When I ask Christine Van Geyn to meet for a coffee, she’s quick to say yes, with enthusiasm.
“This sounds like so much fun,” she writes before noting her schedule is “pretty open” in early February.
Her response does not betray how much she has on the go: litigation director at the Canadian Constitution Foundation, one of the litigants that successfully challenged the government’s use of the Emergencies Act; host of the national TV show Canadian Justice, which airs three times a week on The News Forum; co-author of the recently published Pandemic Panic; YouTuber; podcaster; mother of three.
Apparently accepting invitations is what Van Geyn does.
“Career advice people always give you is to say ‘yes’ to things and I try to embrace that,” she tells me during our conversation.
“But it is exhausting to say yes to everything,” she admits with a laugh.
Van Geyn and I meet at the Nespresso Boutique in Yorkville, one of Toronto’s ritziest neighbourhoods. Van Geyn, who says she has three Nespresso machines in her home, appears to know the store well. She jokes that she doesn’t like to think too hard about the store’s beautiful interior: the soaring ceilings, wood walls and vast footprint. It reminds her of how much she must be overpaying for their coffee.
The store, I discover on arrival, no longer runs a café. But it still has a few inviting armchairs near the window and ample coffee for testing. After receiving some Nespresso tasters — caffeinated hazelnut for Van Geyn, decaf for me — we settle into those chairs with our coffees.
I tell Van Geyn I’ve been looking forward to speaking with her ever since the Federal Court released its Emergencies Act ruling in late January. The court held that Ottawa acted unreasonably and without justification in invoking the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests in February 2022.
“I was ecstatic,” Van Geyn says, recalling the moment. “I could barely open the [the decision] because my hands were shaking. I was so, so thrilled… That is a career high to have a victory like that.”
The judge credited the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the case’s other public-interest litigant, with changing his position through their “informed legal arguments.”
“[T]he effect of invoking [the Emergencies Act] is historic and society-wide,” Van Geyn says in a precise, measured tone. “We need to have clear guidance from the courts on how it can be used and when.”
The government was quick — very quick — to announce its plan to appeal. “I think they announced [the intention to appeal] within 30 minutes,” Van Geyn says.
Had the government even read the decision?
“I’m a pretty fast reader, but it’s 190-pages, so draw your own conclusions,” Van Geyn notes wryly.
Van Geyn thinks there is “no need” for the government to appeal. “[It’s] a very careful decision that was very well-reasoned and thorough,” she says. But she is not surprised that they are.
“I think they’re appealing because it’s a very bad political loss for them. They have egg on their face and it’s very embarrassing.”
First world problems?
A lot of Canadians are keen to forget the pandemic years. With Pandemic Panic, Van Geyn and co-author Joanna Baron are encouraging Canadians to do the opposite.
“If we forget history, it will repeat itself and the government can violate our rights with impunity,” Van Geyn said in a press release announcing the book’s November release.
The book’s foreword, written by Preston Manning, applauds the book for challenging “chapter by chapter” the official and widely accepted narrative that all of the governments’ pandemic-era limitations on rights and freedoms “were reasonable and justifiable even in a professedly free and democratic society.”
The book’s chapters are organized around constitutional rights, such as the freedom of expression, assembly, religion and movement. Each chapter tracks some of the court challenges brought by the Canadian Constitution Foundation and others who argued government policies or laws violated those rights.
Did they observe any trends in judicial outcomes?
One of the “surprising” findings was that the courts often said these constitutional rights were “not even engaged,” says Van Geyn before taking a sip of her coffee.
For instance, the foundation and others challenged the government’s requirement that Canadians pay thousands to quarantine in hotels when returning to Canada as a violation of the constitutionally-protected freedom of mobility.
The court concluded that the litigants had not provided any legal basis to support a claim that freedom of mobility was violated. It described the applicants’ wishes to avoid paying for hotel quarantines as “decidedly first world, economic problems.”
“These individuals were all travelling for compassionate reasons,” Van Geyn tells me. “We had an applicant who was going to see his mother who was at the end of her life and wanted to say goodbye. We had an applicant who wanted to attend a funeral. We had an applicant who was in a cross-border marriage” and wanted to help a spouse who had broken a shoulder.
