When the “Public Interest” Meets the Record
Published September 24, 2026 · Nova Scotia Legal Resource editorial
In March 2017, CBA National Magazine published a profile entitled “Lunch with Marjorie Hickey: Practising with conviction.”
It was an admiring portrait of Halifax lawyer Marjorie Hickey and her approach to professional regulation. The article presented a lawyer whose career had been influenced by an interest in social justice and whose regulatory practice repeatedly returned to one central question:
What is in the public interest?
Hickey explained the attraction of regulatory law by saying that professional regulation repeatedly comes back to what is in the public interest.
Read the original 2017 CBA National article
Nearly a decade later, that profile deserves to be read again.
Not because protecting the public is an improper objective for a professional regulator. It is fundamental to one.
But because much more is now known about the institution whose interests Hickey was retained to advance—and about the experiences of the Black lawyer at the centre of one of its most extraordinary disciplinary proceedings.
The question is no longer simply what is in the public interest?
Who gets to define it?
The Other Story Unfolding in 2017
At approximately the same time that Hickey was being profiled for a career associated with social justice and the public interest, another story was unfolding within Nova Scotia’s legal profession.
At its centre was Lyle Howe, a Black Halifax lawyer facing disciplinary proceedings brought by the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society.
Hickey represented the Society.
The record shows that Hickey’s involvement was not merely peripheral. She appeared as counsel for the Society in the disciplinary hearing and took positions based on instructions from the Society during the proceeding. The judicial-review record also contains material showing that, during the hearing, counsel for the Society — Hickey and Daniel Wallace — attempted to have a second set of charges added to the proceeding. The Hearing Panel refused that request, and those charges remained separate.
Years later, Hickey remained directly involved in discussions concerning Howe’s allegations of discrimination. According to contemporaneous records maintained by Lyle Howe, on April 25, 2019, Howe recorded that he had spoken with Hickey about reinstatement and possible resolution. Howe’s records document that discussion. On May 2, 2019, Hickey wrote to Howe on McInnes Cooper letterhead on behalf of the Society. She stated that the Society maintained the position that it had not discriminated against him during its investigation or throughout the process and was not prepared to resolve the matter with any admission of discrimination.
That correspondence later became significant in Howe’s human-rights complaint because he relied on it as part of his position that the alleged discriminatory conduct remained ongoing.
The proceeding was extraordinary in scale. The disciplinary hearing consumed 66 hearing days. The Society’s own subsequent decision records the 66-day proceeding, while contemporary reporting characterized it as the longest disciplinary hearing in the history of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society.
Read the NSBS decision recording the 66-day hearing
Read contemporary reporting on the proceedings
What the Howe Proceeding Cost the Society
The scale of the Howe proceeding can also be measured in dollars. In its 2017 costs submissions, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society set out the fees and disbursements it said it had incurred in the investigation and hearing process. The schedule totalled $1,108,278.94, including HST. The Society also expressly noted that the schedule excluded certain additional costs it had incurred, meaning even that figure did not represent the full institutional cost of the investigation and hearing.
One entry is particularly significant in the context of the 2017 profile. The Society’s schedule records $637,823.90 in net fees and disbursements paid to McInnes Cooper for advice to the Society during the investigation and representation during the hearing, plus $95,593.86 in HST, for a total of $733,417.76. Marjorie Hickey practiced with McInnes Cooper and represented the Society in the Howe proceeding.
The Society’s costs submissions did not merely disclose what had been spent. They also asked that Howe be required to bear a substantial portion of the Society’s costs. The Society proposed an award in the range of $450,000 to $600,000, while acknowledging the need to consider proportionality and Howe’s ability to pay.
Those figures add another dimension to the historical record. A 66-day professional discipline proceeding consuming more than $1.1 million in documented institutional expenditures — with more than $733,000.00 attributed to the firm providing advice during the investigation and representation at the hearing — was not an ordinary regulatory event. The financial scale does not itself establish discrimination or impropriety. But it underscores the extraordinary institutional resources committed to the proceeding and the magnitude of the consequences Howe faced.
