Adam Goldenberg

2Pulat, thank you so much for having me.

4Yeah, that's fake news. I guess I have— I guess to be fair, anyone who does advocacy, particularly a lot of appeals, is a writer. I'm a professional writer. I just also get to, get to talk for a living as well.

6So I think there are probably a few things. The first is that when I was relatively new out of university, my first grown-up job was as a speechwriter. I wrote speeches for Michael Ignatieff when he was the leader of the Liberal Party, and everyone knows how that ended for him and for me. But, but I was a professional speechwriter for a number of years for him, and then I went to law school. And when I was in law school, because I was interested in and wanted to stay engaged in Canadian politics, public affairs, Canadian law, I wrote a lot of op-eds for Canadian publications, opinion pieces, and that was kind of a sideline for me while I was a law student.

7So I think there's a lot that I have published in various publications in Canada and elsewhere. And so I, I suppose that's fooled Google into thinking that I'm a legitimate writer when really I'm only a poser in that regard.

9I mean, I think like most people who have jobs in politics, it was a series of happy accidents and coincidences. When I finished university, I had in my mind that I was going to work in the international system. I had set my goal to work in the UN system, and I got a job for myself at the World Food Programme, which is the UN's humanitarian agency based just outside of Rome. And the position that they gave me was an internship, and the idea was I would do the internship and then we'd see how things worked out. I was supposed to spend half the year at headquarters in Rome in the Executive Director's office and then half the year in the Country Director's office in Uganda.

10And then a few months into that internship, the financial crisis happened in 2008. The markets crashed. There was a hiring freeze, a funding crunch throughout the UN system, including at the World Food Programme. And they basically said to me, we can't afford to keep you as an intern. We are we're having to end this program and the funding for it. We think we can bring you back as a full-time, full-fledged staff person, but you need to disappear for a while. We have policies. There were policies in place, I think, that prevented you from going directly from interning into being a full-time staff person. They had to post a job and have a competition and so forth.

11And so they said, so goodbye, and and we'll be in touch if and when we can hire you back. So I was without a job. I moved back home to Vancouver which is where I grew up and where my parents where I still live and went to sleep in my childhood bedroom. And no sooner did I step off the plane in September of 2008 that Prime Minister Harper dropped the writ and called the 2008 federal election. And I'd always been interested in politics. I had been peripherally involved as a young Liberal when I was in high school in the Paul Martin years. And so I got in touch with some people that I had met through the involvement.

12My parents had a family friend who had been involved in the Liberal Party decades before, and he knew some people. And so I kind of reached out and said, how can I help? What can I do? And because I had written for the school newspaper in undergrad and had, I guess, some demonstrated writing ability that they could verify from that, I got a call from the campaign chair saying, we need somebody in the Vancouver headquarters for the British Columbia campaign to help us write press releases and things for the, for the British Columbia arm of the federal Liberal campaign. And so I took that on. They— it was a volunteer job. I was, I was waiting for the UN to call me back, and then the Liberals lost, and Stéphane Dion said he was going to resign, and there was going to be a leadership race.

13And then all of a sudden, people that I knew from that campaign were working on leadership races, and some of them working for Ignatieff. And I called them up, and I ended up volunteering for Mr. Ignatieff's leadership campaign. And then he became the leader rather suddenly. You may recall in 2008 there was a coalition proposal that did not go so well. Mr. Dion resigned more precipitously than he was expected to. The other leadership contenders dropped out. Mr. Ignatieff became the interim leader on a vote of the Liberal caucus. And all of a sudden I'm working for the leader of the opposition. And the UN eventually did call, and I had to tell them that I've got a more interesting offer.

14I couldn't bring myself to leave the excitement of that. You remember 2008, 2009, Michael and the Liberals were leading by quite a lot in the polls. And so I thought, shoot, I'm going to work for the Prime Minister of Canada. Well, it didn't work out that way. But having stumbled into that opportunity, eventually someone offered me the chance to take a crack at one of Mr. Ignatieff's speeches. We got on well. I read almost every word he had ever written, which was an undertaking because he's a real writer, and got a knack for his style. And he liked working with me. And so we had that that principal speechwriter relationship for about 3 years, right up until the time the Liberal campaign went down in flames in May of 2011.

