Gwen Brodsky, LLB (University of Victoria) 1981; LLM (Harvard) 1994; PhD (Osgoode Hall) 1999, is a leading constitutional equality rights lawyer. She has argued major constitutional equality rights cases in Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada. She has also appeared before treaty bodies of the United Nations and the Americas. Ms. Brodsky was counsel to Sharon McIvor in the case of McIvor v. Canada (2007 BCSC 827; 2009 BCCA 153; 2009 CanLII 61383 (SCC)), a constitutional challenge to the sex discrimination in the status registration provisions of the Indian Act, and represented Ms. McIvor in her subsequent petition to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The McIvor lawsuit and petition were ground-breaking in Canadian and international law, and the ensuing legislative reform established eligibility for Indian status for thousands of previously excluded descendants of Indigenous women.
Ms. Brodsky has dedicated her work to the equal-seeking community, frequently representing non-governmental organizations engaged in collaborative litigation and law reform initiatives, involving lawyers, community advocates, and academics. Her work is focused on enforcing governmental obligations under statutory, constitutional, and international human rights law, to realize rights to social and economic security and equality. Ms. Brodsky has represented, among others, the National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL), the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues (CCPI), Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (EGALE), and the Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD).
Gwen Brodsky is also a prolific writer and an equality rights theorist who began writing at a time when interpretations of equality rights were being newly considered and contested. She has made significant contributions to analysis and jurisprudence concerning substantive equality, social and economic rights, and human rights remedies. Her joint publications with Shelagh Day include Canadian Charter Equality Rights for Women: One Step Forward or Two Steps Back? (Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1990), a comprehensive study of the early years of Charter litigation, and Women and the Equality Deficit, an examination of the impact on women of cuts to social programmes.
Brodsky and Day’s writing has been cited by numerous courts and tribunals. Notably, Brodsky and Day’s analysis advanced in “The Legal Duty To Accommodate: Who Benefits?” [1996] vol. 75 The Canadian Bar Review 433, was applied by the Supreme Court of Canada to transform and strengthen Canadian law on the duty to accommodate, in the landmark case known as Meiorin. Brodsky was also counsel to BCGEU in Meiorin.
Gwen Brodsky has been involved in the Canadian equality rights movement since its earliest days. In the 1980’s, as a law student, she served as a member of the Steering Committee of NAWL. This was an historic period when the proposed language of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was being debated, and NAWL was active in a campaign to secure wording that would advance the substantive equality goals of women and other disadvantaged groups. From 1985 to 1987 Ms. Brodsky was the first Litigation Director of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) in Toronto. Subsequently, she has maintained a constitutional and human rights law practice and consultancy based in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2001, she and Shelagh Day founded the Poverty and Human Rights Centre, to advance the law concerning social and economic rights, in particular the rights of the poorest people.
Gwen Brodsky has taught human rights and constitutional law at the University of British Columbia, and in the Akitsiraq Law Program in Iqaluit. She has been an advisor to Canadian non-governmental organizations, Indigenous organizations, human rights commissions, governments, trade unions, employers, and universities.
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