The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 | Episode 9 | Angela Cameron

Law school may have forced her to work instead of organise protests, but she’s more than made up for it since - now she's running conferences, shaping policy, and mentoring future feminist lawyers with serious flair. In this episode, we welcome Dr Angela Cameron, an Associate Professor from the University of Ottowa's Faculty of Law. This episode dives into the ignition of Dr Cameron's feminist flame and shines a chandelier of insight on Canada's legal landscape. She covers bilingual legal education, surrogacy receipts, and building feminist communities from law school basements to national boards.

First published 2017.

The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.

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Transcript | The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 | Episode 9 | Angela Cameron

Becky Batagol: [00:00:00] Good morning. I'm Becky Batagol and welcome to this episode of The Scarlet Letter, the monthly podcast for the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today we're recording from Ottawa, Canada, and I'm joined by Professor Angela Cameron, the Shirley Greenberg Chair and Associate Professor in the Common Law section at the University of Ottawa.

Welcome, Angela. Thank you very much. Professor Cameron is also the chair of the Feminist Alliance for the International Action, or FAFIA, one of Canada's leading feminist organizations, as well as secretary of the board of directors of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law and the Canadian Association of Law Teachers.

In 2015, she received the Faculty of Law's Community Service Award. Dr. Cameron has been the Faculty Advisor in the University of Oshawa Faculty of Law's Women Legal Mentorship Program and is currently the Advisor of [00:01:00] Outlaw's LGBTQI student group. Professor Cameron's research is general in the area of social justice, with a particular focus on equality interests of women.

Professor Cameron's research areas include criminal law. Restorative Justice, Property Law, Reproductive Technologies Law, Family Law, Legal Theory, Socio Legal Approaches to Law, and Human Rights Law. Angela teaches in the area of Property Law, Constitutional Law, including material on settler colonial relations in Canada, Gender and Sexuality, it's an upper level course, and also a clinical program helping Indigenous people with their legal problems.

Angela Cameron: She's the administrator of the blog Blogging for Equality. So Angela, it's lovely to speak to you. Perhaps you could start by telling us about whether or not there was a point where you began to identify as a feminist.

I would say I always felt like a feminist through my teenage years, but I wouldn't have identified as a feminist, I would say.

Angela Cameron: Looking back now, I think I had feminist [00:02:00] leanings. Through law school, there was an excellent women's I did my undergraduate law degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There was an excellent woman in the law program there that I felt, group, pardon, that I felt very tempted to join.

And in the 1990s in Halifax, there was a lot going on around sort of the immigration issues. Abortion and women only spaces, it was really fascinating to me but unfortunately when I was in law school I had to, I worked I did paid work to pay my way through so I really felt like I couldn't stretch myself to, to do too much probably looking back now I regret it, I should have just done it, but I didn't I would say in law school I started identifying as a feminist, there were some great feminist scholars.

That faculty of law that I learned from and then I decided I was going to go do my Master's and my Master's project was the first, most explicitly feminist thing that I did. So I decided I was going to go out to British Columbia and do a feminist take on restorative justice and intimate violence.

[00:03:00] And as I'm sure lots of people listening to the podcast know, UBC has a huge and strong and very welcoming community of feminist legal scholars. And so it was really there that I put my solid foundation down, I think, around feminist legal theory praxis and and community work.

Becky Batagol: Why did you decide to become an academic? Or did you decide? That's a really good question. Yeah. So when I got to BC, I started doing the academic work, which I loved. Part of the program there allowed folks to to teach as well under master's students to teach in the research and writing program.

Angela Cameron: And I found that I loved that. The teaching part. I loved the student interaction. Loved watching those light bulbs going on. So that, that was lovely and tempting. And I started doing the reading and writing, which I liked, but I also started doing community work. So I started doing research and writing and advocacy for women's IT violence organizations in the city.

And some of those were paid positions. [00:04:00] Yeah, and I loved that work the most of all of the work I was doing between teaching and research, but it just, it really paid badly. And then I looked around me and said, how do I continue doing this advocacy work that I care so much about? And make a living wage.

And, Again, I turned to that really strong community of feminists, both at the University of Victoria and UBC and saw they were doing activism and teaching at the same time. This really inspiring, amazing capacity to do both of those things. And so that, that was the path that I ended up taking.

So being able to make a living wage, but also do work like the work I do with FAFIA. At the same time.

Becky Batagol: And we're here in your office at the University of Ottawa. And I know that University of Ottawa is Canada's first bilingual university with language teaching, both in English and in French. I noticed that you're in the common law section of the law school.