16Certainly, yeah. I see him when he's in Canada and we text and email. He's a wonderful person and a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant academic and was a wonderful person to work for. And I've been very fortunate in my career as a lawyer, when I was a law clerk, when I worked in politics, to have had bosses who are genuinely invested in the development, the well-being, the happiness of the junior people who work for them. And Michael was, was first-rate in that regard. And there are a number of us who are very close friends because we had that experience of working with him together. And he keeps in touch with, with most of all, most or all of us, and and has been a mentor to me ever since I had the privilege of working for him.

18Why? If you're still doing this in, in 15 years, I promise you that there— the cool people you'll be interviewing then will be saying the same about COVID right? There are these there are these international game-changing moments. There's the— for the generation of lawyers ahead of me, a lot of them have stories about the tech bubble bursting in the early 2000s and how that affected their lives and their careers. So it's not surprising to me, and certainly the financial crisis was the first big turning point for me.

20I have incredible parents. My, my parents are both physicians. They, they both grew up in Toronto. My dad was and is the son of Holocaust survivors. My grandparents on my dad's side came to Canada in the late 1940s, both of whom having survived separately as children through the war years in Poland, in different places. And they met in what was then the center of Jewish life in Toronto on College Street, I think, at a dance when my grandfather was 20 and my grandmother was 16 or something. And they got married fairly quickly. The story is my great-grandfather had to sign a consent form at City Hall so that my grandmother could marry my grandfather because she wasn't yet 18 years old.

21And, and my father was born in 1953. He just turned 70. And, and they lived initially in the area around what's now Little Italy, around Palmerston and College, that kind of part of Toronto. And then my grandfather went into business with his father-in-law, my grandmother's father, building houses, you know, one at a time, duplexes, triplexes. And, and they were in business together for decades and decades. And my grandfather was successful enough that the family eventually moved to North Toronto to Dufferin and Lawrence in a house that my grandfather built where my dad and my aunt and two uncles all grew up and where my grandmother still lives. My grandfather passed away in 2020, but my grandmother is 90 years old and still going strong and still in that house.

22So my dad grew up in this very, very much steeped in Jewish tradition, in Yiddishkeit, as we say. His parents were what more assimilated Jews, like my mother's parents, to whom I'll come in a moment, would call greenhorns derisively when they arrived in the late '40s. My father's first language was Yiddish. He went to Jewish schools the whole way through grade 13, and he was You know, he's brilliant and was exceptional and went off to the University of Toronto and then to U of T Medical School where he met my mother. My mom is from a very different kind of Jewish background in Toronto. And one thing that I love about the city is because the Jewish community here goes back so many decades, there are very different Jewish experiences all in parallel to one another, depending essentially on when your people came to Canada and from where.

23So my mother's parents were both born in Canada. My great-grandparents on my mother's side were from Lithuania on one side and actually from England on the other, but I think you go back far enough and they were from Lithuania too. My great-grandfather on my, on my mother's side, my mother's father's father Morris Gordon, was originally from England, came to Canada, and he was an artist. He painted the windows in the Bay Store on Queen Queen and Yonge, the old Bay store, around Christmas time, you know, they have the Christmas displays in the windows. That was my great-grandfather who used to, who used to paint that as part of his, his making a living.

24My grandfather, my mother's father, became a doctor in the days when not a lot of Jews were able to do that in Canada. He and my grandmother actually moved to New York so he could complete his residency training in urology because there were no hospitals in Toronto where a Jewish doctor could train. The Mount Sinai was very small in those days, and, and the reason the Mount Sinai Hospital exists in Toronto, by the way, the same is true of Mount Sinai hospitals elsewhere, is not for Jewish patients, it's for Jewish doctors, because they couldn't get hired in, in the other hospitals. My grandpa—

26not

28Exactly. I often, I often comment that if the, if the founders of McCarthy Tétrault, including Dalton McCarthy KC, one of the greatest trial lawyers of the 19th century, knew that they had this gay Jewish partner sitting in his law firm. Today he would turn over in his grave, but I'm not too fussed about that. In any event, my grandfather was a surgeon. He was a urologist. My grandmother, her family, my mother's mother, her family grew up, or rather she grew up on College Street, that same neighborhood in Toronto where which was the hub of the Jewish community, they had a dry goods store. And those don't really exist anymore. But it was kind of a combination of a hardware store where you could buy clothing and things and was called Gottlieb's Dry Goods.

