being
from another case entirely. The only time that the word "father"
crops up in the case itself is in connection with the duties,
not the rights of the father (i.e. his volunteered
duty to support the addict mother). The word "mother", on
the other hand, appears so often that I stopped counting at 20 ! The
phrase "mother's right(s)" appears three times. The term "father's
right(s)" does not appear at all.
On the page Dobson
(Litigation Guardian of) v Dobson, a search for "father"
also only results in two hits. The word "mother", on the other
hand, appears so often that I again stopped counting at 20 ! The phrase
"mother's right(s)" appears once. The term "father's
right(s)" does not appear at all.
I invite interested readers to read the judgements and trace the authority
(if any) for the "rights" that these judges describe women
as having -- quite apart from the issue of the total ignoring of the
rights of fathers.
These cases have obvious implication for custody and access decisions
in the Canadian (in-)justice system ! It is clear that bias against
fathers is a pandemic which infects the entire Canadian legal system
-- indeed, the whole of Canadian society, in my opinion.
Beverley McLachlin was one of the most vocal of the judges in these
two cases, and she is now Chief Justice. I draw the following conclusions:
- it seems that grotesque anti-father bias is not a bar to promotion
in the Canadian judicial system -- in fact, it may even be an aid
to promotion there;
- in her capacity as Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin can be expected
to have made judgements, administrative decisions, and extra-legal
pronouncements on divorce-related matters, and even to have pontificated
on how misguided Men's/Fathers' groups were in their allegations of
anti-male bias in divorce cases (see http://fact.on.ca/facthome/fact_not.htm),
so the above cases are concrete evidence of how anti-male and lacking
in credibility the Canadian divorce system -- not to mention the justice
system generally -- is.
N.B. I do not see Canada as being significantly different from any
other Western country, as regards the issues mentioned above.