“These are real reasons,” Van Geyn says softly but intently. “These people are not going to party in Ibiza. They are going to do something very core to who they are.”
“I don’t know how you can look at an applicant and say saying goodbye to your mother at the end of her life is a ‘first world’ problem,” says Van Geyn.
Having to incur thousands in additional travel costs can functionally impair someone’s movement, Van Geyn suggests to me. “These were all people of quite average means… [T]acking on between $2,000 and $5,000 to a trip, many Canadians cannot afford that.”
Strategy and argument
As the foundation’s litigation director, it is Van Geyn’s job to find cases like these and to “shepherd and manage the litigation.” She doesn’t argue the cases herself, but does weigh in on “their strategy and argument.”
Fundraising is an important factor in determining whether to accept a case. The level of public interest in the Emergencies Act case was huge, she notes. “Thousands of Canadians from across the country have donated to that case.”
Does the foundation have other big cases in the works now?
“We typically do four to five cases at the Supreme Court per year. And we don’t have anything in the roster for 2024… [T]here’s been a decline in the number of cases that the Supreme Court has been taking,” she adds with a look of consternation.
If there are looks of consternation from the store’s clerks that we’re still ensconced in their chairs, I do not notice them.
Van Geyn’s observation has piqued my interest: earlier that day, the legal magazine Law360 published an article making the very same point. It noted that the “top court’s total output of judgments dropped drastically in 2023 — by 36 per cent — from what was already a comparatively low output in 2022.”
The implications of Canada’s highest court refusing to weigh in on complex legal questions can be enormous.
Van Geyn provides just one example. In 2023, the court declined to hear an appeal of B.C.’s famed Cambie case, which upheld limits on the availability of private health care in the province. The decision came despite findings that health-care wait times were both long and at times life-impairing.
Given a seemingly contradictory ruling from the Supreme Court in 2005, which permitted greater access to private health care in Quebec where wait times are too long, many legal observers expected the Supreme Court to weigh in on the B.C. case.
“It’s frustrating that that was denied,” Van Geyn says understatedly.
No program like it
As our conversation extends into the late afternoon, I promise Van Geyn I have just a few questions left. I have not finished my coffee, even though it was small to begin with. Perhaps I ought to have tried the hazelnut.
I ask Van Geyn about her role as host of Canadian Justice and whether she enjoys being in the spotlight.
The show’s really about putting a spotlight on her guest experts, not her, she says demurely.
“It’s so fascinating to get to learn from these people and explore areas of law that are beyond the scope of what I normally practice.” She lists family law, bankruptcy, employment law, personal injury and fraud as some of the topics her guests cover.
In her view, the show addresses a gap in the market. “There is not another program like Canadian Justice where the public gets to do a deep dive with experts on the full spectrum of legal topics,” says Van Geyn, who, at the time of our meeting, has just filmed her 276th episode.
“The public is fascinated by legal topics.”
The Canadian Constitution Foundation’s podcast, Not Reserving Judgment, and YouTube channel support this claim. The latter has close to 70,000 followers.
By my count, that’s a lot of avenues through which Van Geyn is shaping Canadians’ awareness and understanding of contemporary legal issues.
Yet, as we near the end of our conversation, Van Geyn tells me “legal influencer is not how I describe myself.”
She says this sincerely, but I’m not convinced.
As we put on our coats, Van Geyn reminds me that she submitted an op-ed for Canadian Affairs’ consideration earlier that day. The piece is about a recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision that rejected a claim that a math competency test for teachers was racist.
Just one more way the non-legal influencer is informing — and perhaps influencing — Canadians’ understanding of the law.
Interesting article Lauren. As you wrote, if we forget our history it will repeat itself again.
Christine & Joanna are the icing on the CCF cake! Make it a Nespresso;)
Every Canadian who wants to understand the relevancy of government overreach should read the book. The foreward by Preston Manning also important as he headed up the National Citizen’s Inquiry
https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/NCI-Letter-to-Prime-Minister-2023-09-14-Eng.pdf
Since our Deputy P.M’s stated reason for appeal had been addressed by Justice Mosley, I would wager she did not read the 190pg ruling in the 30 min to airtime. But alas, I am just a joker and a wild card.