29The family apocrypha— I'm not sure if this is actually true— is that the family name was Gottlieb, G-O-T-T-L-I-E-B. But when it came time to electrify the sign outside of the dry goods store, the sign company charged by the letter. And so they dropped one of the T's and the E and the name became Gotlib. I have no idea if that's true or not, but it's the story we tell the family. So my, my grandmother Dorothy Gottlieb married Sidney Gordon, and, and they had 6 children, of whom my mother was one. And they grew up in Forest Hill. My grand— in those days, a family with a single income as a physician could buy a house in Forest Hill.

30Can't do that anymore. My mother grew up at the corner of Glenairn, Aber Road, on a street that I now recognize is a, is a storied street and a weird precursor to my career. The next-door neighbors of my mother growing up were the Goodmans, like the Goodman's law firm, Eddie Goodman, and his family. And Eddie Goodman's daughter, Joanne Goodman, was my mother's best friend growing up, and she sadly died in a car crash coming back to Western University when she was in her first year. But the Goodmans were right next door, and then next to the Goodmans were the Myerses. One of your other former guests, Justice Fred Myers, grew up two doors down from my mom.

31And there were three Myers.

33On

35Exactly. So they were two doors down, and then across the street was— were the Robinettes, including JJ or John Robinette, who was, you know, as at least we talk about at McCarthy's this way, as the greatest trial lawyer of the 20th century in Canada. And he was— had a storied career in litigation, including for many decades McCarthy's, and his office was actually about 20 feet that way. And he was Mr. Robinette across the road. And ironically, his son or nephew became a urologist, which is what my grandfather was and what my father was. Anyway, I'm getting distracted. So my parents meet in medical school at the University of Toronto. They moved to Vancouver because that's where they could both get residencies.

36And that's where I was born about 10 years later. They waited to have kids. I was 10 years later. My brother followed 2 years later. And they are extraordinary people. My dad is a urologist. He's a urologic surgeon. He's now retired from surgery and from clinical practice, but for decades he was one of the leading prostate cancer surgeons in the country. He's the chair of the Canadian Men's Health Foundation and has had a research career that has been incredibly impressive and significant. My mother is a radiologist who specializes in breast mammography, screening mammography for breast cancer. She's a leading advocate for screening mammography across the country. She's still practicing, still working. Clinically, but she is also doing a ton of advocacy to try to encourage women to get screened for breast cancer in their 40s.

37And they are— I mean, in addition to being loving and very present parents, I mean, we had dinner with at least one, if not both, of my parents every night of the week pretty much growing up. They had these incredibly busy and successful careers. My mom used to take my brother and me to the hospital, back to the clinic, where she would read screening late into the evening after dinner, and we would do our homework in the next room while she would read mammograms and dictate her reports. Like, they just worked incredibly hard for their patients and also for my brother and me to raise us. And, and, you know, they are, they are, they've made an enormous contribution to the country and to science.

38They're both members of the Order of Canada, they're both members of the Order of British Columbia. So growing up with that is daunting, you know, knowing that your parents are overachievers. And, and fortunately it was never imposed on my brother and me in a way that was debilitating or disabling. It was only ever encouragement to figure out what we were interested in, to figure out what we were good at, to cultivate our talents and our passions, and then to commit to them. And my parents really modeled that, the commitment to excellence in what they had chosen to do while also committing to family and to the aspects of life that are outside of one's professional career.

39And so I've always had those role models, and, and, and that I think has been a big part of how I've approached my career in the various stages of my life. I really think I owe absolutely everything I have and everything I am to my mom and dad.

41I think my parents are two of the most empathetic people that I know. They are, they're, they're caregivers, they're, they're healthcare providers. They have always, and I've always seen this, cared deeply about their patients and understood that it's not just their own care that can make a positive difference in the lives of the people to whom they provide medical care, but also broader factors, how we message or convey messages to one another in society about healthcare, about preventative health, about screening for various cancers. And the ones that my parents have worked on in particular, they've been institution builders. My parents, you know, my mother helped to create the Breast Screening Center, the leading breast screening center in Vancouver.

