Renowned civil rights lawyer Joseph Arvay, who spent most of his life fighting from a wheelchair to make things right for any number of society’s legal and civil underdogs, has died at the age of 71.
Arvay’s wife, Connie Addario, said her husband died Sunday from a heart attack.
Arvay suffered a spinal injury that left him a paraplegic in a skiing accident in 1969 at the age of 21 when he was a law student at the University of Western Ontario.
The accident appeared to spur him on.
Joseph Arvay, representing Providence Health Care, checks his phone before a news conference after the B.C. Supreme Court re-established access to diacetylmorphine (heroin) assisted treatment following a 2013 change by the federal government classifying it as a restricted substance, in Vancouver, B.C., on May 29, 2014. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)
Arvay completed his year at Western from Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital and went on to finish his studies at Harvard.
He then went on to take causes and cases that brought about wide-ranging legal changes in Canada, including same-sex marriage, preserving access fo safe injection sites, prisoners’ rights and–most famously–medically-assisted suicide.
“Joe had a life force–I imagine it’s hard to separate what came first. Did the accident make him that kind of indefatigable trailblazer?” Addario said in an interview with The Globe and Mail on Monday.
“Things can go one way or the other when people suffer that degree of trauma. I think he turned it to the good,” she said.
“He started on a very cellular level to understand the experience of being disenfranchised, disadvantaged, discriminated against, pitied–all those things.”
The Victoria-based Arvay was an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Order of British Columbia.
Governor General Julie Payette invests Joseph Arvay as an Officer of the Order of Canada during a ceremony at Rideau Hall in May 2018 in Ottawa. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/David Kawai)
“His legacy, his record is just extraordinary. He was a force of nature–personally and professionally,” a long-time friend and a former B.C. attorney general, Andrew Petter, told Gloria Macarenko, host of CBC’s On the Coast, on Monday.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Paul Champ, an Ottawa human-rights lawyer, called Arvay “Canada’s greatest constitutional litigator, if not its greatest litigator, period.”
Craig Jones, a professor of law at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C, told the Victoria Times Colonist newspaper:
“I’m gutted, everybody’s gutted who knew him.
“He was far and away the most successful and storied constitutional litigator in Canadian history.”
Joseph Arvay is pictured making his way past pro-life demonstrators outside the B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver on June 15, 2012. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward)
Grace Pastine, the litigation director for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, worked with Arvay on a number of landmark cases, including the medically-assisted suicide case known as Carter v Canada, in 2015.
One of the things that was so remarkable about Arvay was that he worked at the “absolute pinnacle of the profession,” she told the Times Colonist.
“What drove him was a strong and abiding belief in justice and equality. Joe had deep wells of compassion for people.
“He translated that into the fiercest constitutional advocacy.”
With files from CBC News,
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