There's also a civil law section. You also mentioned that there's a French common law section as well. That's right. Can you please [00:05:00] explain that? The difference, the divide, and how it works at your law school?

Angela Cameron: In order to get tenure most of us have to attain a certain fluency in French.

We should be able, for instance, to sit in a meeting and if our colleagues speak about their work or about administrative work in French, we should be able to understand, but maybe respond in the language of our choice. I'm lucky enough to have had French in my background. So it's an exciting, for me, it's exciting and lovely to be in a bilingual environment.

I think that it raises challenges and I think systemic barriers particularly for Indigenous scholars. I think we ask Indigenous scholars to learn a second colonizers. Language which I think is in my personal opinion is problematic and a worry. So yes, I love the French English bilingualism.

I wish that we would continue to expand our understanding of the kind of power and politics of language to imagine what that means for our indigenous students and colleagues. Yeah, so that, that would be the only caveat that I [00:06:00] would that I would tag on. As far as the bilingual experience goes.

So you can take your common law common law degree in French or you can take your common law degree in English and those two programs coexist. And then separate and apart from that is, is our civil law program. So Canada has constitutionally two official languages and legal systems. So within the province of Quebec, the civil law system which was received by French colonizers onto the land.

That indigenous territory is the kind of dominant colonial law in Quebec and in the rest of Canada we have common law. In order for settler and indigenous lawyers to be able to work in those two different juridical systems, we need to train lawyers in the civil and the common law systems.

Yeah, so we, we have civilians as we call them professors trained in the civil law who teach, students and they graduate with their degree in civil law and could go on to practice law in Quebec, and our common law lawyers can go on to practice in other provinces. [00:07:00] There's obviously some overlap things that are federal jurisdiction in Quebec, obviously you need to be able to know and understand that law.

So the, we also have a pro national program where students graduate with both, which is really interesting and I think what's important to add to this is our faculty and other law faculties are starting to really come into a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the role of Indigenous laws and legal orders in the Canadian constitution.

It's burgeoning, it's budding, it's new, but we do have we are, So lucky to have more than a handful of Indigenous scholars and students here at our faculty and who bring expertise in Cree law, in Métis laws and legal orders in Coast Salish law. And they are teaching our students about those laws and as a settler I'm teaching my students about the ways in which we need to start understanding our Canadian constitutional order to really include those as and, unravel together what it means to live in a poly juridical or a poly jurisdictional Canada.

What it looks like to have civil law, common law, and [00:08:00] maybe Cree or Coast Salish law working at the same time in the same space.

Becky Batagol: Really challenges that dichotomy between common law and civil law, doesn't it? It does, yeah. And it feels In exciting ways.

Angela Cameron: Yeah. It feels great to work at a faculty. That's done so much work to really valorize and value the role of civil law, which doesn't always get its rightful place, I think, in, if we're talking by juridical systems.

Yes. It's exciting to work in a place where there's room for other jurisdictions, other kinds of law. And that may be because of the history of understanding civil and common law to be working side by side that now it's not so hard for us to imagine Coast Salish or Cree or we're on unceded Algonquin territory.

So Algonquin law would be important.

Becky Batagol: So you're the sixth holder of the Shirley Greenberg Chair for Women and the Legal Profession in the Common Law section of the Faculty of Law here at Ottawa. What's the chair and what do you do with it?

Angela Cameron: The chair is fabulous. Shirley Greenberg who lives part time in in Ottawa.

So we get to have her two events. She's a fabulous feminist who opened [00:09:00] one of Canada's first women only feminist family law practices and has been active both at a number of levels, but really importantly in Indigenous settler relations, in women's health and in women in the legal profession.

So she gave us an endowment and the idea is it's different from some other chairs in the sense that it isn't, research focused. Research is part of what we do, so I support different research if colleagues want to do a feminist conference, then I might support that through letters of support in the grant, and some money in attending, and that sort of thing, or providing students.

But it's in my mind, I think of it as community building so producing and reinforcing an Ottawa U, an Ottawa, a national and an international community of feminist lawyers and law students who are going out into the world to make important feminist legal change. And so that's everything from we have a lecture series that students can attend.

We have social events. There are, we have a, we're really lucky. We have a lot of feminist student groups, so I support them financially and and through helping them to organize events and find [00:10:00] rooms. Yeah everything from bringing in speakers to collectively organizing to supporting law reform and conferences to just getting together meeting folks from Australia who come into town and having lunch together.

It's fabulous. It's it's. a huge honour to be able to do it.

Becky Batagol: So I'm impressed with the breadth of your research. You cover so many different areas across reproductive justice, including surrogacy and donor conception, Indigenous law and sexual and colonial relations, restorative justice, violence against women, family law, administrative law, equality, constitutional law and legal education.

