Doing the right thing

barbara findlay has spent 45 years advocating for and defending the rights of queer and trans people. To younger readers, equal rights for LGBTQ+ people may not sound like anything special. They can thank findlay and her many years in advocacy for that.

“When I went to law school, we were four years out from decriminalization,” she explains. “You were either bad because you were a criminal, or you were crazy because [homosexuality] was a mental health diagnosis. It’s a different world.”

When she went for article interviews, she says, she was asked the kinds of questions women had to answer: What did her husband think of her working outside the home? What birth control did she use? She was told by male interviewers that while they personally would not have a problem hiring a woman, some of their clients would.

After more than a decade at legal aid and a couple of years on the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia, findlay opened a practice for queers.

In those days, she had to make it clear to new clients that other parties would assume they were gay or lesbian if they hired her. She told them she would refer them to a different lawyer if they could not afford other people drawing that inference. Some clients left.

And there were so few openly queer lawyers that when findlay organized a SOGIC (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Community) session with the heads of the CBA and the Law Society of British Columbia to hear about the circumstances in which queer lawyers were working, she had to put the members of those executives on undertakings not to “out” anyone they met.

“We held our breath for the first few years after the Charter came in,” findlay says, “to see whether ‘sexual orientation’ would be held to a protected ground, and then, if it was, whether it would protect queer relationships or only queer individuals.”

findlay has been as active in the legal profession as she has been in the courts, co-founding the SOGIC, and educating the profession and the judiciary about queer and trans legal issues.

She was designated a Queen’s Counsel in 2001. Last year, she received the highest award of the British Columbia Branch of the CBA, the Georges Goyer award. 

The Louis St-Laurent Award of Excellence is conferred to a Canadian Bar Association member in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding service and professional achievement to the benefit of the legal profession, the CBA and society at large. 

Among the achievements to findlay’s credit is her advocacy for the right of a trans woman to work as a volunteer rape counsellor in the Nixon v. Rape Relief case. She also successfully secured a right for non-biological co-mothers to be acknowledged as a “parent” on their child’s birth certificate. She advocated for Indigenous women concerning matrimonial property on reserves, and she defended the rights of trans youth to make their own medical decisions. 

findlay has been doing unlearning racism work since 1984, facilitating hundreds of workshops for the profession, schools, employers, prisons, and other institutions. “Unless we spend as much time working against the ways we are privileged as we spend working against the ways we are oppressed, we will never see a just world.” 

The Louis St-Laurent award of Excellence is the highest award conferred to a CBA member in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding service and professional achievement to the benefit of the legal profession, the CBA and society at large. The breadth and scope of achievement are significant factors in receipt of this award, as is the contribution that the individual has made to the goals and objectives of the CBA. The Award was named in memory of Louis St-Laurent, a former Prime Minister of Canada and former President of the CBA. View the list of past recipients.