42My father built the Prostate Center in Vancouver. General Hospital. They, they have been builders through my, my whole life, and, and all of it has been motivated by a desire to leave the world, to leave the community better than they found it. And that was contagious to my, to my brother. My brother, by the way, is now a surgeon. So my, my, my Jewish mother likes to say that she, she won the Jewish mother lottery. She's got a doctor and a lawyer, but, but I'm always going to be cursed by being the one who didn't become a doctor. So we know who the favorite is, right? But, but I think what I see in my brother and what I hear from the people he works with is his patients love him.

43He has incredible bedside manner because we learn from our parents this empathy, this ability to listen, this, the importance of recognizing the people around us, the people whom we serve. And in my career as a litigator, I mean, often, you know, when we're fighting in a commercial dispute about about money or something, that can sometimes seem to take a second, a second chair to the real priorities and the client's priorities. But what I've always said to people that I work with, to the juniors that I work with, to the clients that I have the privilege of working with, empathy and EQ is actually much more important, I think, in advocacy than IQ and raw intelligence.

44Because ultimately we're in the persuasion business. And if I can use empathy, use my understanding of the people around me to get a good outcome from the client, to negotiate an outcome, in a case, or if I can, if we end up in court, use my empathy to the extent I can to connect with the judge who ultimately is going to have to decide the case, that's the ballgame. And I think we learn that as lawyers from experience and practice, and I had the privilege and the very good fortune of having grown up with people who really modeled that in their careers and from whom I learned that at a young age.

48Absolutely.

51Sure. So I really struggled with whether to leave Canada to go to law school. As you mentioned, I'd gone to university, to undergrad, in the US, and so I'd had that experience outside the country. I came back after undergrad because I wanted to be in Canada. This is my home. I knew this was going to be my home. Even when I was there, though, it was tempting to stay and take a job in New York and follow the big city lights. I really just knew that Canada was where I wanted to be. And first I went international. I went to Europe, as I said, and then I came back to Canada and stayed there for 3 years.

52And then I— when it came time to go to law school, I really struggled between staying in Canada or going to the US because again, I knew that I ultimately wanted to end up here. But ultimately, I remember I would bore a lot of my friends with my thinking about this. I was really struggling and I would talk about the pros and cons and talk to people who'd gone to both law schools and talk to people who'd gone to law school in the US and come back to Canada and talk to people who'd gone to law school in Canada, having chosen that over going to law school in the US. How did they make those decisions?

53Finally, a friend of mine, we're at a bar and he's been thinking, or rather hearing me talk about this for months and months. And he looks at me and he says, "Dude, you got into Yale Law School. Just go to Yale Law School." And ultimately that's why I went. Like, it is a phenomenal institution. And to have had the opportunity to go there, to have gotten in, is like winning the lottery. I cannot tell you what it was that put me over the line when so many other people who are a lot smarter than I am and a lot more accomplished than I am, We're not going to

55about the

57In

59I know, but I'm not going to get into the numbers, but I promise you it wasn't my LSAT score. And, and in any event, I got that opportunity and I, and I pursued it, but I knew that I wanted to come back to Canada. And, and the same thing that happened in undergrad happened in law school. You know, you're there, you're surrounded by most of the American classmates, and you are, you're kind of infected with their enthusiasm for what it means to be successful in the US and you enter— I interviewed at law firms in New York. I thought about staying in that country, but when I was choosing a second year summer job, having interviewed in New York and then interviewed in Toronto as well, I chose to come back to Canada.

60I chose the summer gig, not at McCarthy's, at Lenczner Slaght, over going to one of the firms in New York that had offered me a job. And that then led to, okay, if I'm going to be in Canada, Let me figure out how to, how to do that and how to make that happen.

62Oh gosh.

64This is over a decade ago now, so I'm, I don't remember. I recall that, that in those days they would do these kind of interviews where they would gang up on you. I remember sitting in a room and there would be, there were like a dozen Lenczner's lawyers who would come in and they would filter in and out and just pepper you with questions. And it was not a very friendly experience. I think they're a lot friendlier now. I distinctly remember Matt Sammon, who is, who is a phenomenal lawyer and has been at Lenczner's for many, many years, peppering me with questions about why I hadn't mooted. Why should we hire you at a litigation boutique when you haven't done any mooting in law school?

