ON THE FRONT COVER LOUISA WINN, K.C.

By Aleem Bharmal, K.C., Tina Parbhakar and Mary Salaysay

In 2021, Louisa Winn, K.C., co-directed a documentary film called But I Look Like a Lawyer 1 This 30-minute film brought to light the experiences with unconscious bias and discrimination lived by British Columbia’s pan-Asian lawyers over the past 30 plus years. Louisa, her co-director Audrey Jun and the team of creators were inspired by an earlier short film called But I Was Wearing a Suit, 2 created by Indigenous lawyers in British Columbia in 2017. With the support of the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers (“FACL”) BC, filmmaker Jeremy Dyson and his media team and the Law Foundation of BC, But I Look Like a Lawyer premiered successfully to a North American audience of over one thousand lawyers and law students in November 2021. The film was featured at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and has become a teaching tool for several Canadian law societies and at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law. An evidence-based exposition featuring pan-Asian lawyers and scholars in law and history, the film addresses the negative and lasting impacts of Canadian colonial policies and is a thoughtful companion to the 2017 film and diversity and inclusion dialogues in British Columbia’s legal profession. Not every day does a circumspect senior prosecutor moonlight as a social justice documentary filmmaker with rave reviews. There is definitely more to Louisa than meets the eye. While Louisa appears to navigate various arenas effortlessly, behind the scenes, her drive, focus and courage play instrumental roles.

A TIRELESS ADVOCATE, DAY AND NIGHT

A lawyer for almost 30 years, Louisa was first called to the bar in 1994, in Newfoundland, and then called to the B.C. bar in 1995. Louisa is a senior

Crown prosecutor at the BC Prosecution Service (“BCPS”). Embedded in the Criminal Appeals and Special Prosecutions section, she has become an expert in commercial crime and regulatory prosecutions and received a Queen’s Counsel appointment in 2019 for her commitment to excellence and distinguished service. Daily life sees her prosecuting the spectrum of criminal fraud, employer-caused workplace fatalities and a variety of corruption-based offences in trial courts across the province. Her cases invariably involve breaches of trust and betrayal in relationships, which have resulted in the loss of money, assets and sometimes lives. As Crown, Louisa and her BCPS colleagues spend their days working to protect the public through independent, effective and fair prosecutions. This involves making difficult decisions about prosecuting offenders and protecting victims of crime, balancing the various factors that can make up the public interest in each case. As Louisa puts it, when you have been cheated by fraud or another’s financial recklessness, you are essentially robbed of the ability to thrive economically in life. Louisa sees herself as metaphorically chasing after fraudsters to hold them to account for their unfair activities toward others and, in reality, she is extremely successful at preparing and putting forward her cases to get the job done.

Indeed, Louisa’s passion has led to her becoming a subject-matter expert in counterfeit currency offences. She is the only prosecutor in Canada to have successfully secured convictions of three different “master” producers of large-scale sums of fake money, all of whom operated in British Columbia. Such experiences drew the Bank of Canada to ask the BCPS for her ongoing services and recruit her for legal educational advice on counterfeit currency identification and enforcement. Her BCPS supervisors thus unanimously say, “Louisa is the expert to the experts.” Indeed, she has trained specialists at the Bank of Canada as well as the National Anti-Counterfeiting Bureau, the RCMP, forensic accounting investigators and teams of regulatory investigators on how to fortify their special investigations.

A QUIET, YET MIGHTY STORM

Crown managers who work with Louisa say, “She is a quiet little storm—if you unleash her, watch out!” Even as a junior Crown lawyer in the 1990s, when playing touch football with other prosecutors, despite her short height and non-jock lifestyle, team members knew the secret was to position Louisa to catch the ball, as she would outrun many others to a touchdown.

Louisa is both competitive and compassionate. Colleagues say Louisa is warm, welcoming and well connected, as well as perpetually pleasant and positive. Friends, other social justice advocates, law students and colleagues seek her out to guide and mentor new lawyers as well as articled and law students. She is the kind of person who organizes and connects different organizations to a common goal from a singular desire to align and achieve shared momentum and success. Louisa leverages mutual interests and uplifts people around her. She seeks to exceed expectations of what can be done, whatever she is assigned.

