Acceptance
speech of the Bora Laskin Award by Paul C. Weiler
Sutton
Place Hotel in Toronto at 7:00 p.m. on May 5, 2005
I
want to thank all of you for giving me this Canadian Bora Laskin Award, which
is one of the greatest honors I have ever had or will be having in my entire life.
I must begin by expressing my gratitude to Peter Gall and his top-flight labour
law firm, Heenan Blaikie — that my brother and former student Joe Weiler
also once worked for — for the wonderful dinner gathering beforehand-and
also for commissioning their associate Kate Burke to write a biography about me.
But now I want to tell all of you the persons who were the other labour law greats
who shaped my personal as well as professional life.
The first one to mention
is Canada's greatest-ever lifetime labour law scholar, who thus rightly received
your first Bora Laskin Award — Harry Arthurs. Harry taught me labour law
in his first-ever course at Osgoode Hall. When I went back there in 1965 to teach
criminal and tort law, not labour (because there was only one course then), he
still got me writing and arbitrating in that field. In exchange, I persuaded Harry
to go with me to Maple Leaf Gardens in the summer of 1966 to watch a man fight
for the last time under his old name Cassius Clay, and who we all know now as
Muhammad Ali.
In 1972, Arthurs, now our Dean, let me go out to Vancouver
on sabbatical, to write my first book, In the Last Resort, examining the performance
of the Supreme Court of Canada over the first 25 years after it became our final
court of appeal. One of the many personal benefits there was that I met a person
who had reviewed that book for the Vancouver Sun and said I should have titled
it The Nine Blind Men, and he then became my tennis partner, Alan Fotheringham.
More important for my professional career, though, the UBC Law School professor
whose office was right next door to mine on my sabbatical was Professor Jim Matkin.
Jim was then also chairing the commission to create some important reforms and
modernization of the labour law. And he persuaded me to chair the new B.C. Labour
Board for five years — to gain such crucial real world experience for my
teaching and writing.
That third person I want to mention and thank is
the one who in 1947 had written the first-ever book about American labour law
and then had taught Harry, me and many other Canadians, Archibald Cox. What I
specifically owe to Cox is that, in 1978, after I had finished with the Labour
Board and gone back to Harvard for a year to write my second book, Reconcilable
Differences, about reforming Canadian Labour Law generally, Cox asked me to stay
there and take over teaching Labor Law from him — because he wanted to create
a new course and write a book about his successful effort to impeach America's
last relatively "liberal" president Richard Nixon.
Cox thus not
only got me into teaching labour law, but also, accidentally, got me into sports
and entertainment law. The reason is that in my first labour course I had ever
taught, two students came to me and asked me to supervise their theses about labour
and sports, to prepare for their own professional careers in that industry. One
picked football, and after beginning with the NHL is now General Counsel for the
NFL, Jeff Pash. The other picked hockey and he has devoted his entire life to
our National Pastime, and that is Brian Burke.
More important for our purposes,
the next person I want to thank for shaping my life for this honor is the head
of Harvard's Labor and Worklife Program, and my great personal friend, Elaine
Bernard. Elaine's and my professional relationship was actually produced by something
that the Harvard Business School did back in 1942, by creating America's first-ever
university based executive training program. Interestingly, in that FDR New-Deal
era, it was not designed to teach future business, but rather union leaders, the
Trade Union Program. When I was a student and then teacher at Harvard, that program
was essentially being run, in tandem with Archibald Cox, by the pioneering labor
economist, John Dunlop — who you would also be interested to know is the
only academic in history to have worked, either full-time or part-time, for every
single president from Roosevelt to Clinton.
In any event, in 1987, Cox's
former labor law student who had then become his fellow teacher and co-author
in this field and had now risen to be the Harvard President, Derek Bok, asked
both Dunlop's top-flight labor economist, Richard Freeman and me to take on responsibility
for that program — which the native Canadian Business School Dean, John H.
McArthur, had been told by the HBS alumni donors to shut down.
The key
decision Richard and I made together was to select Elaine from 12 candidates as
our new Executive Director and then persuade her to move here, also from Vancouver
where she was there a labour professor. Then, three years ago, Elaine, Richard
and I formally transformed this into the far broader Harvard Labor and Worklife
Program — though defacto, we had begun this effort a decade before. We still
do have as our core work project, the six-week Trade Union Program to which we
now attract for training future union leaders from around the world, including
the current head of the Ontario Police Union.
The final person I want to
be thanking for shaping my professional life is the person who Harry, Jim, Elaine
and I believe, and I know all of you agree, is the most important person in transforming
Canada's whole legal life — Bora Laskin (who was actually also Cox's classmate
when he was getting his Harvard LL.M. in the mid 1930s).
With respect
to my own life, at the request of his Thunder Bay friend, my father, Laskin, who
was still teaching labor law here in May 1961, took me to lunch at the Faculty
Club and persuaded me to give up getting my philosophy PhD. and instead go to
law school. But contrary to my Dad's wish that I then go back to practice labour
law with him, Bora told me to follow his lead and after getting my LL.B. in Toronto,
then go over to Harvard and get my Masters in law and become a scholar, teaching
and writing, especially about labor law, which is exactly what I did.
Then,
in January 1978 when Laskin had become Canada's greatest-ever Supreme Court Justice,
he called me on the phone in Vancouver where he knew I was about to be leaving
the Labour Board. Rather than go back quickly to Toronto or stay in Vancouver
to teach law there, he asked me to accept the invitation of Derek Bok to become
the visiting Mackenzie King Professor of Canadian Studies and create a permanent
Canadian Lecture program here, the first of its kind in any American university. Among
the many reasons why I am so happy I accepted Laskin's advice is first, that after
this Canadian Program took off, over the past quarter century, we have at least
a half dozen Canadian speakers each year — which have included not only such
legal and political greats as Chief Justice Laskin and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau,
but also our top movie director Norman Jewison and our top sports figure Ken Dryden.
Second,
I vividly remember our first lecture there in the fall of 1979 where my commentator,
Archibald Cox said my new idea was "ridiculous." However, three years
later Trudeau and others finally found it acceptable to help bring the Constitutional
Charter of Rights and Freedom to Canada — my "notwithstanding clause"
proposal. Finally, because Cox then got me teaching labor law there, and I complied
with the wishes of labor law students like Brian Burke, I am now able to honestly
tell my family like Florrie and friends like Elaine that when I go to games and
movies — or a combination of the two like Fever Pitch — I am doing so
for research work, not just personal fun.
Thanks to all of you for shaping
my life in that wonderful fashion.
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Paul C. Weiler -
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