Great Promoters of Tolerance

Julius Grey: In Praise of Freedom
By Frédéric Denoncourt, journalist

Mr. Julius Grey.
Photo: Gunther Gamper.
As part of a series of articles on major personalities who have furthered the cause of tolerance in Canada, Tolerance.ca® presents Mr. Julius Grey, a renowned Montreal lawyer and McGill University professor of law. A tireless fighter and man of conviction.

Julius Grey was born in 1948 in Poland, one of the countries most affected by World War II and the Nazi crimes. Life soon took him far from his homeland, as his Jewish parents decided to immigrate to Canada in 1957 to give their family a peaceful future. In post-war Poland, the spectre of the Holocaust still hung heavy on everyone's mind. But Julius was only a child, and of those few years spent in the land of Chopin, he says he has only good memories. He still maintains strong emotional ties with his native culture.


Protecting the Weak

On arriving in his adopted country at the age of nine, Grey quickly had to deal with hardship. A stranger in an unfamiliar land, unable to speak the language of his classmates, he ended up on the receiving end of their jibes and soon learned the meaning of the word misfit. He admits that the experience was decisive: he learned the importance of "taking the side of the one who falls," as he puts it. "The weak, the disadvantaged, those who have less must be defended. Our society is hard on those who lose or make a mistake. We should reassert the value of forgiveness," he comments in an interview in his offices on Peel Street in Montreal.

Grey's philosophy of empathy and forgiveness towards the weak draws from a second source: literature. A constant reader since childhood, he particularly admires the men of letters of the 19th century, such as Dickens, Zola, Hugo, Balzac and Tolstoy. "I also admire the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and - surprising as it might seem - Marx," Grey says. "He was very important. Those four thinkers, each in an admittedly incomplete manner, succeeded in building a system to understand our world."

He had such a passion for literature and culture that when it came to choosing a path for his university studies, he hesitated between writing and law. He finally chose law: "I really wanted to be part of the action, to work towards changing things."

In his mind, changing things has always been synonymous with protecting social benefits and defending fundamental rights and freedoms. He never forgets that the legacy of the Enlightenment remains fragile and there can be no respite in the struggle for democracy and freedom. On many occasions, he has taken the side of ordinary citizens and minority groups in their attempts to gain recognition of their rights, no matter what their religion, ethnic group or social affiliation.

"To Julius, everyone is equal before the law," notes Diana Nicholson, who has known him for a decade. "He cannot tolerate the small-minded mentality some people display in applying the law. He supports social justice in the fullest sense of the term."

A Man of Many Battles


Mr. Julius Grey.
Photo: Gunther Gamper.
Never one to shy from controversy, Grey has taken on unpopular and even unusual causes. On one occasion, he fiercely defended an elderly woman's right to bring her cat into her apartment. A few years ago, he defended the right of a Sikh student to wear a kirpan, or ceremonial dagger, to school, proposing that the kirpan be carefully sheathed to avoid all danger. And he convinced the city of Outremont to tolerate the eruv, a thin wire erected high above the ground to symbolically enlarge the private space of Hassidic Jews and allow them to go about their activities on the Sabbath.

"Grey is truly a champion of rights; he does not have a communitarian mindset. He believes rights such as freedom of religion and of expression must be defended, as long as they don't infringe upon the great principles of civic life. We need civil lawyers like him to remind us that the concept of rights and freedom of expression also applies to those whose values and forms of expression we don't approve of," explains Marc Angenot, who holds the James McGill chair in French literature and language at McGill University.


The State, Enemy of Freedom?

Over the years, Julius Grey has often opposed the State and its laws in an effort to protect ordinary citizens from its grasp. Does he view the State as the greatest threat to our freedoms? "In fact, I usually oppose the political aspect of the State, not the economic aspect. What I find sad is that today, the State seems to be renouncing its role in the redistribution of resources, which I consider essential in terms of the economy. At the same time, it seems to be taking a position of repression in terms of freedoms, whereas it should be the opposite."

The recent attitude towards terrorism and insecurity makes him fear the worst: he sees it as an alibi for a growing infringement on freedoms. "Our society is becoming imbued with a completely unjustified idea of correctness. What scares me most and worries me greatly today is the possibility that our society, with its sense of smugness, could adopt a law obliging any person who observes a violation of the law to report it. That would be terrible, a real disaster."


