Wallace Craig is at work on a project that will contribute a unique resource to Vancouver’s historic record.
During his career as a provincial court judge from 1975 to 2001, Craig, as he prefers to be called, kept a complete record of his decisions in the cases that came before him. Now he is making a catalogue of those decisions.
The decisions accumulated in 26 years as a court judge reside in a stack of materials more than three feet high. Rendering a catalogue from all that paper is a daunting prospect. Craig sees the task as a challenge, certainly, but well worth the effort.
He believes it’s important that these records be housed at the City of Vancouver Archives where they would be available to the public. According to Craig, this collection of case decisions is unique in two respects.
“I am not aware that any of my fellow judges kept their decisions. And they show criminal matters and the judicial process from the inside out,” he says. “Finding treasures among the documents is what makes me so delighted with the process. I recently came upon the video record and transcript of the send-off given to Les Bewley by his friends and colleagues when he retired in 1981.”
The project has been gestating since Craig took mandatory retirement at the age of 70. Assuming the rights of a citizen to comment freely on the Canadian justice system, Craig published an account of his life and times in 2003 that he titled Short Pants to Striped Trousers: The Life and Times of a Judge in Skid Road Vancouver.
The book looks at the cases and the people, controversial or inspiring, that Craig encountered throughout his career. Some of the cases he dealt in his years on the bench were controversial, others notorious. Put them together and they are a record of the life and times of a community from the perspectives of crime, law and justice.
Here are colleagues Angelo Branca and Les Bewley. Here is the Bennett Doman insider trading trial and the case of Greenpeace vs. U.S.S. Independence. Here also is a glimpse into Wally-World, a term coined to describe the occasions when Judge Craig would “zero in on some cowardly wife-beater using English as a blunt instrument.”
Craig’s career in the legal profession is covered in the “Striped Trousers” section of his book. The “Short Pants” section is about growing up in Vancouver. In the preface, Craig writes: “... this book is not an autobiography or a memoir, it is about people and changing and turbulent times in Vancouver since 1931, the year I was born.”
It’s the story of Vancouver as it was during the Depression and the war years, and what it became after the war. It’s also a portrait of Fraserview, the neighbourhood where Craig was born and raised. About an aerial photograph of Fraserview in 1950, where 1,200 homes were built for returning veterans, he writes: “The little streams, the blackberries are gone. The past has been eliminated. Yet, when I drive through my old neighbourhood, I can still feel it as it was. We must never ignore our past, it tells us where we have been and where we’re going.”
Craig writes about family and friends and the people who shaped his values and beliefs over the course of his life. Those values and beliefs influenced Craig’s 46 years in the law, first as a lawyer and then as a judge of the provincial criminal court located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
In 2004, with Short Pants to Striped Trousers written and published, and a routine of swimming off the Ambleside shoreline in place, Craig looked about him from his North Vancouver home and garden for a new challenge. One turned up, almost in his own backyard.
From 2004 to 2009, Craig wrote more than 100 columns in the North Shore News, in which he continued to exercise his right as a citizen to comment freely on the Canadian criminal justice system. The column overlapped for a year with Craig’s appointment to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which continued until 2014. Craig’s newspaper columns are now privately collected under the title Black-Sheep Commentaries on Canada’s Criminal Justice System.
Black Sheep is a fitting term, one Craig chose deliberately.
“There are usually a couple of black sheep in a flock, usually standing off to the side, alone. I walked my own path and never answered to anyone,” he explains.
In Short Pants to Striped Trousers, Judge Wallace Craig created a memorable portrait of his life and career to share with his community.
Perhaps one day Craig’s collected decisions will be housed in the City of Vancouver Archives for the benefit of his fellow citizens.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. Contact her at 778-279-2275 or email her at lander1@shaw.ca.
