Another viewpoint (on its twenty-fifth anniversary, Law Now dedicates itself anew to the cause of justice).

• Author: Mildon, Marsha

2000/01 July

Last month, my landlord, his partner, and I, subscribed to an on-line organic vegetable and fruit delivery service. Each week, apples, grapefruit, lettuce, carrots and so on are delivered to our door via an elaborate bicycle delivery cart. It costs more than firing up the truck and going to the mega grocery store, but as my landlord poignantly said while composting last week's unused organic cabbage, "Sooner or later we have to take a stand for the kind of world we want."

1976/77

Canada's Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, was taking stands for the kind of Canada he wanted. He was quoted in 1965 as saying "I believe a constitution can permit the co-existence of several cultures and ethnic groups within a single state." By 1982, The Constitution Act, with its accompanying Charter of Rights had become the primary law of the land.

There was generally optimism that change was happening though there were cracks in that optimism. Medicare was healthy and well-funded, but inflation was skyrocketing. The "Just Society" Trudeau had promised in '68 was slipping under the waves of wage and price controls. Neighbourhoods, on the other hand, had taken the "Just Society" to their hearts and begun insisting on power in the planning and legislation that affected their immediate communities.

The civil rights, then Hippy, culture was splitting into three streams: the drug culture, the someday-to-be-well-off and powerful Boomer culture, and the third stream: those who moved from protest of war, prejudice, and poverty to social action.

Among this third stream were those who began to develop Canada's version of Public Legal Education (PLE). According to Lois Gander, one of the pioneers of PLE, "... they [early PLE radicals] exposed the way the law created, legitimized, and reinforced relationships between the state and its citizens, between classes, and among individuals. They demonstrated that law was not benign in its effect on these social arrangements. It was neither a passive by-product of social decisions, nor a neutral arbiter of disputes. ... With the new and radical mandate for law came the realization that public involvement in legal matters would be necessary if the law was to reflect the needs of everyone, not just a privileged group" (The Radical Promise of Public Legal Education in Canada).

25 years of L

It was within this context, 25 years ago, that LawNow (then known as Resource News) was begun. From the beginning, it had dual...