Hugh Stansfield, B.C.’s Chief Judge

With his piercing blue eyes, casual smile and closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, Hugh Stansfield looks made for television; indeed, he’s made a couple of well-received guest appearances on Global’s morning newscast. It’s not exactly what you’d expect from B.C.’s chief judge. But then Stansfield, who was appointed to the post last July, isn’t really interested in upholding traditions.

“Working as a judge for [13] years, there are times when you look at the way things operate and believe there must be better ways of doing things,” he says during a casual sit-down in the boardroom of his downtown headquarters. Judges, he says, have been distant for far too long. “I’ll meet with community groups and they’ll say ‘I’m so surprised you would talk to us,’” he notes. “Their perception must have been that judges are aloof and arrogant. We need to rectify that.” Hence, his reinvention as media darling; in his first two months on the job, he travelled the province notifying local press that he was available for interviews. Even so, the former English and theatre major – whose amateur and professional stage roles include Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet – insists he’s not interested in being “a personality.” He confesses he got into law “by accident;” it was just something to do with his liberal arts degree, and he never planned on practicing. But his Type A personality thrived in the competitive atmosphere and he now admits to being, “for all intents and purposes, the face of the court.” He might be striving for a greater connection to the man (and woman) on the street, but don’t expect him to bow to public pressures for harsher criminal sentences. The majority of cases come and go without any media fuss; those that don’t, he says, are largely the result of ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ reporting. “If you’ve been in the courtroom for the whole proceedings, you have a very different perspective than what you would get from a 10-second sound bite.” What he does support are reforms based on conflict resolution rather than courtroom drama, and a simplification of judicial processes. He’s a great proponent of a U.S.-style community court model, in which an accused would be arrested, enter a guilty plea and immediately negotiate their rehabilitation – all on the same day. “Our systems… have been built on the assumption that the court will go to trial, but the vast majority of cases will settle,” he points out. “Resolutions achieved around a table are, by definition, consensual, and the prospect of compliance is substantially greater than if a judge tells [people] what to do.” All of which begs the question: Are these the ravings of an idealist? “For sure,” the father of four readily admits. “But one would want at least a measure of idealism in judges.” He’s not above paraphrasing Robert Kennedy to prove his point: “Some people look at the way things are and ask how. Others look at the way things could be and ask why not… I find myself wondering about the way things could be.”