Eric Nicol, whose death in February at the age of 91 has only just
been reported, was the last of the
great belles lettres wits. He came of
age as a writer during the golden
age of literary boulevardiers in
North America — the era of Benchley, Thurber, Woollcott, Mencken,
Parker, Perelman, Groucho Marx,
Don Marquis, Peter De Vries and
Stephen Leacock. (Nicol won
three of the annual awards commemorating the wit of Mariposa.)
And he kept writing funny beyond
the heydays of Erma Bombeck,
Dave Barry, et. al.
These days everyone with an
Internet connection is a funny
writer, self-styled and -centred, if
not a wit. A while ago, I contacted
one of the venerable names
among New York editors about
writing a biography of De Vries.
The reply came back, “I would
love to read this book. The trouble
is, not a single younger editor
down here will know who he is.”
This was just a few years after the
hilarious New Yorker writer, a
brilliant novelist, social commentator, poet and chosen heir of
JEFFREY
MILLER
James Thurber, had died, the
obituaries headlined “humorist.”
Nicol, however, will live on in
legal history, as one of the few
Canadians ever convicted of scan-
dalising the court. Apparently he
didn’t like to be called a humorist,
and Re Nicol, [1954] B.C. J. No. 96,
shows why he might have found
the label too categorical.
For many years, Nicol was a
columnist at the Vancouver Daily
Province. In that role, he came to
write of a jury trial in which the
Crown alleged that 19-year-old
William Gash had bludgeoned a
man to death for his wallet. The
jury convicted Gash of first-
degree murder, and Justice John
Clyne, of the British Columbia
Supreme Court, sentenced him to
death by hanging. Nicol’s con-
temporary column on the matter
was a bare-fisted attack on capital
punishment, in which he
imagined his own murder trial at
the gates of Heaven.
PHOTO BY BARRY PETERSEN AND BLAISE ENRIGHT-PETERSON
Eric Nicol was one of the few Canadians ever convicted of scandalising the court.
Public insurance: a solution to Canada’s legal aid crisis
OPINION
SUJIT
CHOUDHRY
&MICHAEL TREBILCOCK
Canada’s legal aid system is
failing us. A staggering number of
Canadians who need legal assist-
ance do not qualify for legal aid.
They are attempting to navigate
an increasingly complex civil jus-
tice system, upon the breakdown
of their families, jobs and com-
mercial relationships, without any
legal assistance. They feel increas-
ingly alienated from the system as
a result. While the problems are
pan-Canadian, the solutions are
necessarily provincial, since civil
legal aid falls within provincial
jurisdiction. We propose a simple
solution: a public insurance pro-
gram for legal expenses adminis-
tered by provincial legal assist-
ance programs. Our proposal
focuses on Ontario and Legal Aid
Ontario (LAO), where we have
the greatest experience. But other
provinces can potentially adopt
our proposal as well.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Re: “Agent liable for misstate-
ment: OCA,” The Lawyers
Weekly, May 20.
Hidden latent defects continue
to be the number one problem
facing re-sale home buyers today.
The law says that sellers must
disclose material latent defects
that render a property uninhabitable and cannot actively conceal a
hidden defect. Real estate agents
have tried to obtain disclosure of
these hidden defects through
completion of a Sellers Property
Information Statement (SPIS) or
similar disclosure statement
across Canada over the past 15-20
years. The recent Court of Appeal
decision in Krawchuk v. Scherbak
is the latest attempt by lawyers
and judges to attack the use of the
SPIS form by sellers.
This decision and most articles
against the use of the SPIS ignore
one critical fact; in over 80 per cent
of the cases cited, the seller was
found on a factual basis as having
either concealed a hidden defect or
failed to disclose a material defect
that made the home uninhabit-
able. In other words, the seller lied
to the buyer and was caught after
closing. They would have been
found liable even if no SPIS state-
ment was completed.
Research Solutions
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