At the same time as managing a full-time trial load, Louisa has authored with a team of her co-workers the report and recommendations of the BCPS’s Gender Equity and Advancement Committee. She also remains a proactive inaugural member of the BCPS’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, established in 2020 by the Assistant Deputy Attorney General Peter Juk, K.C. Louisa brings her lived experiences, academic background and advocacy experiences as a dedicated member of Amnesty International to her equity and inclusion work in the legal realm. She is the former chair and active contributor to the annual Amnesty International Film Festival hosted in Vancouver for over a dozen years. Having experienced the transformative power of film throughout her own life, Louisa is adamant that documentary is a key method to effectively communicate complex human rights abuses and social justice challenges at home and around the world.

As a member of the CBABC’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee since 2017, Louisa has innovated, initiated and sustained an ongoing dialogue series to showcase the supportive relationships that have existed and can continue to exist among Indigenous, pan-Asian and other racialized communities in British Columbia. This relation-building series, which she formulated in 2019 with Tina Parbhakar, represents a collaborative effort between Indigenous and racialized elders, scholars, lawyers and law students and is supported by the CBABC, Allard Law’s Indigenous Legal Studies and FACL BC. Chief James Hobart of the Spô’zêm First Nations, a founding partner, has described the dialogue series as a bright light example of truth and reconciliation efforts. Of course, co-collaborators watching the short films “Cedar and Bamboo” and “To All My Fathers Relations” formed the key part of an initial gathering. Louisa remains dedicated to this series about cross-cultural collaboration to dismantle colonialism and its devastating effects of bias and discrimination in our communities.

Formative Influences And Reel Causes

Louisa’s commitment to creating a safe, stable and equitable society began at an early age, influenced by her late father’s family experiences in Burma, now Myanmar. Born in Hong Kong, she is the product of diasporic parents from two former British colonial countries. Louisa grew up in St. John’s,

Newfoundland, in the 1970s and ’80s. She explains that she was “born in one far east and raised in another far east.” Her love of documentary films began at an early age when her father would bring home National Film Board of Canada (“NFB”) films for their family and friends to watch. Cable TV was rare, so families in St. John’s rented film reels from the local NFB office to watch with a projector. This love of film found later expression during university lunch breaks, as Louisa sought out showings of human rights films on campus. This audio-visual education was a perfect complement to her undergraduate studies in Western philosophical thought, which culminated in an honours degree in Canadian history.

Studying the experiences of the past to understand the present and knowing where we have come from as a community of communities are recurrent themes in both Louisa’s life and her personal approach. Louisa spent her early university years learning the effects of Canadian colonial policies on immigration, including British child migration and European migrant labour. As a student, she dreamed of becoming an historian and re-writing textbooks to celebrate diversity. Years later, as a lawyer volunteering with Amnesty International, Louisa’s “documentary addiction” found an outlet as she and her Amnesty International friends reviewed hundreds of film submissions each year to find suitable candidates to showcase the current state of human rights around the world at the annual film festival.

Born To Be A Lawyer

Some say lawyers are made; others say lawyers are born. Louisa, consistently seeking to protect the vulnerable, stand up against unfairness and call out for justice, seems to be the latter. As an infant, Louisa had arrived with her parents in Toronto in 1968. As reflected above, her parents then followed career opportunities in St. John’s. Childhood memories include regular gatherings of the Multicultural Society, which hosted families originating from as near as the mainland of Canada to as far as Sri Lanka and South Africa. The world’s diasporas living in St. John’s formed their own friendships, sharing feasts at each other’s homes. Two younger siblings soon joined the family, born in St. John’s, growing up in the quiet new suburban neighbourhood of Cowan Heights. Being Chinese in a community with few other visible “foreigners” mostly drew friendly curiosity. However, it also drew outright disdain. Louisa recalls incidents of explicit racism, such as being called anti-Asian slurs by other children. In a graphic primary school memory, an aggressive boy attacked her and her little sister at a neighbourhood playground, hurling insults while beating them with his fists. His physical pursuit was violent and unrelenting, supported by his friends’ jeers and despite her friends’ screams for help. Louisa’s friends quickly found her mother, who was running over to investigate the commotion. Soon afterwards, police arrived to disperse the melee. This real-world lesson of supportive allies and intolerant foes led Louisa and her sister (now also a lawyer) to develop a heightened awareness. Louisa, in particular, took on the role of a protector and defender as a result of these kinds of formative experiences.

