From a young age, Alan Borovoy’s passion for human rights was driven by the disparity he saw between the rich and the poor, and the anti-Semitism he witnessed. daughterApril 21, 2009 - Photograph of Alan Borovoy who is retiring after many many years of leading the Civil Liberties Association. Photo: Charla Jones/Globe and MailCharla Jones/The Globe and Mail
Even as a boy, Alan Borovoy was a scrapper, a skeptic-in-waiting for whom authority existed to be challenged – and fought.
When his father lost his pharmacy business in Hamilton during the Depression and moved the family to a then-roughish area of Toronto in 1938, young Alan quickly shed the pallid Little Lord Fauntleroy image his mother had cast him in. According to his 2013 memoir, At the Barricades, he became involved in fist fights; often he was the initiator, mostly he was the loser. Although he soon came to abhor violence, that feistiness never abandoned him.
When Alan Borovoy died of heart failure on May 11, he was widely acknowledged as Canada's foremost champion of civil rights and free speech, causes for which he fought tirelessly for six decades, largely as general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) from 1968 to 2009. For his many admirers, he was a vigorous and eloquent enemy of legal absurdities and political-social injustices, whether questionable police procedures, national security overreach or attempts to muzzle free speech, either on the left or on the right. For his (many fewer) critics, he was an often quixotic crusader, inflexibly tilting at every windmill that came into his view.
Alfred Alan Borovoy was born in Hamilton on March 17, 1932, to Rae and Jack Borovoy. He received a BA in 1953 and a law degree in 1956, both from the University of Toronto. Eschewing the traditional lawyer's path and indifferent to material success, he began working in 1960 as secretary of the Jewish Labour Committee, which fought racism, especially against black Canadians. He was also active with other human-rights groups.
In 1963, he ran for the NDP in the Toronto riding of Downsview, finishing second with 35 per cent of the vote. Realizing belatedly that winning the seat would have entailed playing a political role that was far from his real passion, he immediately abandoned all further political ambition. In 1968, he assumed the position with the CCLA that he would hold for the next four decades.
Young Alan's indignation was fuelled by the disparity he saw between the wealthy and the poor, and by the anti-Semitism that was still endemic in much of Canadian life. But he was also becoming, and remained, as he writes in his memoir, "a social democrat, a civil libertarian, a secular Jew, and a philosophical pragmatist."
It was this set of beliefs that drove Mr. Borovoy's most rewarding moments of intervention in Canada's legal and social policy, as in the feverish, high-stakes battles over abortion, hate speech and pornography; the rights of aboriginals and of homosexuals; the defence of minority rights in Quebec; and the troubling case of Robert Latimer, imprisoned for a decade for killing his severely disabled and pain-ridden daughter.
But they also created the most vexing turns of a career peppered with vexations: the defence of Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi, and of James Keegstra, a rural Alberta teacher who promulgated anti-Semitism in the classroom. Mr. Zundel was tried in 1985 for spreading false news, a criminal charge that Mr. Borovoy saw as the crest of the proverbial slippery slope, its broader implications "capable of threatening us for engaging in normal democratic debate."
Mr. Borovoy was very much hurt by the angry reaction to his stance of many Jews, especially Holocaust survivors, made to
relive their trauma during Mr. Zundel's long and often farcical trial.
Some thought he was siding with people whose views he actually abhorred, or even called him a "self-hating Jew," which was far from the truth. In fact, says Myra Merkur, his companion of the past 10 years or so (Mr. Borovoy never married), he was, despite his atheism, a devout cultural Jew who loved to sing Jewish songs and to speak Yiddish, though he never mastered the language.
Nor was this the only occasion on which Mr. Borovoy ran afoul of what might seem his natural constituency. When his devotion to freedom of expression led him, and the CCLA, to defend pornography and to oppose obscenity laws, he alienated many feminists and other progressives who felt porn objectified women and thus considered it a threat to the goal of sexual equality.
Despite Mr. Borovoy's (and the CCLA's) long-standing support for feminist goals, he continued to attack the censorship and criminalization of pornography. He maintained that the law's definition of the "undue exploitation" of sex was hazy; always wary of slippery slopes, he argued the laws could potentially include Greek mythology (the rape of Leda by Zeus, for instance) or a brilliant film such as Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. As for Game of Thrones? Beyond the pale.
But even in such a hothouse of contention, Mr. Borovoy could find some fun. In At the Barricades, he recounts a debate at the University of Guelph in which a male psychologist, who "felt competent to assess certain types of pornography as dangerous to women," buttressed his argument by showing some disturbing images on a screen to an audience made up largely of students.
The typically Borovian response: "If you really believe that exposure to these pictures is so dangerous to women, why would you show them to an audience of so many strangers?"
The argument, he allows, may not have been logically air-tight, but "it had an arresting response."
