When it comes to the Canadian legal community, The Honourable Michelle O’Bonsawin (LLB ’98, PhD ’22) is a trailblazer and an inspiration. In 2022, Justice O’Bonsawin became the first Indigenous judge to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Justice O’Bonsawin is an Abenaki member of the Odanak First Nation in Quebec, and is originally from a small Francophone community near Sudbury. Wanting to be a lawyer since she was a child, Justice O’Bonsawin pursued studies in the French Common Law program at uOttawa. During and immediately following her LL.B. she was a case review worker at the University of Ottawa’s Legal Aid Clinic, Aboriginal Legal Services, and was part of the Indigenous Law Students Association.
Her appointment to Canada’s highest court is a culmination of the expertise and experience Justice O'Bonsawin developed through her distinguished career. She served as general counsel for institutions like the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, the RCMP, and Canada Post. In 2017, Justice O’Bonsawin was appointed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice where she adjudicated trials in French and English.
Her specialties are labour, human rights, and mental health law—the latter of which has been called a highly specialized area that fuses criminal, constitutional, and administrative law. In her written application for the federal judiciary, Justice O'Bonsawin noted that her experience in mental health enables her to work in an area of law that is becoming more common before the courts.
In her eight years with the Royal Ottawa, she became aware of the need for legal services for health professionals as they went through review board hearings. Recognizing this gap, Justice O'Bonsawin refined her understanding of the legal issues related to mental health and was called on several occasions to provide legal guidance in this space.
“I would like to ensure that the stigma associated with mental health is reduced and one day completely eliminated,” wrote Justice O’Bonsawin in her federal judiciary questionnaire. “This applies not only to the general population but also to the judiciary. Thanks to these efforts, people appearing before tribunals and courts will hopefully receive the attention they need from mental health professionals.”
During her time with the Royal Ottawa, Justice O’Bonsawin also performed significant research regarding the use of the Gladue principles. These principles were established to help judges better consider the circumstances and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples during the sentencing for criminal trials. Justice O’Bonsawin carried this work into her doctoral research at uOttawa, and her PhD thesis examined the use of the Gladue principles at review board hearings.
Over the course of her two uOttawa degrees, Justice O’Bonsawin was an active member of the uOttawa community. She taught Indigenous law in the University’s French Common Law Program and previously served on uOttawa’s Board of Governors. Supporting the next generation of lawyers, Justice O’Bonsawin also volunteered for more than a decade with uOttawa’s Legal Mentorship Program for Women, in addition to various other mentorship programs.
With a fierce commitment to justice and her varied public service roles, Justice O’Bonsawin has—and is continuing to make—a positive impact on her community and Canada’s legal system at large.