Louisa’s curiosity, audacity and leadership were early childhood traits, continuing a lineage of unwavering resilience. Her father, the son of a tenacious woman who raised him and his nine siblings during the Second World War, was the first in his country to receive a United Nations Colombo Plan Scholarship in 1958. This opportunity took him from medical school studies at the University of Rangoon to optometry studies in Queensland, Australia, and then to meeting and marrying Louisa’s mother, an optician from Hong Kong. Unrest in Burma and Australia’s exclusionary immigration policies in the early 1960s compelled her parents to move to Canada to join family. In later years, her father developed an interest in animal rights, human rights and Buddhism, enlisting Louisa to proofread his op-eds. While in middle school, Louisa also regularly proofread his essays, and this inevitably influenced her own thinking. She found early opportunities to try her own advocacy in high school public speaking competitions, not shying away from weighty or unpopular topics, such as criminalizing pornography and legalizing prostitution. As a teenaged youth parliamentarian, in 1984, she learned a sobering lesson on the power of institutionalized and societal prejudice with a crushing defeat to her proposed mock bill to prohibit schools from banning and segregating children with AIDS. Decades later, Louisa sought out allies for another audacious social justice advocacy effort. In 2018, Louisa found wholehearted support from her supervisors at the BCPS, Trevor Shaw and Peter Juk, K.C., to create a proposal to Myanmar’s parliamentarians for a training program for their prosecutors on gender-based violence. Other Crown colleagues had delivered similar training to police and prosecutors in South America and Asia. The military coup in Myanmar in 2021 alongside a worldwide pandemic put an abrupt end to any present hope of delivering this training. Not easily discouraged, Louisa directed her energy into her local advocacy work, and specifically the filming and post-production of the But I Look Like a Lawyer documentary under serious COVID-19 protocols.

Clarus Magnus Dicerus

This Latin term meaning “clear and loud speech” was the slogan for the Memorial University (“MUN”) Debating Society in 1987. An avid debater through grade 11 to the end of her university years, Louisa was thrilled by public speaking and debating competitions. In fact, Louisa along with her keen cohort of fellow debaters were determined to host the national tour- nament of the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate (“CUSID”) in style. John and Ann, her good friends, were part of a small organizing team with Louisa. They describe two years of meticulous planning, given that none of them had any past experience running a large event. They fundraised through car washes and rented a local pub to host a dance night. They promoted the tournament at other provincial debating events. They mobilized a large team of friends as volunteers.

Ultimately, over one hundred students arrived for a weekend that, unfortunately, saw the worst snowstorm in Newfoundland’s 1980s weather history. Nonetheless, Louisa and the team were prepared and the national event went ahead with the wider local community showing up in full force—including lawyers, judges, professors, a talk show host and other local celebrities—as debate judges. Louisa was a project manager in early development. John and Ann recount Louisa’s precise planning and logistical directions to her volunteer crew on a walkie-talkie. Louisa had prepared everything down to the last minute, and was clear and loud when needed. The student attendees left St. John’s satisfied and impressed.

An Untitled And Unbridled Leader

The legal profession is meant to uphold the rule of law and due process and advocate for equitable treatment and equality before the law. These principles are not universally held around the world or universally respected, even in our own communities. Knowing how to lead when you are not officially in charge and creating opportunities to bring folks together to push towards common social justice goals are strategies that Louisa unwittingly yet unfailingly embraced from an early age. They find ongoing and intentional expression in her as a lawyer today.

On the heels of widespread positive attention to the documentary But I Look Like a Lawyer, viewers have asked for a spinoff to address current challenges in addressing characteristics such as gender, race and ability. Louisa has had the foresight to see the broader opportunity to address identity and intersectionality and mobilized colleagues and friends, once again, from various equity-seeking legal associations and groups, including an established entertainment lawyer, to form a development team for the next documentary project. With her ability to create a bold vision that others can rally around and gently guide that vision forward, this documentary is in the incubation phase, centred in the calm eye of the quiet little storm.

Endnotes

1. Online: <faclbc.ca/documentary/>.

2. Online: <www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTG7fi-5c3U>.