Our Professionals

I grew up as a global citizen. My adoptive father was a documentary filmmaker and as a child my family travelled the world with him making ethnographies. We spent a year in northern Norway and another in Greenland; my teenage years were spent at boarding school in India.

My childhood and adolescence were far crazier than my adult life has turned out to be, but these experiences have deeply informed my adulthood. For one, I feel like I have already won the lottery – I’m so thankful I was born in Canada. Being a teenager in a third world country gave me a different perspective on life here – there is so much that we take for granted that isn’t necessarily so for the rest of the world. Our legal system is one of those things, and our Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been used as a model by emerging democracies around the world.

My first career was as a cultural anthropologist. I received my Masters in Anthropology from McMaster University. My thesis was an interview‑based study on a native residential school in Northern Ontario, focussing on how early experiences in residential school affected parenting styles among the Cree in the James Bay region. I later worked on a multi-disciplinary health project in Montreal, with a focus on homeless urban native Canadians.

I think one of the reasons I got into anthropology was to make sense of my childhood experiences. I needed to learn about culture and the unconscious conditioning that shapes our thinking and view of the world. An anthropologist’s role is to observe culture. Ultimately, I realized I wanted to participate in it too. Culture is so arbitrary; it enriches us and, all too often, it divides us.

After I left anthropology, I took a while to figure out what to do for a living. I took classes in accounting and considered becoming a plumber. I am delighted to have found my place as a law clerk at Iler Campbell.

I work mostly on litigation files. I love digging through piles of documents and organizing them, flagging the documents that could make or break the case. It’s so closely related to research – which I also love. And I love that many of the files I get to work on are for such good causes.

When I entered this profession I thought I’d find good work that wasn’t morally reprehensible, but not Good work. What Brian writes on his page here about values and work coming together really resonates for me. I never expected to find that as a law clerk. I truly believe that we are global citizens, and that the local concerns of our clients exist within the framework of global struggles for social justice.