January 21, 2009 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090121.OBHOW21/TPStory/?query=Glen+How
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
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. © Copyright 2009 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.