For the past several years, a lunch (occasionally a breakfast) to commemorate Walter S. Tarnopolsky and to honour the current recipient of the Tarnopolsky Award has been held prior to the ICJ Annual Meeting. The lunch is attended by the recipient, members of the Executive, members of that year’s Tarnopolsky Award Selection Committee, and local members of Council. In the past, it has been sponsored by an anonymous donor. This year it was generously sponsored by the law firm of Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP.

Under the presidency of Ed Ratushny, a tradition evolved within the Tarnopolsky lunch in which two toasts are proposed, one to the award recipient and the other to Walter Tarnopolsky. At the 2007 Tarnopolsky lunch in Calgary, the toast to Walter Tarnopolsky was made by incoming Vice-President for the Prairie Provinces, Thomas Wakeling, Q.C.

Distinguished Members and Friends of the International Commission of Jurists:

Walter Surma Tarnopolsky was a champion of human rights around the world.

He was a superb scholar, the author of the first major work on the Canadian Bill of Rights, the acknowledged architect of our human rights legislative model, an advocate for constitutional reform whose opinions contributed to the content of sections 1 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and to the Ukranian constitution, a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee from 1977 to 1983, and a respected appellate judge from 1983 until his death in 1992.

Tarnopolsky was born in 1932 in Gronlib, Saskatchewan, a small farming community in the east central part of the province. His parents were Ukranian pioneers. He earned his arts and law degrees from the University of Saskatchewan in the mid 1950s. Two lesser known institutions awarded him graduate degrees. Columbia granted him an A.M. and the University of London gave him an LL.M.

Tarnopolsky started his academic career at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Law. He was a faculty member during the law school’s golden era in the 1950s. During this period, the school’s graduates served as Deans of Law at British Columbia (George F. Curtis), Alberta (John A. Weir), Queen’s (William R. Lederman), and Saskatchewan (Otto E. Lang). Tarnopolsky rubbed shoulders with outstanding young colleagues at Saskatoon, including Douglas Schmeiser, who published Civil Liberties in Canada in 1964, Edward Tollefson, Barry Strayer, Jacob Ziegel, and John McLaren, each of whom has made significant contributions to public life in Canada.

According to the Honourable George Baynton, a retired justice of the Saskatchewan’s Queen’s Bench and a member of the University of Saskatchewan law class of 1965, Professor Tarnopolsky was a popular instructor. He was open-minded, and he encouraged wide-ranging discussions in his classroom. Tarnopolsky was blessed with an abundance of energy. One of the ways in which this trait manifested itself was his fast talking style. His colleague, Douglas Scmeiser, recalls that students affectionately referred to Tarnopolsky as “Machine Gun Tarno.”

Ken Norman, a respected human rights lawyer and, like his classmate George Baynton, a student of Professor Tarnopolsky, admired Walter Tarnopolsky very much. Ken told me that his former teacher was an optimist who was convinced that rational debate could lead to a more tolerant world.

A review of Tarnopolsky’s work reveals that he had an international focus and confirms that he was a Canadian who made the world a better place. His death at age 61 was a tragedy.

I propose a toast to the memory of Walter Surma Tarnopolsky, a great Canadian.