Howe was ultimately found guilty of professional misconduct and professional incompetence. He was disbarred for five years and ordered to pay substantial costs before becoming eligible to apply for readmission.
Those findings are part of the record. They should not be minimized. But neither should the rest of the record.
Because race did not suddenly enter the Howe story years later.
Howe argued during the disciplinary process that his treatment had to be understood in the context of his experiences as a Black lawyer, historical discrimination against African Nova Scotians, systemic racism within the justice system, and the manner in which the Society had investigated and prosecuted him.
The disciplinary panel did not ultimately accept Howe’s claim that his equality rights under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been infringed. That fact matters.
But contemporary reporting on the panel’s findings also recorded that Howe had been subjected to closer scrutiny than his peers, notwithstanding the rejection of the ultimate Charter claim.
Read the 2017 reporting on the panel’s findings
For years, that might have appeared to be where the institutional conversation ended. Howe alleged discrimination. The Society contested it. The disciplinary panel rejected the ultimate Charter claim. The appellate process followed.
But history did not stop there.
Then the Institution Looked at Itself
In 2021, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society publicly acknowledged the existence of systemic discrimination within the Society and the legal profession.
It subsequently commissioned an independent external review led by Douglas Ruck, K.C. The inquiry was broader than whether an individual decision-maker consciously acted with racial prejudice. It concerned structures, processes, institutional culture, and the possibility that apparently neutral systems could produce unequal experiences and outcomes.
The resulting report was released in October 2024. Its title captured the institutional challenge in two words:
Regaining Trust.
Read Regaining Trust: The Ruck Report
This was not simply another allegation advanced by Howe. It was an independent review commissioned by the regulator itself.
Ruck’s work examined systemic discrimination affecting the Society and the legal profession and produced 21 recommendations for change. The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society accepted all of them.
Then came something institutions rarely offer easily: an apology.
The Society publicly apologized to those affected and acknowledged its past failure to address systemic discrimination within the Society and the justice system.
Read the NSBS response to the Ruck Report
That acknowledgement inevitably changes the historical lens through which earlier events can be examined. It does not erase disciplinary findings. It does not automatically prove that every allegation of discrimination previously made against the Society was correct. And it certainly does not establish, without more, that any particular lawyer personally engaged in discriminatory conduct.
But it makes one proposition increasingly difficult to maintain: that concerns about systemic discrimination within the regulator could simply be dismissed as the complaints of those dissatisfied with regulatory outcomes.
The regulator itself now acknowledges that the systemic problem existed.
The Howe Proceedings Look Different in Retrospect
That creates an uncomfortable historical question.
When a Black lawyer was alleging systemic discrimination during an unprecedented 66-day disciplinary proceeding, what did the institution understand about systemic discrimination at the time?
And perhaps more importantly: What was it prepared to understand?
Systemic discrimination does not require every person operating within a system to harbour consciously racist beliefs. It can exist through institutional practices, assumptions, discretionary decisions, patterns of scrutiny and apparently neutral processes whose cumulative effects disadvantage particular groups.
An institution can sincerely believe it is protecting the public. Its lawyers can sincerely believe they are performing their professional obligations. Its adjudicators can sincerely believe they are applying neutral rules. And systemic inequality can nevertheless exist.
That is precisely why institutional self-examination matters.
The Human Rights Question Did Not Disappear
The story has also moved beyond the Ruck Report.
The present moment also provides a concrete reason to revisit this history. Two Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission investigation reports dated August 9, 2025 examined Howe’s complaints. Those reports did not determine that discrimination occurred; an investigation report does not make that adjudicative finding. Both, however, recommended referral to a Board of Inquiry after concluding that the available record warranted independent adjudication.
One report stated that the accumulated evidence provided a valid reason to believe Howe may have faced race-based discrimination in the way the Society regulated him, identifying concerns including heightened scrutiny, disproportionate sanctions, departures from usual practices and disparities in disciplinary outcomes. It also treated the Ruck Report and the Society’s later acknowledgment of systemic anti-Black racism as relevant new context.
