432 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 78 PART 3 MAY 2020
lawyers appearing before her (“the voice” mentioned below), these
were important instructions!
• There are many versions of this next story, but one that MJP herself
told is that on her first day walking into the judges’ lounge (presumably
the one at the Supreme Court, but it could have been one
of the earlier courts), she was confronted by a room of male judges,
as to be expected. One of the seated ones (never named in any of
the stories) held up his coffee cup and saucer and asked for her to
get him a cup of coffee. She said she did not fetch coffee or clean
up the cups. She then got her own coffee and sat down.
• Many lawyers who appeared before her will recall “the Proudfoot
voice” or simply “the voice”. It brooked no argument. She was in
control of her courtroom. However, there was much more. Bryan
Davis in his eulogy noted that she was “kind, fair, reasonable, compassionate”,
honest and acted with integrity to “arrive at the right
decision”. Justice Mary Newbury of the Court of Appeal says that
MJP’s best qualities were her “humanity and sensibleness”, which
made her a very good family law judge.
• The Honourable Marion Allan in her eulogy credited MJP for “setting
the tone for behaviour towards federal women judges in a
heavily male-dominated culture”. The Honourable Bertha Wilson
(the first woman on the Ontario Court of Appeal and on the
Supreme Court of Canada) wrote a report in 1993 about the
“deplorable treatment of women judges across Canada”. However,
British Columbia’s women judges “adamantly declared that we
were not discriminated against by our male colleagues”. Marion
Allan also credited the efforts and example of Chief Justice
McEachern for how women judges sitting in courts in B.C. were to
be treated.
• MJP grew weary of what she understood she was expected to wear
in chambers: black jacket, black skirt, black shoes and white blouse
buttoned to the neck. She started first by wearing bright red nail
polish—then, possibly in this order, red shoes, an open-collared
shirt with a red scarf, red stockings, black pants(!) and then a red
jacket. She was always well turned out to the end, and loved colour,
style and her red tam.
• This was a story MJP told some of her law clerks. She was presiding
at a trial of several Doukhobors in winter in an old courtroom that
had windows, possibly in Nelson. Before she went into court, the