65Mooting is a big deal in Canada. It's not a thing that people get really into in the same way in the US. I don't remember what my answer was, but I have a distinct memory of Matt coming at me about that gap in my resume. And I chose to go work there and made a different choice later and came to McCarthy's. But But I, having gone through the mayhem of the interview week in Toronto Bay Street, somehow that convinced me that Toronto was where I wanted to be. And so then I had to figure out, okay, how do I get credentialed here? I think it's actually a very good thing and an important thing that the process I went through and that anyone who goes to Yale or Harvard or whatever, Oxford, goes through is the same process that someone would go through from any other law school in any other country that isn't Canada around the world.

66You don't get any special treatment, nor should you. So I went through the NCA process. I wrote those exams. But the difficulty that you often have, that people often have as internationally trained lawyers, is that law firms and lawyers can't take you on as an articling student when you don't have your certificate of qualification from the NCA, the National Committee on Accreditation. You need to first finish your exams, then you get that certificate, then you can get into the licensing program with the Law Society, and And that's when you can be an articling student. The way around that, I figured from people who had done this before, is that you go to the courts.

67The Court of Appeal is not constrained by that in the same way. And I could be hired as a law clerk, which I was. And all of the other law clerks were formally articling throughout their clerkship year. I, at the Court of Appeal, was just a law clerk. I wasn't formally an articling student. I wrote my NCA exams during that year while clerking. Then when I got my certificate of qualification, I took that to the Law Society. They gave me my admission to the licensing program, and then I applied for what's called an abridgment of articles, which essentially recognizes the work that I had done as a law clerk to, to fulfill the articling requirements.

68So retroactively, the clerkship, which for everyone else was counting as articling at the time, counted as my articles. So I was called to the bar rather than in June of the year after I finished law school, in September of the year after I finished law school, but otherwise was on the same schedule as the folks that I'd worked with. And I actually didn't go directly from the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court. I wasn't sure that I wanted to clerk twice, and I wanted to try it out first to see if I liked it, and I loved it. So when I was at the Court of Appeal, that's when I applied to clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada and was very, very fortunate to get the position as Chief Justice McLachlin's law clerk for the following year.

69And so it was after the Court of Appeal that I joined McCarthy's as an associate. I was here for a year and then I left on a leave of absence to do clerkship number 2, returned to McCarthy's after that, and I've been here ever since.

71I, yes, her last full year. There was another group of clerks that came in for her last couple of months, but her last full year on the court was, was my year clerking for her.

73She, I mean, Beverley McLachlin is an exceptional Canadian. She is a brilliant, brilliant person. And it was the honor and privilege of a lifetime to work with her, to learn from her, to work on cases with her. She in, at that stage in her career, and I think throughout her time as Chief Justice, commanded enormous respect on the court. By virtue of her intellectual firepower, her unbelievable work ethic, her collegiality. You talk about empathy. I mean, Beverley has that in spades in a way that many judges do not, particularly those who have been appellate judges for a long time. You kind of get disconnected from the people and the facts and can get wrapped up in the law sometimes.

74That never happened to her. She was incredibly down to earth, incredibly invested in the facts of the cases and in the real-world implications of the legal principles that they were deciding. And she had an ability to move her colleagues on issues that was really impressive. She was also committed behind the scenes to ensuring the collegiality of the court, to ensuring that the court's judgments, whether there was going to be one judgment or multiple judgments, provided clear guidance to the lower courts. And so I got to see a lot of that behind-the-scenes diplomacy that happens on an apex court and still happens on the Supreme Court of Canada, I'm sure. But when I clerked for her, she had been doing this for so long.

75And so much longer than everybody else that she really commanded authority and respect in a way that would be very difficult to replicate. Although I'm sure our current Chief Justice is no less impactful in his discussions with his colleagues and in moving the court to the positions that ultimately it takes. The other thing that was fun about clerking for the end of a long career is sometimes cases would come up that drew upon or that relied upon or that thought to move principles that had been decided in cases from decades earlier that she had decided. And so more than once we would discuss a previous case and she would say, I thought we had decided this, that, and the other thing in that case.

76And I would say, well, actually, I think that if you read it this way or the way that we read it now decades later, this is how the case actually reads. Having those discussions with someone who actually decided the case was a very neat experience. And sometimes I would persuade her, most times I wouldn't. She knew better than I did what exactly had been decided decades before. But she was also, and this is the last point I'll make about her, she was also an appellate judge, a Supreme Court judge really of the old school. Like she would do her own drafting, everything, you know, every word that comes out under her pen. Her name is a word that Beverley McLachlin has written.

