MAKING NOVA SCOTIA BETTER FOR NEWCOMERS As Nova Scotians prepared to welcome Syrian refugees in late 2015, the Bayers Lake building that formerly housed a Rona was set up as a donation space to provide refugees with things like clothing, toiletries and furniture. Organizers shut it down less than a month later because they received more supplies than needed. “You wouldn’t have seen that 20 years ago,” says immigration lawyer Lee Cohen. While Cohen is the face of immigration law in Nova Scotia, that wasn’t always his practice area. After getting his law degree from Dalhousie in 1980, he began doing criminal and family law, but didn’t love it. Things changed in July 1987 when a boatload of Indian refugees (173 Sikh men and a woman) landed in Shelburne County. The World Sikh Organization hired a Toronto lawyer to act as counsel for the refugees. The situation intrigued Cohen, so he contacted the lawyer to volunteer his services, even though he didn’t have any immigration-law experience. After some persistence, the Toronto lawyer agreed to let Cohen come on board. After a few days, the lawyer went back to Toronto because he had a practice to manage. The refugees became Cohen’s clients. The anger some Nova Scotians had for them appalled him. As global media descended on Nova Scotia, Cohen would often do scrums outside. “It was very, very ugly what was happening,” he says. “A lot of people driving by and walking by would say very horrible things about my brown clients and were saying very horrible things about me, anti-Semitic stuff. I was just blown away by how racist the whole thing was.”
BY RICHARD WOODBURY PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/VISIONFIRE STUDIOS
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