Danielle McLaughlin, director
of education for the CCLA and a long-time friend and colleague
of Mr. Borovoy, calls him "my mentor and tormentor … a brilliant thinker who loved argument, though never ad hominem, and was always prepared to play devil's advocate." She is not the only one who admired Mr. Borovoy's Socratic turn of argumentation.
George Jonas, a writer of conservative libertarian disposition, nevertheless enjoyed a long and vividly disputatious friendship with Mr. Borovoy, their intellectual sparring sessions often held at Toronto's legendary, and lamented, Coffee Mill. For Mr. Jonas, he was "an attractively ambitious man, who enjoyed few things as much as debating, for the simple reason that he was good at it. He was a sharp polemicist, something of a born contrarian, and enjoyed the immediate rewards that come from winning a debating point."
Although considered a man of the left, Mr. Borovoy really had no political home, says his friend Cyril Levitt, a psychotherapist and professor of sociology. His stances against communism, and for the United States and Israel, distanced him from many on the left. His friend Ron Biderman, a Toronto lawyer and in recent years Mr. Borovoy's workout mate on the treadmills of the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre, says he "rejected both the hard-hearted right and the soft-headed left."
Despite his image as a crusader, there was nothing of the populist in Mr. Borovoy. He respected "the people," but was under no illusion that they were always, or even mostly, right in their views. But he had even less regard for the judgment of government.
"He always thought outside the box," Mr. Levitt says. "His reactions were never knee-jerk or ideological. … And he did not dislike anyone, except, often, those he defended."
Case in point: Days after his trial, Mr. Zundel called in to a radio show where Mr. Borovoy was the guest, praising him for his public statements of defence. An extremely discomfited Mr. Borovoy refused to engage with the author of the pamphlet "The Hitler We Loved, and Why," simply saying, "While I feel obliged to defend Mr. Zundel's legal rights, I have no comparable obligation to treat him with respect."
His intellectual mentor was the American pragmatist Sidney Hook, a disenchanted former communist and a ferocious critic of totalitarian thinking, who, says Mr. Jonas, "had the attitude of a jilted lover toward Marxism, or, better still, the attitude of a girl who realizes that the attractive chap she fell for is Jack the Ripper."
He was witty, straightforward and fun-loving, could speak at length without notes, and enjoyed riffing on themes, such as a series of puns on fish species, "just for the halibut," Mr. Levitt says. He was also a gifted polemicist who seized any opportunity, and any forum, to advance the agenda of the CCLA.
He loved to sing, although his close friend Owen Shime, a Toronto lawyer, says he might not have possessed quite so good a voice as he thought he did. Mr. Borovoy particularly loved old labour songs, such as Joe Hill and Solidarity Forever and, according to Ms. McLaughlin, "was mad for Al Jolson." One of the songs played at his funeral service was Jolson's Keep Smiling at Trouble (Trouble's a Bubble). "Alan not only smiled at trouble," Ms. McLaughlin says, "he salivated over it, had fun with it." Indeed, having fun even while engaged in the thorniest of issues seems to have been a necessity for Mr. Borovoy. "He believed that if he took things too seriously, he'd lose his sense of humour," Ms. McLaughlin adds.
Mr. Borovoy was, by all accounts, an indifferent housekeeper, a technological Luddite and a man whose office was so legendarily out of control, it was the stuff of magazine covers.
He was also a man for whom "a good meal was a bowl of corn flakes," says Mr. Levitt. In his last years, health problems made him much more attentive to his diet, to the consternation of servers at restaurants, whom he would plague with a litany of questions about the content of their dishes.
Although he had no siblings, Mr. Borovoy was close to a number of his many cousins, particularly Andrea Baltman, who says, "He was like a brother to me; we had endless conversations about our family."
For Ms. Merkur, he was not only a companion, but also a mentor. "He never talked at you, but with you, and could always draw you out and make you think," she says.
Besides his memoir, Mr. Borovoy wrote four other books: When Freedoms Collide (1988), Uncivil Obedience (1991), The New Anti-Liberals (1999) and Categorically Incorrect (2007). He received honorary doctorates of law from four universities, as well as one from the Law Society of Upper Canada. He was named to the Order of Canada in 1982.
Alan Borovoy was never shy about afflicting the comfortable or demanding the best from those with whom he worked. "He puts the 'oy' in Borovoy," one student said of him, after a particularly rough session.
A scrapper to the end, fortified by a cocktail of self-confidence, intelligence and a dash of egotism, he took aim at recent national outrages against liberty, from the Harper government's covert "war" against terrorism and inflexible anti-crime agenda to the devolution of the human-rights tribunals he'd helped create into a kind of thought police. As he wrote in his memoir, "In order to get justice, you must do justice." It was a lesson Alan Borovoy learned early and never forgot.
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