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Supreme Court Justice William Stevenson, appointed to the Court in 1990. Mr. Stevenson died in a long-term care home in Edmonton on July 7, 2021. He was 87 years old, having survived nearly 30 years with a progressive, multi-degenerative neurological condition that forced him to peremptorily retire from the Supreme Court in 1992.
Courtesy of the Family
Once, former Supreme Court Justice William Stevenson made his four young children sign a contract before a trip to France in which they promised to behave. Perfectly legal, it read: “In consideration of your paying the costs involved in a holiday in France, we the undersigned Covenant and Agree, promise and undertake, assure and guarantee that we will not make any complaints whatsoever about the places to which we are taken or the sites we examine or visit or the food or any other aspect of the holiday. In witness thereof we have hereunto placed our hands and seals this fifteenth day of April AD 1978.”
His daughter, Vivian Stevenson, who followed her father into the legal profession, laughed at the memory. “We didn’t complain once,” she said. “I remember seeing a lot of chateaus and museums on that trip.”
The contract was typical of Mr. Stevenson, who managed to combine a love for the law with a dry and sly sense of humour. As a professor, as a mentor and judge who sat on four separate courts before his career was cut short by illness, he left his exacting mark, and he did not like leaving anything to chance.
In 1999, when the building that housed the Alberta Law Review – a peer-reviewed quarterly Mr. Stevenson founded in 1955 as a student at the University of Alberta and for which he served as its first editor-in-chief – was officially named for him, Justice Jean C？té of the Alberta Court of Appeal wrote that in a partisan age, his long-time friend’s opinions were never shaped by partisan considerations, prejudgments, dogma, social theory or politicized views.
“An important reason for that is his distrust of theory which is unrelated to experience,” the biography continued. “Never has any lawyer or judge more fully integrated theory with fact, teaching with practice, than did Bill Stevenson. His statements of claim, examinations for discovery, and trials made full use of his very articulated knowledge of the law. Every talk which he gave to a law student, whether privately or to a big class, was full of practical examples and shaped by actual experience.”
Brian Mulroney, the prime minister who appointed Mr. Stevenson to the Supreme Court in 1990, said he was vetted very carefully and got outstanding reviews from everyone, including former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, who called him an “outstanding jurist and a gentleman.”
“I was very proud to appoint him,” Mr. Mulroney continued.
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An undated family photo.
Courtesy of the Family
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Mr. Stevenson's holiday contract with his four young children.
Courtesy of the Family
Mr. Stevenson died in a long-term care home in Edmonton on July 7. He was 87, having survived nearly 30 years with a progressive, multidegenerative neurological condition that forced him to peremptorily retire from the Supreme Court in 1992.
“Like everything else, he didn’t really talk about it. It was just another card he had been dealt. I know it was devastating for him, but he never complained,” Ms. Stevenson said. “We never got an official diagnosis, either, but it was one of those conditions that would be worse on some days than others. He ended up in a wheelchair because he would fall.”
William Alexander Stevenson was born in Edmonton on May 7, 1934, the only child of Alexander Lindsay Stevenson and Eileen Harriet (née Burns) Stevenson. His father was a police officer who rose through the ranks to become a deputy chief; the parents were mostly absent and eventually split up.
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Young Bill learned early to fend for himself and to develop goals he never wavered from: to become a lawyer and have a family. These were the two pillars of his life, staked and nurtured, what he called in his valedictory speech to classmates at Eastwood High School in 1951 his “life’s work.”
To that end, he worked at a series of blue-collar jobs to pay for his education at the University of Alberta, from a gas station attendant to the floor of a Coca-Cola bottling plant. In 1957, he was awarded the law school’s coveted gold medal, and was called to the Alberta Bar the following year.
One of his proudest moments as a young lawyer came when he travelled to London in October, 1959, and, as the bewigged, specially robed junior counsel to his future law partner, Bill Morrow, argued the last Canadian case heard before the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council, one that revolved around mechanic’s liens and oil. (The council upheld a Supreme Court of Canada decision for the other side.)
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Mr. Stevenson argued the last Canadian case heard before the Judicial Committee of British Privy Council.
Courtesy of the Family
While continuing to practise, Mr. Stevenson began to lecture at the University of Alberta’s law school in 1963. In 1968, he became a full professor, teaching for two years before returning to his law practice. He continued to teach part-time for 15 more years, a commonsensical, creative mentor who never took anything at face value.
In 1975, he became the first chair of the Legal Education Society of Alberta. That same year, he was appointed to sit on the Alberta District Court, joining the Court of Queen’s Bench in 1979 when the two were merged into one. In 1980, he ascended to the province’s Court of Appeal, sitting there until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1990.
In remarks before an Alberta Law Review reception in 2018, Supreme Court Justice Russell Brown said Mr. Stevenson’s judgments, which covered the full range of legal subjects, from corporate to criminal, were “models of uncommonly fine legal writing, characterized by economical, pithy and scrupulous legal analysis.” What was more, he continued, most were dissents or concurrences, which showed his courage and willingness to bare his concerns in ways that could benefit the country.
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For example, in his dissent in a 1991 case known as Osborne v. Canada (Treasury Board), in which public servants contested a provision of the Public Service Employment Act that prohibited partisan expression and activity, he showed how deeply he believed the need for political neutrality.
And in a criminal case in which an accused father from British Columbia asked the Supreme Court to reinstate a stay of charges of sexual assault involving his two daughters and stepdaughter because of the time elapsed between the alleged offences and the complaints – a stay that had been granted by the trial court, then overturned by the B.C. Court of Appeal – Mr. Stevenson stood firm.
“For victims of sexual abuse to complain would take courage and emotional strength in revealing those personal secrets, in opening old wounds,” he wrote. “If proceedings were to be stayed solely on the passage of time between the abuse and the charge, victims would be required to report incidents before they were psychologically prepared for the consequences of that reporting.
“Establishing a judicial statute of limitations would mean that sexual abusers would be able to take advantage of the failure to report which they themselves, in many cases, caused. This is not a result we should encourage.”
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In 1992, The University of Alberta made Mr. Stevenson an honorary LLD, while in 1996, he was named to the Order of Canada.
Cheryl Lukasewich
In other words, Mr. Stevenson’s distrust of theory, of torts and expected practice that was unrelated (and often contradictory) to lived experience made him into what Mr. Brown, in his speech, called “the very model of the neutral, dispassionate, open-minded arbiter.”
Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Stevenson also co-authored, with Mr. C？té, the Annotations of the Alberta Rules of Court, which became the basis for the Civil Procedure Encyclopedia, a five-volume treatise that has become both a reference and a search tool for lawyers and courts themselves.
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In 1992, The University of Alberta made Mr. Stevenson an honorary LLD, while in 1996, he was named to the Order of Canada.
When not practising or enforcing the law, Mr. Stevenson clung fast to the other pillar of his life: his family. To his wife, Patricia, a special education teacher to whom he was married for nearly 60 years. To his children, Cathy, Kevin, Vivian and James Stevenson, for whom he made brown-bag lunches before they went to school each weekday morning. To his children’s spouses and his four grandchildren. He leaves all of them.
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Mr. Stevenson with his wife, Patricia.
Courtesy of the Family