Glen Howe died (page 3)

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Glen How; jurist helped win freedoms for all Canadians

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Datum: 22.01.2009 06:24
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GLEN HOW, 89: JURIST

He helped win freedoms for all Canadians
Long before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, he acted as
counsel at the Supreme Court of Canada in a quintet of cases
that established fundamental freedoms of religion,
expression and assembly
SANDRA MARTIN

[email protected]

January 21, 2009


As a lawyer, Glen How had only one client. From the time he
was called to the bar in Ontario in 1943 until the day he
stopped practising, well into his 80s, he spent his entire
professional career protecting and promoting the interests
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

A slight, dapper man with a shock of white hair, he looked
almost biblical, despite his short stature, as he thundered
about the rights and entitlements of his co-religionists in
courtrooms across the country and around the world. "The
thing about Glen How that always struck me was that he would
never take no for an answer. He just soldiered on because,
ultimately, he believed that if he could just explain the
issues, he would eventually get a fair hearing and a fair
result," said lawyer William Kaplan, author of State and
Salvation: The Jehovah's Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil
Rights. "If he got no in one court, he would just move the
matter to another court and if he got no there, he would
move it further."

And so he did all the way to the Supreme Court in the 1950s,
as counsel in a quintet of cases that established
fundamental freedoms of religion, expression and assembly
more than two decades before the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms was promulgated. "He was a very hard-working and
tenacious lawyer, but he was wise enough to know that he
couldn't do all the heavy lifting himself, so he would
prepare the briefs and the submissions and then enlist
others, such as constitutional expert Frank Scott, to help
him argue cases before the court," Mr. Kaplan said.

Mr. How wasn't always successful - far from it - especially
in defending the rights of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse
blood transfusions for their children during medical
emergencies. But in a series of landmark legal decisions, he
did help to extend an adult's right to make personal
decisions about his or her own health-care treatment.

Jehovah's Witnesses, who believe we exist in a satanic
world, live in anticipation of the end of this world and the
recreation of a new one in which they will be saved. They
disdain state institutions - although they recognize that
they must pay taxes, they abhor patriotic demonstrations,
abstain from military service, try to claim conscientious
objector status in wartime and decline to salute the flag or
to sing the national anthem.

But Mr. How was an anomaly. He practised his faith devoutly
while using the country's institutions to win guarantees for
Witnesses' rights. He respected the courts and was willing
to accept the trappings of our society if they didn't
overtly violate the tenets of his faith.

For example, in the late 1950s, lawyer John Honsberger, then
a member of the Civil Liberties Committee of the Canadian
Bar Association, was surprised that Mr. How was not included
on the list of lawyers awarded the honorific Queen's
Counsel.

"He was the foot soldier on the ground, going into the
courts, and I was on the sidelines, cheering him on," Mr.
Honsberger said in an interview. He thought Mr. How was "an
outstanding counsel" who deserved the QC designation at
least as much as the 50 or 60 lawyers on the list. After
writing to the attorney-general's office to tell them so,
Mr. Honsberger was enlisted as an emissary to ask Mr. How
whether his religious beliefs would preclude him accepting
the honour. Mr. How, after ascertaining that he wouldn't
have to swear an oath recognizing the Queen as head of
state, was more than happy to join the QC ranks.

"It showed the integrity of the man - that he wasn't going
to take an award that many people would have been glad to
have if it was going to subordinate his faith," said Mr.
Honsberger.

It was this ability to navigate between religious and legal
worlds that made Mr. How such a powerhouse lawyer for the
Jehovah's Witnesses. In winning freedoms for them, he helped
establish implied rights for everyone. In doing so, he
influenced legalists, intellectuals and civil libertarians,
including future politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, who
went on to introduce the Charter legislation as prime
minister in 1982.

Glen How, the elder of two sons of Frank and Bessie How, was
born in Montreal just after the First World War. The family
moved to Toronto when he was about a year old and settled in
the Kingston Road area, in the city's east end. His father
was an accountant and personnel manager at paint
manufacturer CIL and his mother was a homemaker. When Glen
was 5 and his younger brother John (Joe) was 3, his mother
answered a knock on the door of their Toronto home and fell
into conversation with George Rix, a Jehovah's Witness.