I wanted to focus It's net for now on reproductive justice. You've recently argued for a three baskets approach to reimbursement for surrogates, providing gestation services for human babies in Canada. So how does surrogacy currently work in Canada and what is the three baskets approach?

Angela Cameron: Sure. So right now, [00:11:00] surrogacy in Canada, there's, we have two main jurisdictions, federal jurisdiction and provincial jurisdiction.

We have a piece of federal legislation that we're working on right now that was passed quite a long time ago, almost 15 years ago now, no 18 years ago now, that purports to criminalize all forms of paid surrogacy, but altruistic surrogacy is allowed. And then section 12 of that act basically said women who act as surrogates can be reimbursed for their surrogacy related expenses pursuant to a set of regulations.

The big problem was Those regulations were never promulgated. So we have surrogacy happening in Canada. We know what's happening. People are using surrogacy to build their families, but they've been doing it in what has been described as a gray market. So it's clear that women can't be, can't make a profit, but people are not sure what they can claim as expenses.

So surrogates themselves can never be [00:12:00] criminalized. What agencies that organize surrogacy, the intended parents, anyone who's peripherally organized peripherally involved in organizing the surrogacy can be prosecuted. We've only had one prosecution under the law, and that was for a woman who was running a surrogacy agency was prosecuted.

So people have basically been guessing at what could be reimbursed which has been. Insanely stressful for people trying to build their families using surrogacy. That's the state of the law right now. We had a change in federal government a few years ago and they began working on the portfolio right away.

And so they will be, those regulations will be promulgated in the future. We hear in the fall, so we'll, we think, have a list of receivable expenses. And that's the current state of the law. There has recently been a move by some activist members of parliament to to reform the Assisted Human Reproduction Act and remove the criminalization and make it an open commercialized [00:13:00] market.

So there's been this sudden spike in debate around surrogacy. Yeah, so last year in May, the Shirley Greenberg Chair and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada co sponsored a conference where we got together basically all of the feminists in Canada who were thinking about and working on surrogacy and we all got together in Ottawa to talk about if we're going to do law reform, what is it going to look like?

And so there were tons of different ideas, everything from yes, free market commercialization to we should get rid of. Surrogacy altogether, we shouldn't have it at all and everything in between people thinking about the administration, about ombuds people, about oversight, about same sex families, about all, polyglot, it was a, an excellent conference, so there's a book about that coming out very soon and so myself, my colleague Vanessa Gruben, who's here at the Faculty of Law, she's a feminist scholar who does work on health and an ethicist named Angel Petropanagos, who works at a hospital here in Ontario as a practical ethicist, but also [00:14:00] is a PhD in ethics from Dalhousie University, came up with this idea of the three baskets approach, because we're really worried about the kinds of record keeping and administrative burdens that are placed on surrogates.

We're trying to keep track of these receipts and we're worried about this notion of surrogates having to spend out of pocket and then be reimbursed. Especially if right now we don't have a great oversight mechanism. So if they say spend if on that list of receivable expenses maternity massage shows up and they get maternity massage and then there's a disagreement with their intended parents about.

How and when to get or even if to get that receivable expense given back that we're worried about the ways in which You know, even something as basic as credit card Interest right that surrogates shouldn't be bearing that if the premise of our legislation is that it surrogates shouldn't be in a pocket then how do we imagine administrative system that allows it to happen better?

[00:15:00] So this is three baskets. The first basket is basic expenses, which would be we would use a cost estimator or an actuarial to figure out what the, sort of the median cost of a pregnancy is based on the list of expenses in that section 12 regulations and then that would be prorated over 12 months before, during and after the pregnancy.

And it would just be, X number of dollars goes to the surrogate at the beginning of every month. And so we know that that. maternity vitamins, extra food, clothes, all that stuff is covered and she doesn't have to pay for it and get reimbursed for it. So keep track of those receipts. There's a second basket for lawyer and counseling fees.

So that would be, again, we would use the experts to figure out what that looks like on a kind of personal level. multi provincial level and that money would be given before every, everything was undertaken. So she's getting separate legal advice from the intended parents and separate counseling and that's paid.

So the money would go from the intended parents to the lawyer or the counselor and she would just go and access those [00:16:00] services without having to pay in a pocket. And we would know that was done that she was receiving all of the sort of independent advice that she needed to make the decisions as as she went through and negotiate that contract.

And then the third basket would be under the oversight of an ombudsperson. And that would be extraordinary expenses that neither, that no one could have anticipated. So someone gets hip dysplasia or has postpartum depression or is badly injured during labor and delivery or pregnancy that those would be, you could take those extra expenses to the ombudsperson and they would adjudicate it and say yes, you should pay those or no, you shouldn't.

