SENATORS’ STATEMENTS — The Late Ritu Khullar

Honourable senators, today Albertans are celebrating the resounding results of our vote to stay in Canada, while at the same time we are grieving the horrific tragedy at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright.

Against that background, I rise to celebrate the life and grieve the untimely death of an extraordinary Albertan, a great Canadian, an acclaimed jurist and a champion of civil liberties.

Ritu Khullar was Alberta’s beloved Chief Justice as well as the Chief Justice of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. I could tell you that Ritu was Alberta’s first South Asian judge. I could tell you that she was Canada’s first South Asian Chief Justice. However, she would have hated that. She always defined herself as a Canadian, full stop.

She insisted that she be judged not as a visible minority woman who shattered glass ceilings but, rather, as the brave advocate and sharp legal thinker she was.

Ritu was as Albertan as it’s possible to be. Her parents — one Hindu, one Sikh, both teachers — came to Alberta from India to work in the tiny Mennonite community of La Crete, about 700 km north of Edmonton. She was born in Fort Vermilion, as it had the nearest hospital, and spent most of her childhood in the francophone farming community of Morinville. She spent her summers working as a guide in Jasper National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park, falling deeply in love with Alberta’s mountains.

She cut her teeth as a young advocate, working on the landmark Vriend case that established queer rights in Canada. She practised labour law and disability law and won a precedent-setting judgment for a client that established that obesity was a disability and that airlines had to make reasonable accommodations for passengers who could not fit into their narrow seats. As a litigator before the court, Ritu brought not sound and fury but, rather, reason, moral authority and logical legal analysis.

She brought that same gravitas to her work on the bench, where she was never afraid to write a ruling that might offend popular political sentiment. She was also a fine legal administrator who brought order to the court, along with a visionary commitment to better serve the Dene and Inuit communities of the High Arctic.

Ritu was a fiercely proud mother to her sons, Samir and Nikhil, and a doting wife to her husband, Rob Reynolds, whom some of our table officers may remember as the former parliamentary counsel for Alberta’s legislature. Sam and Nikhil join us today, and Sam is, in fact, living in Ottawa and clerking to the Supreme Court this year. Her beloved sons have lost their brilliant, kind, courageous mother far too soon. I have lost a friend and a neighbour, and Albertans have lost a true moral leader at a time when we need one most.

May her memory be for a blessing.

Thank you.