77I might have contributed, or her clerks might have contributed in different ways to shaping her thinking or giving her the grist for the mill of her decision-making. But she is an exceptional writer, and you can tell when you read her decisions that they're in her voice. Excuse me, in her voice. She would— I remember once she called me down to her office to talk about a case, and I walked in and I found her sitting at her computer. I don't think I'm giving away anything here that I shouldn't be. I found her sitting at her computer with a copy a paper copy, a bound copy of the Supreme Court reports in her lap, transcribing a paragraph from a previous decision into a draft judgment, like by hand, one word at a time, looking down, looking up.

78And I kind of said to her, you know, Chief, you know, we've got like Westlaw now and CanLII. You can cut and paste and don't have to type it word for word. But she had her process, and that's how she got these principles into her mind and how she thought through problems. And just to work with somebody who had who had that much of a hands-on approach, who was that invested in each and every case, I think can't help but affect the way that you approach your own work as counsel once you get out of clerking and into practice.

80I, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, I When I was at the Court of Appeal, I interviewed at a number of firms around the city, and I'm not saying anything to you that I haven't said to students who interview. McCarthy's was my backup option, and they all know this. I had turned McCarthy's down as a summer student to go to Lenczner Slaght, and I applied to a bunch of mostly smaller firms because I thought I want to be in a boutique. And I applied to McCarthy's as a backup because I knew they had a big litigation department. I figured I've got a good chance of getting hired there. They like hiring clerks.

81They like hiring people who are really keen on litigation. And so, you know, I threw them into the mix just so that I would have an extra option, I hoped, which was a bit arrogant in hindsight. I think there are lots of clerks that apply to our firm whom we don't hire, and I very well could have ended up being one of them. But during that process of interviewing at the smaller firms and at McCarthy's, that kind of climbed up my list from the backup option to being my number one choice. And I came to the realization that being in a full-service large firm environment would give me a platform that I would be able to use to do not just the litigation work that I wanted to do, but also the broader community work, the broader public policy-related work that was really important to me.

82I remember a conversation I had with, with the then CEO of our firm, Marc-André Blanchard, who subsequently was Canada's ambassador to the United Nations and now works at the Caisse de dépôt as a senior executive in Quebec. And Marc-André said to me as I was interviewing, he said, look, if what you want is to be a preeminent litigator in Toronto, you will do that here. We will give you the tools to become that, but so will other firms. And I don't want to pretend, he said, that this is the only place where you could aspire to that and seek to become that. But what we will give you that other firms can't is a national platform where we will empower you, even as a junior lawyer, to pursue the causes, the pro bono work, the public interest advocacy, the, the work that is only tangentially related to the practice of law that will allow you to build not just a national practice as a litigator working on interesting cases all across the country, but also allow you to contribute to communities that you care about, contribute to the country in a way that that other firms might not be as good at empowering their junior people to do.

83They made that commitment to me, and we make that commitment to our junior people today. And the firm has very much lived up to that promise. And that's why I've stayed here so happily. You mentioned earlier, I get to work on interesting cases all over the country, and I do. I get to work on cases across the country that are interesting and important that we don't get paid for. And I have the resources of a national firm that I can bring to bear on those issues. And we have the privilege because we have such a strong bench, such a strong litigation team here, of being trusted by leading Canadian organizations and institutions with their most important litigation.

84And we get to work on the most interesting, high-value, high-stakes cases at all levels of court in all jurisdictions. And I've been very privileged from the very start of my career to be part of that, to get those opportunities right from, from when I started as a first-year associate.

86and Paul Steep and Awi Sinha, and the list goes on. Tom Sutton, Sunil Kapoor, who is now the leader of our litigation department, who's one of the best labor and employment lawyers in the country. Caroline Zaid, who was formerly the head of our litigation department, who's a brilliant class actions and public law lawyer, like I'm going to leave a whole bunch of people— I'm going to stop there because I will inevitably not mention everybody because I would take up the rest of our time together. But it is a real league of extraordinary litigators that we have here. And to be able to work with and to learn from that caliber of lawyer, not just in Toronto, by the way, but right across the country.

