Goodbye John Baigent, Labour Lawyer Who Demanded a Better World

It wasn’t a packed hall at the Maritime Labour Centre on Jan. 20, mostly labour lawyers, labour leaders, judges, family and friends, but the guy we were there to remember would have been OK with that — in fact, he would have been happy.

For John Baigent (May 1, 1941 – Dec 3, 2016), it was never about himself, but about empowering and making other people’s lives better.

During a lifetime of work in British Columbia, as both a labour lawyer and the co-founder of a unique development organization, Partners in the Horn of Africa, his work touched tens of thousands of people. He didn’t grab headlines; he grabbed the world and demanded it be a better place.

Victory Square lawyer John Rogers, lead counsel for the BC Teachers’ Federation in its recent Supreme Court of Canada victory, summed up Baigent’s life: “Everything he did was for the benefit of others.”

At the memorial, numerous speakers outlined Baigent’s life as a labour lawyer in B.C. for more than 40 years. He won many cases for the unions he represented, including Supreme Court decisions that changed the law for millions of Canadian workers.

Mediator Vince Ready met Baigent early in both their careers. At the time, Ready was a union representative for the Steelworkers and Baigent represented another union that was in a fight with them.

“Baigent walked into the room, with his wild mop of hair and proceeded to clean our clock,” Ready recalled. (Baigent would clean many clocks before he would put away the law books.)

In fact, the young lawyer impressed Ready so much that he recruited him and Baigent spent several decades representing the Steelworkers.

Ready said Baigent was a good friend who “always had your back.”

Many lawyers worked under Baigent prior to going on and becoming established in their own right. Among those who sought him out as a mentor was Catherine Wedge, now a B.C. Supreme Court judge.

She told the memorial audience how she was so excited, as a young lawyer in 1982, to be picked to work with Baigent, not only because of his legal mind but also because of his heart.

She recalled one of many cases she worked on with Baigent.

A flight attendant had AIDS, and the company had told him he could no longer work because he had lesions. The lawyers spent months holding hearings on the weekend so the case could be heard in a timely manner.

“We knew he was ill and probably dying,” she said.

The complaints against the attendant were not from customers but from the pilots. There was a great deal of evidence regarding the possible transfer of the disease, and at one point a witness explained that one of the few ways may be through breastfeeding.

“Baigent got up immediately and said as long as the pilots refrain from breast feeding off the flight attendants, we should have no trouble,” Wedge recalled.

Unfortunately, despite hearings every weekend, the flight attendant died before the verdict. The next morning, Wedge said, Baigent showed up at her house holding a bunch of purple balloons. He explained that the flight attendant’s favourite colour was purple, and after they both had a cry they set off to release the balloons in his honour.

Wedge concluded by reflecting on Baigent’s relationship with women.

“He was a man who loved women, respected them, admired them and always treated them as equals and often his better.”

Other speakers also told stories about how it was not just his knowledge of the law but his passion for people and justice that made him such an effective lawyer.

The labour movement often turned to Baigent when times were tough or big cases came along that affected thousands of workers.

In 1992, Baigent was joined by employer side lawyer Tom Roper and mediator Ready on the provincial Labour Code review in 1992. Representing the labour movement, he pushed for the inclusion of sectoral bargaining in the recommendations. That would allow people working for a variety of small employers in a hard-to-organize sector to certify and bargain one collective agreement to cover everyone.

Baigent felt strongly this was necessary for the survival and growth of the labour movement. Ken Georgetti, former president of the Canadian Labour Congress and the BC Federation of Labour, remembers Baigent urging him to get the laws changed — “You’ve got to get sectoral organizing, you got to get it!” The provincial government did not change the law, but Baigent continued to raise the issue for many years.

Georgetti, a long time friend of Baigent’s, said the lawyer was a true trade unionist who made a real and lasting contribution to the labour movement.

“In life you can hope for the opportunity to make a difference,” he said. “My life and the lives of so many others are so much better off because he made a difference.”

Shortly after the election of Gordon Campbell, the Liberal government tore up health care collective agreements and proceeded to fire more than 5,000 health care workers.

The unions took the case to the Supreme Court of Canada. Speaking at the memorial, lead council for the unions, Joe Arvay, described how he called Baigent to drag him out of retirement to help on the case.

Baigent relented and presented the history of the labour movement and the international context to the court. In their decision, the justices made numerous references to the submission.

“I credit John with our victory in this case,” Arvay said. “John taught me the importance of being a passionate lawyer and putting your heart into the job.”

Baigent also took a number of other successful cases to the Supreme Court, including one that gave new picketing rights to workers and another that opened the door for trade unionists to leaflet in front of retail employers.

MLA George Heyman, formerly president of the BC Government and Service Employees Union (BCGEU), recalled that Baigent would often remind him that the day-to-day struggles were only pieces of fabric of a much larger struggle.

“He taught me a valuable lesson: keep your eye on the long game,” Heyman said.

That bigger picture stretched around the world for Baigent, who got his first exposure to African life as a young man working on a CUSO contract teaching in Africa. He would come back to this experience years later, when he co-founded Partners in the Horn of Africa to work with communities in Ethiopia.

Heyman said the organization’s underlying principle was giving Ethiopians ownership of the work and making it relevant at the community level.

Baigent oversaw hundreds of projects, raised millions of dollars and changed the lives of thousands. He believed that communities had to be partners in all the projects and the job of all “Partners” was to give a “hand up, not a hand out.”

Projects included building rural libraries and training librarians to run them, building community foot bridges to connect isolated communities with services such as education or health care, group homes for young women, water projects to provide clean water and washable sanitary napkins for women.

John enjoyed loving relationships with three partners, Diane, Marguerite and Woinshet; six wonderful children, Kevin, Martin, Andrew, Spring, Joey and Tigist; and eight grandchildren.

But perhaps the last words about John’s life belong to him.

Before passing, he used these words by Oliver Sachs to describe his life: “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved, I have been given much and I have given something in return.”

A life well lived, a job well done. Thanks, John.