Becky Batagol: Yeah. So what are you working on at the moment, Angela?

Angela Cameron: I am working on this great project with Vanessa Grubin and a colleague named Alana Cattapan, who's a sociologist, or social political science, pardon me, sorry, Alana, in Saskatchewan. We, out of that conference that we did in in May of 2017, we have this edited collection that's coming out, and we've also been doing a lot of, activism and and [00:17:00] law reform lobbying The federal government is here in Ottawa.

So we've been to visit Health Canada and Status of Women to say, these are a feminist concern. So that's really exciting and interesting and we're hoping that when the book comes out that that will generate even more discussion. We're trying to get off the ground a big empirical project in Canada around surrogacy.

We don't even know who surrogates are in Canada. We don't know what their income is. We don't know where they come from. We don't know who intended parents are. We don't know if they're from inside Canada or outside Canada and why they might be coming to Canada or why they might be, jurisdiction shopping even between provinces because family law around surrogacy is different in provinces different provinces.

Yeah, so that, that's exciting, but that's in its infancy this idea of the grant. And then with my good friend, Sari Graben, who's at Ryerson University in Toronto, and my good friend Val Napoleon who's at the University of Victoria, we are just on the cusp of publishing an edited collection, which is a book about the ways in which, so under the Canadian [00:18:00] Constitution and settler understanding of law and land law in Canada, Indigenous peoples collectively hold land in Canada, as we would understand it on the common law, and there's been this sort of trend over the last 15 or 20 years.

In Canada, to privatize those collectively held plots of land or the, or resource extraction that's on larger pieces of traditional territory. And so we're really interested in that trend towards privatization. Most importantly, we're interested in what Indigenous people think about that trend towards privatization because Indigenous collectivities, nations, and bands are involved in that privatization process in some cases and more specifically interested in the ways in which Marginalized communities within indigenous communities, so LGBTQ plus people or or women are, if there are benefits, economic and otherwise, flowing from the privatization of indigenous properties.and resources, are they flowing equally to all members of of the community? And that, this book is about, that edited collection is about [00:19:00] that. And then we are, we've put in a grant application again to do some empirical work to talk to Indigenous peoples about about What they think about this kind of privatization and economic and social development in that vein.

So Sari and I are both settler scholars and Val is is an Indigenous scholar. So we're working together to try and understand that and also to really try hard to imagine the ways in which Indigenous laws and legal orders play a role in that, right? It's decision making about whether to privatize or not, and made using Indigenous laws within a community or if we're talking about, let's say, a contract between a third party resource extraction corporation and an Indigenous community, is there a way in which Indigenous law plays a role in meeting those contractual obligations or what goes into the contract, those sorts of things?

Becky Batagol: It sounds amazing and like something that we in Australia I think that's something that we need to pay a lot of attention to. [00:20:00] Yeah, us too. With a similar history, yes. And thinking about your work within the faculty with female law students, do you think that mentoring is particularly important for women law students?

Angela Cameron: I think so, and I would say I would characterize it as flowing both ways. Yeah. The relationships and mentoring that I have with with law students is Mutually reinforcing. I learned so much from them every, then they're amazing that like they blow my mind. I just like a back at like my 25 year old self and think, wow, like I don't hold a candle to them.

And they just come up with these amazing sort of creative initiatives that have such a strong understanding around technology and the way that we can use technology for Feminist Aims and they do it, so yes, I think mentoring is important. I think providing them with the little bits of money that they need to do their projects, which is part of what Shirley Greenberg does helping them to build their communities and to include and extend their communities behind the law school, which they [00:21:00] already want to do.

They already have a profound and encycling understanding into the ways in which some of them come from marginalized communities, in which the law can be a double edged sword in marginalized communities. Yeah, so yes, I think mentorship is really important. I think we have some anecdotal evidence right now in Canada that especially women from marginalized communities are meeting, really meeting systemic barriers when they get out into the workforce.

And so that's one thing that As a professor and a mentor worries me a lot. And probably for the last couple of years, that's I've really tried to think of ways to, to support and sustain past law school. And I haven't figured out the right formula yet. I'm not doing a good job at it yet.

And I need to learn more from my students about what they need from us as an institution. As they go forward because I think we're, or maybe, it feels like we throw them out of law school and into the bar exam and then that's that. So yes, I think mentorship is important and I think the next stage of figuring how to do [00:22:00] that properly is how to create a community that, that reaches into their careers.