Mrs. How was impressed and soon began attending meetings of
the Bible Students, as Witnesses were called in those days.
By 1929, she was a pioneer - a full-time minister - a
calling she followed until she died in 1969. Initially, her
husband was opposed to his wife's conversion, but he
gradually condoned it, although he never became a Witness
himself.

After graduating from Vaughan Road Collegiate in 1936, Glen
enrolled at the University of Toronto, graduating with a
bachelor's degree in 1940 and then proceeding to Osgoode
Hall Law School. Apparently, his mother was not surprised by
his career choice, having frequently predicted that her
argumentative son - "that little rascal" - was destined for
the law. He was called to the bar in Ontario in 1943. (He
subsequently qualified in Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan.)

As a teenager, Glen was not "very interested in spiritual
things." His conversion came about more because of civil
injustice than religious belief. On July 4, 1940, shortly
before Mr. How went to law school, the Liberal government of
prime minister Mackenzie King used the War Measures Act to
ban a number of organizations, including the Jehovah's
Witnesses. Canada had been at war since the previous
September, but after France fell in June, there was an
understandable fear that the Germans would cross the channel
and invade Britain. It was a treacherous environment in
which conscription might well need to be enforced, and the
Witnesses were suspect because of their opposition to
saluting the flag and serving in the armed forces. The ban
might also help placate generally anti-conscription and
Catholic Quebec, which feared Witness teachings and
practice.

It was "the turning point in my life," Mr. How wrote in a
2000 biographical article in Awake!, a magazine published by
the movement. "When the full power of the government
targeted this tiny organization of innocent, humble people,
it convinced me that Jehovah's Witnesses were Jesus's true
followers."

At the time, Nazi Germany was the only other country to have
issued such an edict. "This ban ranks as the single most
serious interference with religious liberties by the state
in all of modern Canada's history," Mr. Kaplan wrote in
State and Salvation.

Mr. How was baptized on Feb. 10, 1941. After his call to the
bar in Ontario two years later, he began working as general
counsel for the still-illegal Witnesses. He relentlessly
argued that Jehovah's Witness ministers, many of whom had
been interned in labour camps, were entitled to
conscientious-objector status, like other clergy. He also
defended the rights of the children of Jehovah's Witnesses
to refuse to sing the national anthem in school ceremonies.
Some of these children were expelled from school and removed
from their parents' care. Late in 1943, he travelled to New
York to seek help with his appeals from the wily and
experienced Hayden Covington, the Watchtower Society legal
counsel who eventually won 36 out of the 45 cases he argued
before the U.S. Supreme Court.

After the war, the federal government rescinded many of its
strictures against the Witnesses, but there was one
jurisdiction - Quebec - where religious freedom was not
observed. There were fewer than 500 Witnesses in Quebec, but
Union Nationale leader Maurice Duplessis, who was both
premier and attorney-general, waged a campaign against them
with all the authority in his administrative and legal
arsenal. He considered the Witnesses a serious threat to the
dominance of the Roman Catholic Church because of their
strident condemnation of the gospels and the manner of their
proselytizing - knocking on doors, preaching in people's
homes and assembling in large gatherings.

Between 1946 and 1953, Witnesses were involved in more than
1,500 criminal prosecutions, ranging from disturbing the
peace to sedition. Mr. How spent so much time commuting to
and from Quebec that he moved there in the late 1940s to set
up a legal practice. Every morning, his first job was to
find out how many Witnesses had been arrested the day before
and then try to arrange bail for them. A frequent client was
his brother, Joe, who ministered with Laurier Saumur
(obituary, May 5, 2007) on the streets of Quebec City.

Joe How was supposed to attend the Watchtower Bible School
of Gilead in Patterson, N.Y., for training as a Jehovah's
Witness minister in 1945, "but they had to get me [and Mr.
Saumur] out of jail first," he said in an interview. "It was
a blessing in disguise because before you go to that school,
you have to read the Bible through from one end to another
and it gave us six months to do a little studying."