On January 26, 2026, the Commissioners adopted motions referring the two complaints to the same three-member Board of Inquiry to determine whether discrimination occurred. The following day, the Commission notified the parties of that decision. The Chief Judge of the Provincial Court subsequently nominated Benjamin Perryman as Chair, together with Nancy Elliott and Ryan Clements, to constitute the Board.
The Society has challenged that referral for a hearing. In a Notice for Judicial Review filed in March 2026, it asks the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia to quash the Commission’s decision and either dismiss the complaints or return them for a new investigation. Among other grounds, the Society alleges procedural unfairness, unreasonable reliance on undisclosed information, jurisdictional error, and reliance on false or extraneous information. The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission has filed a notice stating that the referral decision should be upheld and the Society’s judicial-review application dismissed.
The merits therefore remain contested. The investigation reports are recommendations, not findings of liability, and the Board of Inquiry has not yet determined whether discrimination occurred. But the record has advanced substantially beyond where it stood in 2017: the allegations have passed through the Commission’s investigative stage, been referred for independent adjudication, and become the subject of a judicial-review proceeding initiated by the regulator itself.
Complaints concerning alleged discrimination arising from these events have proceeded through the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission process and have now been referred to a Board of Inquiry.
A referral to a Board of Inquiry is not a finding that discrimination occurred.
It does not establish liability against Hickey, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society or any other respondent. A Board of Inquiry is an independent adjudicative process. If the matter proceeds to hearing, the evidence will be heard and the allegations determined through that process.
Learn about Nova Scotia Human Rights Boards of Inquiry
The distinction is essential. But so is the fact that the allegations have endured. Nearly a decade after the disciplinary proceedings, questions concerning race, equality and institutional treatment have not simply disappeared into the historical record. They have entered another formal adjudicative process.
The outcome of that process should not be prejudged. Neither, however, should the history that brought the parties there.
Two Versions of the Public Interest
And that brings the story back to Marjorie Hickey’s 2017 interview.
The original National Magazine profile repeatedly returned to the concept of the public interest. That remains the correct starting point for professional regulation. But the developments that followed suggest that it cannot be the ending point.
Who defines the public interest?
Whose experiences inform that definition?
Who receives the benefit of institutional discretion?
Who receives heightened scrutiny?
Whose allegations are considered credible?
And what happens when someone alleging systemic discrimination is himself accused of serious wrongdoing?
Equality principles are easy to defend when the person invoking them is sympathetic. They become meaningful when they protect people who are unpopular, difficult, accused or condemned.
The Society had an obligation to investigate legitimate concerns about Howe’s professional conduct. But Howe’s status as the subject of regulatory proceedings did not eliminate the institution’s corresponding obligation to ensure that race and systemic discrimination played no improper role in how he was investigated, prosecuted or judged.
Both propositions can be true.
Marjorie Hickey and McInnes Cooper: Principles in Practice
There is another reason the historical record warrants examination today.
Marjorie Hickey is not presented by McInnes Cooper simply as an experienced litigator. She is presently identified by the firm as its Deputy Managing Partner, and professional regulation remains a central part of her practice.
Read Marjorie Hickey's McInnes Cooper profile
Her current professional biography is striking when read alongside the history described above.
McInnes Cooper says Hickey assists professional regulators with investigations and disciplinary prosecutions and has helped design regulatory processes intended to provide flexible and fair procedures for respondents, witnesses and regulators. Her biography further emphasizes that her strategic advice to self-governing organizations is intended to ensure that the public-interest mandate remains at the forefront.
Those are important principles.
They are also principles against which the administration of professional regulation can legitimately be examined.
Fairness is not merely an aspiration for future proceedings. The public interest is not simply an objective invoked by a regulator. Both concepts require continuing examination of whether institutional processes have operated fairly in practice, particularly where subsequent evidence reveals systemic barriers that were not adequately recognized at the time.
The connection extends beyond Hickey's individual biography.
McInnes Cooper publicly identifies “Excellence without Ego” as one of its institutional values, explaining that this means listening first, remaining curious and continuing to learn. Another value, “Invested in People,” expressly invokes trust and inclusion.
