Joe Arvay was certainly the most remarkable lawyer I have known in over forty years of practicing law. Brilliant, creative, diligent and highly skilled; his profound understanding of the law – especially Canada’s constitution – was unmatched. He weaponized his immense talents as an instrument for justice for oppressed Canadians, smashed through so many barriers, left so many areas of law transformed, extracted so many breakthroughs for people’s rights from a legal system that is inherently conservative.
Hearing Joe lucidly explain to judges how the Charter works was like listening to poetry. Always patient, always gracious, always even-tempered, always able to find the turn of phrase that crystalized a contentious point.
When the BC government gutted health sector workers’ collective agreements and barred them from re-negotiating them, I was the Legal Director of the Hospital Employees Union. In league with the BC Nurses Union and BC Government and Service Employees’ Union, we retained Joe and his amazing associate, Cathy Boies-Parker, to lead the project and present our case before the Courts. It was an audacious project, too – seeking to reverse decades of Supreme Court of Canada rulings that shut trade unionism out of the Charter. Several prominent labour lawyers from eastern Canada lobbied the unions to abandon the litigation, arguing that we had no chance of winning and would only reinforce the heavy load of adverse jurisprudence.
But we all believed in Joe and Cathy and the unions stuck it out, all the way to the Supreme Court, where they delivered a crushing victory for Canadian workers, solidly grounding the right to engage in collective bargaining in the Charter, and laying the groundwork for a series of follow-up victories, including constitutional protection of the right to strike. The old “labour trilogy” of Supreme Court decisions was left behind in the trash heap. Canadian democracy gained a whole new dimension.
Joe’s sudden death was an enormous loss, not only as a great lawyer but as a friend.
-Jim Quail
One thing I admired greatly about Joe was his complete lack of any arrogance about his work, which came from his single-minded focus on the work itself. He was not an activist; he was a legal problem-solver. He told me that he ended up doing Charter litigation more or less by accident. He had studied American constitutional and civil rights law during his LLM at Harvard, and then ended up working for the BC Attorney General in the 1980s. When the Charter was enacted, no one really knew what to do with it - suddenly that bit of knowledge from the American context made him the expert. He found that he had a talent and passion for solving legal problems in this brand-new context, and that was what he went on to do for nearly 40 more years.
Joe was a “visiting clinical fellow” at Osgoode briefly when I was there, and he was invited to a luncheon with students from all of Osgoode’s clinical programs to talk about clinical legal education. We students, dressed smartly to impress this famous lawyer, went around the table singing the praises of the clinical programs we worked in. (Osgoode does have very good clinical programs.) When it was Joe’s turn, the Dean asked him for his thoughts about the future of clinical legal education. He shrugged off the question, claiming to really know nothing about clinical legal education, and then went on a long rant about the problem of access to justice in medical malpractice litigation. He was supremely uninterested in the trappings and institutions of the Canadian legal community, and obsessed with the legal problems facing vulnerable people. It was such an inconsequential moment but so perfectly Joe, in my mind. All he wanted to do was litigate and all he wanted to talk about was the law.
When asked why he didn’t enter politics and pursue social change more broadly, Joe said: “I love what I do. I like the fact that governments behave badly. That gives me something to do.” He was above all else a practitioner of the law. He didn’t seek status or achievement. He applied the law to solve problems, day in and day out, and he transformed Canada along the way.
-Susanna Quail