Judith Wahl remembered as 'a trailblazer'

Leader of the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly was a champion for the rights of older Canadians

- MOIRA WELSH

Judith Wahl, a pioneering lawyer who helped shift the law’s focus to the rights of older adults and not just the eventual heirs of their estates, has died. She was 71.

In the 1980s, when Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry hired Wahl as founding executive director of a new community legal clinic focused on older adults, most lawyers in a similar practice devoted their time to estate law, focused on transferring wealth after death.

Wahl took a hard turn in the opposite direction.

She focused on the living, making the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly (ACE) a legal voice for the rights of older adults. In doing so, colleagues said Wahl created a new legal practice in Canada, now known as elder law.

“She looked at … law through a different lens around capacity and self-direction to ensure that people were able to speak up for themselves and say, ‘I do have a right to make decisions,’ ” said Jane Meadus, Wahl’s long-time colleague and friend at ACE.

“Anyone practising elder law in Canada now is doing it on her shoulders,” Meadus said.

On May 15, Wahl died in hospital, a few months after doctors diagnosed her with stage-four endometrial cancer.

Wahl wasn’t all button-down business. She loved white-water canoeing and kayaking in the Canadian north, often joining friends and family on weeks-long camping trips.

Her childhood was spent in downtown Toronto, growing up near Dundas St. W. and Dovercourt Rd., where her parents ran a confectionary shop, said her older sister, Patricia Banel.

“She loved to read and she loved school,” Banel said. “She was very good in school too.”