Canada's first black chief justice has passed

JULIUS ISAAC, the Grenada-born lawyer who became the first black person appointed Chief Justice of Canada's Federal Court, died in Regina, Saskatchewan, on July 16, just two days before his 83rd birthday.

Isaac is familiar to Jamaicans for heading the three-member panel that oversaw the commission of inquiry into the West Kingston stand-off between security forces and gunmen in that community in July 2001.

Twenty-seven persons, including a police officer and soldier, died in the three-day firefight. Isaac was appointed by the administration of former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson to preside over the inquiry, which started in September 2001 and ended in April 2002.

Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, reported that Isaac died from a 'degenerative brain condition'.

Born in St David's, Grenada, Isaac moved to Canada in 1951. Initially, he worked as a janitor, coal miner and railway porter before earning a law degree from the University of Toronto.

Several key positions

Isaac went on to hold several key positions in the Canadian legal system, including adviser to the Ontario Securities Commission and adviser in criminal matters to the Minister of Justice in Ottawa.

He was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1975. In 1991, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney named him Chief Justice of the Federal Court. At his funeral service last Thursday, one of Isaac's contemporaries, Edward Greenspan, lauded him: "He had a tremendous knack for synthesising the complex facts of a case."

Isaac is survived by his wife Ann, three children, a brother and sister and grandchildren.

- H.C.