Quebec City, which was Mr. Duplessis's political stronghold,
had enacted a bylaw forbidding the distribution of "any
book, pamphlet, booklet, circular, or tract whatever without
having previously obtained ... the written permission of the
chief of police." In response, the Witnesses produced
"Quebec's Burning Hate," a four-page tract listing names,
dates and places of violence against Jehovah's Witnesses,
and began distributing it across Canada in late 1946.

Within days, Mr. Duplessis declared "a war without mercy
against the Witnesses of Jehovah" and ordered sedition
charges laid against anyone caught distributing the
pamphlet. He personally revoked the liquor licence of
Montreal restaurateur Frank Roncarelli, a Jehovah's Witness
who was a prime source of bail money. (Mr. Roncarelli closed
Quaff, his Crescent Street restaurant, six months later
because his income had been so seriously diminished. He sued
Mr. Duplessis for damages.)

In the first sedition case to go to trial, Mr. How, who had
still not been called to the bar of Quebec, worked under
Jewish lawyer A. L. Stein to defend a Jehovah's Witness
named Aimé Boucher. Meanwhile, Mr. Saumur, who had been
arrested numerous times for violating the flyer bylaw, filed
a civil suit against Quebec City.

The Boucher, Saumur and Roncarelli cases went to the Supreme
Court in the 1950s. The Boucher case, which used truth as a
defence, eliminated an archaic Quebec law defining sedition
as criticism of the government and led to the dismissal of
nearly 125 sedition charges. The Saumur case, which relied
on a defence of freedom of expression and religion,
established that issuing licences to restrict a person's
rights to practise his or her faith was beyond municipal or
provincial authority and led to the dismissal of more than
1,000 bylaw charges. And the Roncarelli case established
that publicly elected officials cannot arbitrarily invoke
the law against individuals, as Mr. Duplessis had done.

Not all of the cases Mr. How argued were as widely
celebrated in the larger world. Some, especially the ones in
which he fought for the right to refuse blood transfusions,
especially for children, are medically and ethically
problematic for many people. Jehovah's Witnesses believe the
Bible prohibits the eating or consumption of blood, a
stricture that encompasses transfusions and most blood
products, even in life-threatening medical emergencies. Mr.
How was counsel for the Jehovah's Witnesses in Supreme Court
of Canada appeals that allowed medical intervention on
behalf of underage children and in an Ontario Court of
Appeal case that confirmed an adult's right to make
health-care treatment decisions.

In 1954, Mr. How married Margaret Biegel, a British
Jehovah's Witness. They had no children and she worked as
his secretary as his law career expanded. She died of cancer
in 1987.

Two years later, in November, 1989, Mr. How married Linda
Manning, a young American lawyer and Jehovah's Witness who
had moved north to work in the Canadian organization's legal
department. Until well into his 80s, Mr. How continued to
represent the Witnesses' legal interests, appearing as
consultant counsel in Osaka, Japan, in 1993 and in Singapore
from 1994 to 1996.

The American College of Trial Lawyers gave him its Award for
Courageous Advocacy on Sept. 8, 1997, the first time a
Canadian lawyer had received this distinction. In honouring
him, the college said Mr. How had, "throughout the course of
his long career, demonstrated courage and commitment as a
trial lawyer, as an appellate lawyer and as a human being."

He was awarded the Law Society Medal of the Law Society of
Upper Canada in 1998, a certificate of appreciation and
recognition from the Bar of Montreal the following year. In
2000, he was named an officer of the Order of Canada for
"consistently and courageously" fighting legal battles to
advance civil liberties and helping "pave the way" for the
Canadian Bill of Rights and Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Calling him a "man of conscience," the citation lauded him
for working at "minimal compensation" to defend clients "in
every province of Canada, many American states and several
other countries."

GLEN HOW

William Glen How was born March 25, 1919, in Montreal. He
died Dec. 30, 2008, in Georgetown, Ont., of pneumonia as a
result of complications of prostate cancer. He was 89. He is
survived by his wife, Linda. He also leaves his brother,
Joe, and extended family.
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Glen How; jurist helped win freedoms for all Canadians

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