And so part of my job is, it's a Shirley Greenberg Chair in Women in the Legal Profession, is to imagine ways that we can we can do that. And to build bridges with the, with the community. women that are already working in the legal profession find out ways that we can mutually sustain and support new lawyers.

Becky Batagol: Yes. And when the barriers are systemic, there's always a danger in a mentoring program in saying you can do it. Yes. And creating, a point of tension for the students when they're going out there. So it's a difficult position to be in because mentoring. Certainly in this podcast series, in lots of academics and students who have been speaking to you, they talk about the importance of role models in understanding where you can get to but when the barrier systemic, it's really got to go, you've got, you have to experience them.

Angela Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. And I worry about it a lot. I, [00:23:00] it's all anecdotal, but I watch. amazing women from marginalized communities go out and really struggle to find their place in the legal profession. And I feel like I don't have the tools that I need to support them in the way that they deserve.

Becky Batagol: And what one of the things that is really apparent, the more we speak is how your work is very based in the communities that you're part of.

And being in Ottawa, you have access to the federal government and One, you're chair of the Feminist Alliance for International Action. What is that and what does it do and what do you do there?

Angela Cameron: I'm like, we call it a steering committee, but I'm the chair of the board. We're a volunteer driven organization.

Academics and community members who have expertise in international human rights law. We're a national umbrella organization. We have, I forget, maybe 56 member organizations now. So everything from grassroots women's shelters to other feminist activist groups to you know, other groups of women law academics.

So everything from from the [00:24:00] top up, I would say, as far as institutional structures. And our mandate is to to take the mystery that is international human rights law and all the good things that are said about Canada in the international sphere and all the times that. The United Nations and the Inter American Human Rights Committees have said to Canada, you need to do better, especially in relation to Indigenous women, especially in relation to marginalized women, especially in relation to women's social and economic rights and figure out how do we bring that into Canada?

How do we make that actionable and usable in domestic law? How do we put those tools into the hands of women so that when they're thinking and talking about human rights, that it has an international scope? Because Canada has this great international reputation as having, we have a human rights constitution, we have the Charter, we have human rights legislation, we have good human rights records and there are just a few glaring places in Canada where we have an abysmal human rights record and we don't talk about it enough.

And one of the places where [00:25:00] our human rights failures have been acknowledged and pinpointed really is that is in these international human rights venues. So really trying to put to translate those complex international human rights norms and tools into things that women can use in their everyday life.

To advocate at their local library for change or advocate with a, with the federal government for change. Yeah. So that's what we do. We do, yeah. We work with different member organizations and groups to do oral and written advocacy at the United Nations and the Inter American Human Rights Commission, Committee.

So we, we write stuff and we send people and we do that advocacy. And then we we do workshops and we use web pages. webcast no, what's it called? A webinar. So that's interactive. We use that platform on a lot to disseminate information and knowledge and answer questions.

And we really try and, help member organizations that want to do the advocacy at those levels [00:26:00] to, to do writing and and learn how to speak legally, use international human rights legalese. And then we also do advocacy directly with the with provincial, territorial, and federal governments to say, hey, look, the CEDAW committee has said, again, that we have a crisis, we have a human rights crisis in missing and murdered Indigenous women and they've given us a list of things that we have to do to fix it and we haven't done any of them, and they're pretty concrete things, right?

They're, these aren't loosey goosey pie in the sky recommendations, they're like, change this piece of legislation. And so there's, we already have a list of things that we can do now, today that these international human rights bodies think are going to help, to some extent, stem the flow of blood, as it were, from these communities.

Let's do that now. I think it's important to note that our funding was cut under, not this federal government, but the previous federal government, and that federal government. All of this work that I'm talking about, hundreds of pages of documents, thousands of hours of work is done by the, by volunteers on our steering committee [00:27:00] who are dedicated and amazing and inspiring feminists, student volunteers from the University of Ottawa and other places community volunteers.

And then we have two folks who are, who do a few hours of work, paid work a week who are extraordinary feminists who always work more than they're paid for, which, probably sounds like a model that every feminist listening to this recognizes. But yeah, just a shout out to all of those fabulous women who've kept FAFIA doing what it's doing over the last number of years.

Becky Batagol: Thank you so much, Professor Angela Cameron, the Shirley Greenberg Chair and Associate Professor in the Common Law section at the University of Ottawa.

Angela Cameron: Thank you very much.

Becky Batagol: And thank you all for listening to this episode of The Scarlet Letter. You can catch us again next month on iTunes or on our blog which is found at feministlegalstudies.

wordpress. com and don't forget to subscribe to The Scarlet Letter to make sure you never miss an [00:28:00] episode.