My Renowned Brother

Craig E. Jones

B.G.S., LL.B.

by Craig Jones

Craig and Amanda, 1997.

Every few years, I suggest to my brother Adam that he take this page down from his site. And each time, Adam instead convinces me to update my autobiography instead. I don't know why, but I do it. I figure if people are going to Google me, they might as well be forced to read something I wrote myself.

Like my brother Adam, I was born in a location deemed convenient by the Royal Air Force. In my case it was Darlington, County Durham, the nearest town to the airfield at Middleton-St-George in the north of England. Our family came to Canada a few years later when my father, a nuclear, biological and chemical weapons expert with the RAF, was seconded to the Canadian Government in Ottawa. Our Dad took an early retirement from the Air Force at age 38, and set out across the country to find a place to settle. He got to Vernon, B.C. and never went further. I lost my accent after a few years of merciless teasing, and graduated with spectacularly mediocre grades from Vernon Senior Secondary School.

In my twenties I drifted through a hodge podge of jobs: musician, reservist infantryman, magazine writer, and eventually a manager in the Vancouver music industry. I bought a 1952 Landrover named Lucille that is incapable of travel at better than 45 miles per hour, but nevertheless carried me all over the province. At various time I lived in Calgary, Vernon, Vancouver, Surrey, Kelowna and Nanaimo. In the early 1990s I began to upgrade my undergraduate education via correspondence through the B.C. Open University with a view to gaining admission at a law school, and by 1995 had obtained enough credits to earn a place at UBC's Faculty of Law.

I graduated in April 1998. While at school, I became involved with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, first as a volunteer researcher, then as a member of its board of directors. Under the spell of the remarkable Kay Stockholder and John Dixon, I started to think about constitutional issues for the first time with some depth. I would later serve two terms as the Association's president and one as vice president. This was also the period when I became "The APEC Guy," having had the poor judgment to be arrested during protests against visiting dictators in 1997. For a period of time it seemed everybody knew me, which was a very unnerving experience.

I continued to write, quite compulsively. In law school I wrote a student guide to legal education and employment published by Emond Montgomery, in 1997. After graduation, a number of journal articles and newspaper editorials followed. After spending a wonderful year at Harvard a year doing a Master's degree in law, I wrote Theory of Class Actions (based on my master's thesis), and The Law of Large Scale Claims, co-authored by Jamie Cassels. The books explored what I came to call the 'public law model' of complex litigation, inspired by the work of David Rosenberg, my thesis supervisor at Harvard.

I had worked at the Vancouver firm of Bull, Housser and Tupper since my first year of law school, when I was taken on as a temporary articled student. I remained at Bull, Housser for ten years, working mainly in the field of constitutional law, and eventually became a partner at the firm. Seven of those years were spent on the battle against the tobacco industry that culminated in the 2005 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Imperial Tobacco v. British Columbia. I found a number of brilliant and generous mentors at the firm, and through Bull, Housser was also introduced to Tom Berger, who is the view of many one of the greatest men ever to have worn a lawyer's robe in this country. In addition to our work together in the tobacco litigation, Tom took me on as counsel for two outside projects, the 2003 Vancouver Electoral Reform Commission and the 2005/06 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement conciliation project.

In 1999 I was married to Amanda (née Forrestal, pictured), a kindergarten teacher. We now live on Bowen Island with our son, Daniel Wiley, two dogs, a cat, and Lucille.. In 2006 I left Bull, Housser, and took a position with the Attorney General in conjunction with another as Assistant Professor at UBC's law school.

My hobbies are diverse and a little weird. I love to tinker with things mechanical; in addition to attending to Lucille's ongoing needs, I also designed and built what might be the ugliest -- or maybe just the loudest -- motorcycle in BC. Incredibly, the government approved it for road use, and it actually appeared on the cover of Canadian Biker magazine in 2005. And driven by a suspicion that running shoes are inherently evil, one day I took them off and decided to learn to run barefoot. In 2003 I became (I believe) the first person to complete the Vancouver International Marathon shoeless. Although it went without incident, I didn't try it again.

Craig Jones was arrested on the morning of 25 November 1997, the day the APEC conference took place at the University of British Columbia.  His arrest took place hours before the notorious pepper-spray confrontation between protesters and RCMP.  For simply holding signs reading "Democracy" and "Free Speech" along the APEC motorcade route, well away from the security perimeter established by police, Craig was tackled by three police officers, handcuffed, and held in custody for 14 hours.  Craig's only "crime" was to exercise his constitutional right to free speech.  His case attracted national attention, and prompted Freedom of Information requests aimed at securing the minutes of all government planning sessions -- including any in the Prime Minister's office -- concerning "security" for the APEC summit.  The implications of these events for the civil liberties of Canadians are plain to see.