eNews: Judges
How did the removal of cabooses from Canadian trains end up benefitting the Provincial Court of BC? And how did it lead to a judge becoming a doctor?
Updated March 2023
You sometimes hear people say that our judges and courts aren’t accountable, but that’s not true. Both individual judges and the courts they serve in are accountable for their decisions and actions in many ways.
On June 23, 2018 Bill Veenstra, President of the Canadian Bar Association BC Branch (CBABC), awarded its President’s Medal to Justice Thomas Crabtree, former Chief Judge of the Provincial Court of BC, for his outstanding contributions to the legal profession and the administration of justice in British Columbia.
Tom Crabtree—formerly the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court of B.C. and newly appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of B.C.—is known not only for his great accomplishments but also his abiding common touch and modesty.
Her colleagues on the Provincial Court Judges Association Education Committee - a committee she has chaired for nearly five years—routinely refer to her as a “force of nature”. That is not an epithet one would normally expect to be used to describe a person 4’11” in height.