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Judges from the Ontario Court of Appeal join Chief Justice Michael Tulloch on a visit to Fort William First Nation during an outreach visit to Thunder Bay, on Oct. 30.Jason McKenzie/The Globe and Mail
On a mid-fall day in Thunder Bay, judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal crowded into a room at the local courthouse – but they were not the ones presiding.
The morning meeting convened in the Aboriginal Conference Settlement Suite, a circular space focused on restorative justice. Judges from Ontario’s top court were there to listen but not adjudicate, as part of an annual outreach visit.
There was a smudging ceremony, a waft of cleansing smoke shared with each person in the room to open up the senses and spirit.
Justices on the Ontario appeal court heard details of challenges from a local judge and others, in a region that shoulders an array of them: high rates of violent crime; disproportionately high rates of Indigenous incarceration; struggles to provide legal services to far-flung Indigenous communities throughout the vast northwest of the province, where distances are measured in hundreds of kilometres.
Chief Michele Solomon, of the nearby Fort William First Nation, spoke about her difficult years as a teenager, dealing with drugs and alcohol, close calls with serious violence, pregnancy.
“I know the despair that takes our young people to these places,” Chief Solomon told the assembled judiciary. “I know how easy it is to get sucked into that.”
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Chief Justice Tulloch speaks at Lakehead University law school.Jason McKenzie/The Globe and Mail
As the meeting concluded, Chief Justice Michael Tulloch thanked everyone. “Context is critically important,” he said, speaking of the value that personal stories and realities of experience have within the justice system.
It was three years ago, in mid-December, that Chief Justice Tulloch was elevated by former prime minister Justin Trudeau to become the 22nd chief justice of Ontario since Confederation. Chief Justice Tulloch had served on the appeal court since 2012, when he was appointed by the Conservative government.
In Chief Justice Tulloch’s three years leading the court, he has pushed the federal government for more resources and worked to bring the Ontario Court of Appeal to the people of the province, beyond the doors of Osgoode Hall in downtown Toronto.
He calls it humanizing the law.
“People are questioning a lot of important underpinnings of our democracy,” said Chief Justice Tulloch in a rare interview. “A reason for that is a lack of trust.”
The appeal court judges visited Windsor three years ago. in 2024, they headed to Ottawa. In Thunder Bay, the schedule ranged from meetings with local lawyers and judges to a morning at the law school at Lakehead University and a tour of the Fort William First Nation.
“It’s so we can have a better understanding of the people we are serving,” said Chief Justice Tulloch. “That in itself is humanizing the law.”
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Chief Justice Tulloch, before rising to the top job, served in several prominent public roles outside the appeal court.Jason McKenzie/The Globe and Mail
The Ontario Court of Appeal is one of the country’s top judicial arenas and like courts across the country, it is grappling with a heavy workload and many cases of increasing complexity.
In September, Chief Justice Tulloch called on the federal government for more judges. Rulings in Ontario, he said at the time, “not only shape Ontario’s jurisprudence but resonate across the country and around the common-law world.”
The appeal court has 22 full-time judges, a level unchanged for years. According to a Globe and Mail analysis, Ontario has roughly half the appeal court judges, relative to population, compared with top provincial courts in Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta. Ottawa in November’s federal budget promised Ontario two more appeal judges, reviving an unfulfilled pledge from a year earlier, but the imbalance remains significant.
“The work is complicated, challenging, and there’s a lot more of it,” said Chief Justice Tulloch in the interview. “It’s reasonable for the federal government to add more judges to our court.”
Among recent significant rulings from the court is a decision in early December written by Chief Justice Tulloch. It centred on strict time limits for criminal trial proceedings, known as Jordan deadlines.
The Supreme Court of Canada in 2016 issued the Jordan judgment with the intent of speeding up the justice system but it has led, in part, to the stay or withdrawal of about 10,000 criminal cases each year across Canada, about 4 per cent of the yearly total caseload.
The case in Chief Justice Tulloch’s ruling in early December involved drug trafficking. An interagency police investigation lasted nearly a year and more than two dozen people were arrested in 2021. Disclosure of voluminous evidence from Crown prosecutors took more than a year.
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Chief Justice Tulloch says personal stories and realities of experience within the justice system are of critical importance.Jason McKenzie/The Globe and Mail
The delay for one of the accused, Sukhvir Singh, was tallied at about six months over the 18-month limit for criminal trials in provincial court. The Ontario Court of Justice stayed the charges, concluding that complexity did not justify the delay.
Chief Justice Tulloch disagreed. He set aside the stay and sent the case back to trial. Such a ruling on a central question of how to handle Jordan is notable, in Ontario and across Canada, and its thinking is similar to recent proposed changes from the federal government on how the courts should assess complex cases against the Jordan deadlines.
In Chief Justice Tulloch’s judgment, Jordan should not be applied mechanically. The individual charges were not technically difficult but the case as a whole was. One factor he noted was the work and time required in the early months ahead of trial after charges are laid, in an investigation and prosecution he called a mega-project.
In a break during the session at the law school in Thunder Bay, Chief Justice Tulloch spent some time chatting with several local police officers working as court security that day. One of the cops asked the judge about his role. They were surprised to hear he was the chief justice.
“I’m a people person,” said Chief Justice Tulloch. “I’m at ease with people. I’m a student of human nature.”
He was born in Jamaica and moved to Canada at age nine. Since boyhood, he has loved reading. “It takes you out of your world, the immediacy of where you are,” he said of books. “I spent more time in libraries than anywhere else.”
After finishing law school at York University, he worked as a Crown prosecutor and a lawyer in the 1990s, specializing in criminal law. In 2003, he was named to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, one of the youngest-ever judges to be named to a federally appointed bench.
About 10,000 Jordan cases thrown out annually as Ottawa, provinces call on Supreme Court for change
Soon thereafter, following a session for new judges, he impressed Warren Winkler, who later served as Ontario chief justice. “Michael is truly an eclectic person,” Mr. Winkler said in 2012 when then justice Tulloch joined the appeal court.
Chief Justice Tulloch, before rising to the top job, served in several prominent public roles outside the appeal court. He was head of two independent reviews for the Ontario government, one on police oversight and the other on the former police practice of randomly carding people on the street.
In December 2022, he was named the province’s chief justice, the first Black person in that role in any province.
On the bench, Chief Justice Tulloch sees a balanced role for the judiciary, one where the text of laws is carefully measured but also one where numerous factors are weighed.
That approach ranges from personal histories of an accused to the impact of their actions on victims and society. Understanding the on-the-ground experiences in varied regions of the province, such as Thunder Bay and northwestern Ontario, is a part of it. The experiences of Indigenous people are also key. It’s about work in the courtroom and getting out of the courthouse.
Chief Justice Tulloch sees himself among a new generation of judicial leaders in Canada.
“The courts need to be relevant to society,” he said. “My role as a judge is to interpret the law and you can’t do that without looking at the context of the society in which you live.”