The firm's commitment to inclusion goes further.
McInnes Cooper publicly acknowledges that inequity exists within the legal profession and society. Its stated approach includes critical reflection, education, measures intended to mitigate bias, and efforts to foster belonging.
Read McInnes Cooper's Collective Social Responsibility and IDEA commitments
Those principles should not be invoked as an accusation against McInnes Cooper.
To the contrary, they provide a constructive framework for precisely the kind of retrospective examination this history requires.
If a legal institution values listening, learning, critical reflection, fairness, inclusion and the mitigation of bias, then reconsidering difficult episodes in the profession's history is not inconsistent with those principles.
It is an application of them.
That is particularly relevant to Hickey because her own professional biography combines these themes in one place: regulatory fairness, the public interest, governance, diversity and inclusion.
Her biography records that she formerly served on the Minister of National Defence's Advisory Board on Gender Integration and Employment Equity in the Canadian Forces. It also notes that she received the Sovereign's Medal for Volunteers in 2021 for work that included fostering diversity and inclusion.
These are significant accomplishments and should be acknowledged fairly.
But recognition of those accomplishments does not place historical professional conduct beyond examination.
Indeed, the values associated with them suggest the opposite.
A commitment to equality should permit difficult questions about whether equality was achieved in practice.
A commitment to fair regulatory procedures should permit examination of proceedings in which systemic discrimination was alleged.
And a commitment to listening and learning should leave room for institutional understandings to change when new evidence emerges.
The question is more measured—and ultimately more important:
How should the principles publicly associated with a lawyer and her firm inform the way the profession examines that lawyer's role in a proceeding now viewed against a substantially changed understanding of systemic discrimination?
The Danger of Institutional Certainty
There is an understandable temptation to treat historical adjudicative decisions as the final word on the institutional environment in which they occurred. But institutions evolve partly because later evidence exposes things that earlier processes failed to recognize.
The Human Rights Commission’s own 2025 investigation reports add another layer to that chronology. In examining Howe’s complaints, the investigator did not simply note the existence of the Ruck Report. She expressly considered whether Howe faced heightened scrutiny, stricter standards or disproportionate consequences compared with white lawyers. One report observed that the Ruck Report itself identifies the Howe case as a significant example of how systemic issues can affect access to justice for African Nova Scotians and asks whether Howe received treatment different from white lawyers in similar circumstances.
That does not convert an allegation into an adjudicated fact. But it means the question is no longer being raised only by Howe. It has also been identified as worthy of examination by the independent reviewer commissioned by the Society and by the Human Rights Commission investigator who recommended referral to a Board of Inquiry.
That is what makes the chronology surrounding Howe worth examining. He raised racial discrimination while the proceedings were underway. His ultimate Charter claim failed. Years later, the Society acknowledged systemic discrimination within itself and the profession. An independent reviewer was appointed. A report called Regaining Trust followed. Twenty-one recommendations were accepted. An apology followed. And allegations connected to the broader history are now before a human-rights adjudicative process.
None of those later developments automatically reverses what happened before. But neither can they responsibly be treated as though they have nothing to say about it.
This Is Not About Rewriting the Record
Reconsidering history does not require rewriting it.
The disciplinary findings against Howe remain part of the historical record. So does the extraordinary duration of the proceedings. So do the questions he raised about race. So does the Society’s later acknowledgment of systemic discrimination. So does the Ruck Report. And now so does the referral of human-rights allegations for independent adjudication.
The credible approach is not to select whichever pieces of that history support a preferred conclusion.
It is to confront all of them.
That is particularly important for a profession built around evidence.
Why the 2017 Story Should Not Stand Alone
The problem with the original National Magazine profile is not necessarily what it said in 2017.
The problem is what a reader encounters when it is read today, without the history that followed it.
The profile remains online as a polished account of a regulatory lawyer associated with social justice, professional discipline and the public interest. A reader discovering it today could reasonably leave with that portrait without encountering the institutional reckoning that followed.
There is nothing inherently improper about preserving an historical article. Journalism should not disappear merely because subsequent events complicate the story.
