BarTalk August 2001
Volume 13, Number 4

Lessons learned in a year of leadership

by Margaret Ostrowski QC

This is goodbye. My term as President comes to an end at the completion of the CBA Annual General Meeting in Saskatoon in mid-August. I re-read my first BarTalk column of last September in which I spoke of planning to make a difference and I think and hope I have. I am proud that the Branch office now has a very competent Executive Director in place and that it is being run in a much more accountable and business-like fashion. We have some new initiatives on the go – a Member Dispute Resolution and Communications Process, a Pro Bono forum coming up in October, lawyers selling real estate, a new focus on success for women in law, a special alliance with the Yukon Branch, and promotion of solicitors.

What is the best part of the job as President? For me, it was the ability to be on top of all the issues in the profession and to interact with lawyers of varied areas of practice who were chairs of our 19 standing committees, our 10 special committees, and our 72 Sections, and to work with our stakeholders – Legal Services Society, CLE, the Law Foundation, the Trial Lawyers Association, the three levels of the Judiciary, the media, Faculty of Law at UBC and UVic, the Law Society, the BC Court House Library Society, the Ministry of the Attorney General, and collaborate with the other Branch Presidents across Canada, and our National Executive and office staff. It was the interesting people and issues.

Thank you to all the volunteers who make this Branch work – more than 600 in all. It is very gratifying to see how quickly our lawyers respond to the call for volunteers. We were never short. And much thanks to my Branch executive, Ken Sarnecki, Carman Overholt, Mayland McKimm, QC, David Paul, Margaret Sasges, Jim Herperger, Wynn Lewis, Robert Brun and Ken Armstrong, all who put in a huge number of hours in service of the profession. This year I awarded the President’s Medal to Sandy Jakab-Hancock, a committed volunteer who does a very thorough job on every task she takes on. This past year, she has been very instrumental (along with Alison Narod) in advancing the Member Dispute Resolution Initiative, serving on the Equality and Diversity Committee, helping nominate lawyers for YWCA Women of Distinction awards, and assisting with two President’s forums. If more awards could be given, they would go to David Paul and Robert Brun for their exceptional work on the executive, to Valli Chettiar for her National work, and to Chris Holmes, my husband, for his patience and forebearance.

In this last part of my last column, I ask for a greater involvement of solicitors in our professional association. Solicitors and general practitioners represent more than 50 per cent of our profession but presently are under-represented in our professional bodies: of the 28 elected Benchers of the Law Society, there are only four or five solicitors, of the eight regularly elected members of the CBA executive, this coming year as the Past President, I am the only solicitor. It has been said that it is not as easy for solicitors to get elected to positions in the profession. They don’t have the natural network system that the barristers do at the courthouse and their names don’t make the papers in high profile litigation cases. Our first President’s Forum held three years ago was on Solicitors’ Issues and it sold out. From that forum, we constituted a Solicitors’ Issues Special Committee that was directed to focus on issues unique to the practice and profession of solicitors. This committee has been working on such tasks as Make a Will Week, QC’s, and lawyers as mortgage brokers. So I encourage solicitors to put their names forward and to get involved. To the barristers: could you cast a vote a solicitor’s way sometime?

Thanks to all of you for giving me the privilege of serving as your President this past year. It was a great experience!

This article was published in the August 2001 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2005, all rights reserved.