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Following Michael Bryant’s abrupt departure from Legal Aid BC after just two years as CEO, the provincial government agency paid him a salary for eight more months.
Between Bryant’s last day of work in April 2024 and December of that year, Legal Aid BC paid him a salary of $277,778.
The payments, included in Legal Aid BC’s recently released disclosure of executive compensation for the year, continued until shortly before Premier David Eby chose Bryant to provide advice on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a contract the government cancelled in May amid controversy.
Last week the government appointed Larry Campbell, a former Vancouver mayor and Canadian senator, to work on solutions for the Downtown Eastside under a six-month contract that is to pay a maximum of $102,000.
When the government cancelled Bryant’s contract to do that job, Eby said he would be paid around $75,000 for the work he’d done to that point.
The province’s most recent public accounts show that by the end of the fiscal year, about seven weeks before the cancellation, Bryant’s company Humilitas Group Ltd. had been paid $25,536.
The government cancelled the contract amid accusations from official Opposition critics that there were unanswered questions about Bryant’s departure from Legal Aid BC and whether it was rewarding friends and insiders.
B.C. Conservative finance critic Peter Milobar alleged in the legislature that Bryant “got fired from Legal Aid under a cloud of suspicion around potential misogynistic behaviour.”
Bryant has not responded to requests for comment.
Legal Aid BC has said it cannot provide more information due to privacy laws.
A Crown corporation tasked with providing legal assistance mainly to low-income individuals, Legal Aid BC is primarily funded by the provincial government and receives grants from the Law Foundation of BC and the Notary Foundation of BC.
Total compensation Legal Aid BC paid to Bryant in the 2024-25 fiscal year was $313,861. Aside from his continued salary, included in that were amounts for a vehicle or transportation allowance, cellphone, pension, benefits and a $21,260 vacation payout.
Bryant, who grew up in Esquimalt, where his father Ray Bryant was mayor from 1966 to 1969, has two degrees from the University of British Columbia, has law degrees from Harvard and Osgoode Hall and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada.
He was once a rising star in Ontario politics and was the youngest attorney general in the province’s history when former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty appointed him in 2003.
In 2009, a couple of months after Bryant left the Ontario government, he was involved in a road accident in Toronto that led to the death of bicycle courier Darcy Allan Sheppard. The Crown dropped charges against Bryant in 2010, reportedly because of the strength of the case that lawyer Marie Henein built in his defence.
Bryant later released a memoir, 28 Seconds: A True Story of Addiction, Tragedy and Hope, that intertwined the stories of Sheppard’s death and his own struggle with alcoholism.
Before moving to the job with Legal Aid BC at the start of 2022, Bryant served for four years as executive director and general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
Read more: BC Politics
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