A Passion for Justice: The Legacy of James Chalmers McRuer

Christopher English is a history professor at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

With rare exceptions, lawyers who plead the law and judges who apply it
voice the assumptions and values of their time; historians work to
describe and explain their subject’s professional life without judging
it by the standards of their own day. In this thorough and detailed
biography, lawyer and historian Patrick Boyer has succeeded admirably in
making a case, but less so at explaining McRuer in the context of his
world.

As lawyer, royal commissioner, and judge McRuer had a long and
distinguished career (1914–77). His professional life is reconstructed
convincingly and exhaustively from his own private papers, more than 500
of his judicial decisions, and Boyer’s taped interviews with
colleagues and collaborators. A member of federal and provincial royal
commissions on prisons, civil rights, and law reform over more than 30
years; chief justice of the High Court of Justice of Ontario
(1945–64); and founding chairman of the Ontario Human Rights
Commission, from which he finally retired at age 87, he owed his
appointments to political patronage. However, he became a competent
judge and presided over famous cases: those inspired by the revelations
of Igor Gouzenko after 1946; Evelyn Dick (1946); and Suchan and Jackson
(1952). In clarifying the issues raised by these and numerous other
cases, Boyer is both informed and skilled.

He is less convincing in explaining the motives, values, and beliefs
that underlay McRuer’s career. That McRuer was an intensely private
man, austere, shy, and stubborn, without close friends, benign but aloof
even with his children, does not make the author’s task any easier.
McRuer was the product of a rural Ontario Scots Presbyterian upbringing
that espoused the values of hard work, probity, independence,
accountability and strict Christian morality, values widely shared by
official Ontario in his lifetime. It is a curious background for a
reformer. That his reformism smacked of noblesse oblige (my term) was
less important than that he had important reforms to propose, many of
which are accepted rights and legal practice today.

The sources of that reforming zeal remain obscure. Boyer holds that it
reflected “a passion for justice.” Whatever the place of that
“passion” in the makeup of this complex, contradictory, and perhaps
unknowable man, McRuer undoubtedly reflected and influenced the nature
and practice of law in his day. He is well served by this widely
researched and fluently argued study.