87Like, I've done cases with my colleague Mike Feder, who's, I would submit, the best and most exciting litigator in Western Canada. He's based in our Vancouver office, who has a national practice. I worked with Mike since I was a first-year lawyer, and, and that's been the case even though we've been in different offices. To be able to work with that caliber of bench strength and the cases that those kinds of people attract has been exceptional. The person who probably had the greatest impact on me as a junior lawyer was a guy called Neil Finkelstein, who sadly died way, way too young a number of years ago. But Neil was one of the big shots at McCarthy's when I joined the firm.

88He had been in a number of different places, including the Davies firm, the Blakes firm. He worked in government and he was a scholar of constitutional law and of public law. He did interesting regulatory cases. He did huge commercial cases. He did class actions. But above all, Neil had this absolute joy in what he did. He was to the practice of law what I had seen in my parents in relation to the practice of medicine. He used to say he bounced out of bed every morning because he loved the work that he got to do. And that's infectious. And I wish that every junior lawyer should have somebody in their career in their early years who shows them the joy that you can have doing the work that we get to do, because you can carry with that.

89I carry that energy, that inspiration from Neil throughout everything that I do and every case that I do, and I will for my entire practice. If you look behind me on the bookshelf, there are some figurines up there. Those are from Neil's collection. He used to collect these figurines of barristers when he and his wife Marie, who's also wonderful, traveled the world. They would collect these barrister figurines and they were in his office. And after he died, his family very generously let me take a few of them for safekeeping. And they watch over me as I do my work. And I'm inspired by his energy, his commitment to excellence, which is emblematic, I think, of how the people that I work with approach what we do.

90And when you work in that kind of environment, it's impossible not to feel jazzed about getting to be a litigator. And again, I think you look on Twitter, you look on social media, you read in the press, it's really tragic how many lawyers there are who don't get to have that, who don't love their career, who aren't energized by the work, who feel burned out. And I, whenever I read those stories, thank my lucky stars that I've landed where I have, because though there have been very tough stretches and though I've experienced burnout for periods of time, just like I think everybody else did, especially during the pandemic, I have never doubted that, that I have the platform I need to be the kind of lawyer that I want to be and to be the kind of professional that I think I can be.

92I don't know that I'd say I live for it. I think that is one of the most exciting things I get to do. My practice, as you say, is built around commercial litigation, but public law has always been a huge feature of it, a huge component of it. That comes from Neil. That was his practice, commercial litigation and public law. And I've aspired to replicate as much of that as I can. Being in the Supreme Court, period, is a huge privilege, whether the case is commercial or public law or something else. And I've done all sorts of cases in the Supreme Court. I've had very good fortune to be up there a lot. A constitutional case is different from a commercial case only in the area of law, the substance of the case, obviously, but also in the kind of public policy implications to arguing an appeal in a public law issue.

93There are also public policy implications, important ones, in a private law case. You mentioned the, the Callow case, the case about the duty of honest contractual performance. When we're talking about the common law principles that govern how parties fulfill their obligations to one another under a contract, there are obvious public policy overtones to how the common law develops in that area. And to be effective, I think, in arguing those kinds of cases in higher appellate courts, being able to speak to those public policy implications, or at least being mindful of them, is an important ingredient to successful advocacy. So there's not a huge gulf between the public policy aspect of a constitutional case and a public policy aspect of a private law case, at least not as much as some might think.

94But in a constitutional case, you are talking about public policy dead center. You know, what were the choices that were made in 1867 when the representatives of the then colonies figured out how to divide powers between Parliament and the provincial legislatures? What were the policy reasons for which Sections 91 and 92 of the 1867 Constitution say what they say? Or if it's a charter case, what was debated in 1982? What text did the drafters of the constitutional document that we now have choose in order to express our shared commitments to civil liberties and fundamental rights, and how do those play out today in a way that constrains government action, that limits the ability of government to implement public policy of its choosing?

95I think given that, you know, I worked in politics, I've always been interested in public policy, it's impossible not to be excited about working on cases like that, particularly in the Supreme Court where they're not bounded by precedent in the same way that other courts are. They really do get to drill down to first principles and understand why the doctrine is why it is, why the cases say what they say. And you get to engage with these 9 brilliant people on those interesting and impactful issues, the disposition of which affects the lives of all of us, that affects the way our governments govern us. And it's really a privilege and exciting, I think, to get to work on cases of that importance and of that implication.