A Free Thinker

Fiercely independent minded, avoiding ideological shackles like the plague, Grey distrusts the concept of multiculturalism and is an avowed opponent of political correctness. His liking for social debate goes back a long way, recalls Marc Angenot, who remembers that Grey was very active in the student protest movement at McGill University in the late 1960s. "I was a young professor then and Grey was among those who made life difficult for the university administration. He made things change and earned the respect of those who later became his colleagues, for he had a philosophical and legal approach that meant he was not a sort of agitated leftist, like the others."



What is tolerance?

"Tolerance means enthusiastically defending positions with which one profound disagrees, be those positions religious, political, ethical, or other."

Julius Grey.



Julius Grey is multilingual - in addition to English and French, he speaks fluent Russian, Polish, and German, and has a good grounding in Greek and Latin - and enjoys living in a multicultural and (de facto) bilingual city. Nonetheless, he distrusts the notion of identity, whether ethnic, cultural, social, or religious (he is Jewish, but maintains that religion has never played a major role in his life).

Instead, he favours the distinctive identity of each individual, which allows him or her to act freely in regard to any group. That identity "comes from the inside and is moral or intellectual, not associated with a group," Grey has said. "One of the great merits of Western societies, compared to others, is the almost total freedom of thought they allow, even though that freedom must be limited in action."


A Sense of Justice

Although he comes from a wealthy background and lives in the affluent neighbourhood of Westmount, Grey supports the New Democratic Party and works with the Civil Liberties Union. "He has an incredible sense of justice," notes Ms. Nicholson. "He always sees both sides of the argument - if not three or four sides!"



A Mistrust of Consensus

"Without being necessarily bad, consensus is generally dangerous, a trap. It's a way of saying to people that they must come round to the majority opinion; otherwise, they disturb."

Julius Grey



In the eyes of Mr. Angenot, the great merit of Julius Grey is to have contributed to all the major public debates over thirty years: "I believe that in Canada, he has acquired a reputation not only as a top-flight civil lawyer, but as a citizen who is at once politically balanced and capable of showing resolution." What is the source of the passion for justice and freedom that drives him? "I think it comes from his childhood in Poland," suggests Ms. Nicholson. "His family were immigrants; there was a lot of injustice. But he was a gifted child; he could have been a different person and said, 'Life is good for me, why should I worry about others?' But he's not like that."

A free thinker, great champion of personal freedoms, and person who distrusts community ties, Julius Grey is nonetheless strongly attached to one group: his family. For them, he is willing to make many concessions to his own freedom. He enjoys listening to classical music, reading, and going to the movies with his wife, Lynne-Marie Casgrain, and his three children, aged 21, 19 and 12. "Today, they are the only group with whom I identify," he concludes.


Translated by Christine York.




To learn more:

Works by Julius Grey

Book

Immigration Law in Canada, Toronto: Butterworths, 1984.


Articles and contributions to collective volumes

Bilingual Institutions in the Public Sector in Québec, Multilingual Cities and Language Policies/Villes plurilingues et politiques linguistiques, Heberts, Kjell & Turi, Joseph Abo, Akademi University, Social Science Research Unit, Publication No. 36, 1999.

Protection of Language Rights in Education in Québec, Droit et langue(s) d'enseignement/Law and Language(s) of Education, Fleine, Thomas/Nelde, Peter H. & Turi, Joseph-G. (ed,), Institut du fédéralisme Fribourg, Suisse (Helbing & Lichtenhahn) Bâle-Genève-Munich: 2001.

The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume V. 1821-1824, Moser, Harold D. (ed.) Journal of Southern History, Feb.1998, Vol 64, No. 1, 127.

Language and Canadian Public Law, Law, Policy and International Justice, Essays in Honour of Maxwell Cohen, William Kaplan and Donald McRae (ed.), McGill-Queen's University Press 1993 (pp. 320-362).

Equality Rights, Chapter 6 of: Human Rights Issues and Trends, Canadian Scholars' Press Inc., 1993.


This article is one of a ten-part series made possible with the financial support of




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