But preservation is different from leaving a story uncontextualized.
Since 2017, the institution at the centre of Hickey’s regulatory work has acknowledged systemic discrimination within itself and the profession. It commissioned an independent review. It accepted 21 recommendations. It apologized for its past failure to address systemic discrimination. And allegations connected to the treatment of Howe have now proceeded into an independent human-rights adjudicative process.
Those developments do not make the original article false.
They make it incomplete.
And incompleteness matters when an article continues to shape a person’s professional reputation years after publication.
The original profile asked readers to understand Hickey’s work through the language of social justice and the public interest. Readers today are entitled to know what happened next.
They are entitled to know that, while that portrait was being presented, Howe was involved in an extraordinary 66-day disciplinary proceeding in which he was raising allegations of racial and systemic discrimination.
They are entitled to know that those allegations were rejected in the disciplinary context.
They are equally entitled to know that the Society subsequently acknowledged systemic discrimination within its own institution and profession.
They are entitled to read the Ruck Report.
And they are entitled to know that human-rights allegations connected to this history have now reached a Board of Inquiry, where the merits remain to be determined.
Context is not cancellation.
It is not a demand that the 2017 article be erased. It is a demand that the historical record be allowed to catch up with it.
For a publication devoted to Canada’s legal profession, that distinction should matter.
Lawyers routinely insist that conclusions be reached only after considering the whole record. Journalism about the legal profession should aspire to the same standard.
The original article can remain part of that record.
It should not remain the last word.
Perhaps the appropriate response is not deletion, but an editor’s note, an update, a follow-up article, or simply a prominent link directing today’s reader to the developments that followed.
Because when the factual landscape has changed this significantly, leaving an old portrait entirely untouched can itself create a misleading impression—not because its original words have changed, but because the world around those words has.
“Practising With Conviction” — Revisited
The title chosen for the 2017 profile now carries an unintended resonance:
Practising with conviction.
Conviction can describe commitment to principle. It can describe courage. It can describe certainty.
But institutional certainty carries its own danger.
An institution convinced of the righteousness of its purpose may become less willing to ask whether the methods through which it pursues that purpose affect people differently.
That does not make the purpose illegitimate. It makes scrutiny indispensable.
The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society has now begun that process of scrutiny itself. It has acknowledged systemic discrimination. It commissioned an independent review. It accepted the resulting recommendations. It apologized. And it has committed itself to implementation.
Read about the Society’s response and implementation of the Ruck Report
Those steps deserve recognition.
But regaining trust requires more than changing the future.
It requires being willing to examine the past. And that includes the uncomfortable cases. Perhaps especially those cases.
Nearly a Decade Later, the Question Remains
The 2017 profile of Marjorie Hickey began with professional regulation and the public interest.
Nearly a decade later, Nova Scotia’s legal profession possesses information and institutional acknowledgements that readers of that profile did not.
The Howe proceedings cannot simply be reduced to a story of either professional misconduct or systemic discrimination. History may ultimately require the profession to grapple with both.
The Board of Inquiry will determine the human-rights allegations placed before it. It should be permitted to do so without anyone prejudging its conclusions.
But the broader institutional question does not require waiting for a verdict.
The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society has already acknowledged that systemic discrimination existed.
The question now is what that acknowledgment means when the profession looks backward at the people who were raising concerns before the institution itself was ready to acknowledge them.
In 2017, the question was:
What is in the public interest?
Nearly a decade later, perhaps the profession is ready for the harder question:
Whose public interest?
Sources and Further Reading
- CBA National — Lunch with Marjorie Hickey: Practising with conviction
- Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society — Regaining Trust: The Ruck Report
- Regaining Trust: The Ruck Report — Full Report
- NSBS 2024 Hearing Panel Decision referring to the 66-day hearing
- Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission — Board of Inquiry information
- Supreme Court of Nova Scotia — Judicial Review Record, Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society v. Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission and Lyle Howe, Hfx No. 551475
- Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission — Investigation Reports concerning Lyle Howe v. Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society, dated August 9, 2025
- Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission — January 27, 2026 Board of Inquiry referral decisions