97Yeah, I mean, first of all, I'm not sure I agree that— well, I won't speak for any other commercial litigators, but I think you look around where I work on Bay Street, commercial litigators across the country, lawyers generally are, are more engaged, I think, with public policy issues than most professionals because the law is such an important instrument of public policy, and we are all trained to think in those terms. So from when I worked in politics to now, I've always felt very much at home in my interests in public policy, including within the commercial bar. But to the extent that that is, is more important to me or a bigger feature of my career than it is for others, I think it really goes back to my mom and dad, we talked about earlier.

98I saw them— they are, they are physicians, they are healthcare providers. The bread and butter, the, the mainstay of their professional lives has always been caring for individual patients. But they also showed me in the way that they conducted themselves in their career that they could have an ameliorative impact on the welfare of people far beyond their own patient population by doing work that was related directly or indirectly to public policy, to building research institutions, to addressing preventive health measures, to pushing governments to change rules around screening and to encourage people to, to get themselves checked out for different forms of cancer. Their engagement in the communities that, that I grew up in has been an inspiration to me my whole life.

99And so I think that my template for a professional is it's not just about getting to the end of the day and and making sure you're providing excellent client service. That's table stakes. You have to do that or you can't do anything else. But in addition to that, there's an obligation to leave the broader world in which we operate better than when we found it, better than the way in which we found it, to make a positive difference in the lives of people around us. And engaging with public policy is right up there with doing pro bono work, in my view, in terms of moving the needle on that. So I think that's where it comes from.

100Plus my academic interest and my background in politics. I just like this stuff. It's interesting to me. And so being able to marry those things together and use the law to do that is one of the things that I'm most excited about, that I love the most about being a litigator, and particularly about doing appellate litigation, which I have the privilege of doing a great deal of.

102So look, I work very hard. The way I've been trained is the principle that it's never about the lawyers, right? There are— I think sometimes we in our practices encounter counsel who have an unfortunate tendency to make things about the lawyers on the other they allege bad faith, they allege sharp practice, they allege misfeasance on the part of opposing counsel. I don't think that's good advocacy. I don't think it's good professionalism. I don't think it's, it's good lawyering. And I, and I've been trained not to do that. So I, when I'm working on a public policy-infused case, which I get to do from time to time, I never assumed that the lawyers on the other side are doing anything more than carrying a brief, just like I am.

103I might believe fervently in the cause that I'm advancing. And I'm lucky that I usually do. But I don't assume that the other side are true believers in advancing the cause that they're advancing because it just personalizes things in a way that's unhelpful. I don't think it helps the court to have a battle between lawyers. It helps the court to have a battle between arguments, a battle between submissions, between ideas and concepts of the public good. So I don't begrudge lawyers from taking on positions that I disagree with. Just as I hope people don't begrudge me for taking on briefs that they might disagree with. But I do think that some of the most satisfying experiences I've had as a litigator have been when I've been able to take on cases that squarely align with my own conception of what is good, what is right, what is just.

104I really do find that that's— that if you can access that really in any case, it makes the experience more fulfilling. And I say any case because it's not just public law cases where I have that experience. If I'm arguing a private law case, if I'm arguing a commercial case or litigating an arbitration or a trial, and I really believe that my client has the better interpretation of the contract, that they're entitled to something that the other side is unjustly or unlawfully withholding from them, being motivated by that, by doing justice, is helpful. It's not essential, though, I should say. Oftentimes, these, the equities are kind of neutral, or you might concede it privately that they're not on your client's side, in which case it's about ensuring that justice is done, that the process is fair, that the best submissions are made.

105And if I can achieve a good outcome from a client in spite of things being stacked against me, well, that's why I get to charge the hourly rates that I do. So that, I think, is a feature not just of my public law practice, but also of my private law practice. And I think it's an important commitment of any barrister, which is how we fancy ourselves, is that we're not our briefs, we're not our clients. We're there in court to do their bidding on instructions in a manner that is consistent with our professional obligations.

107me long-winded, Pulat. I know I can read between the lines of that comment.

110Thank you, Pulat. It's been a pleasure.