THE ADVOCATE 347
VOL. 78 PART 3 MAY 2020
A MAN LIKE GREER
By Hamar Foster, Q.C.
Forensic history … is the use of isolated evidence from the past to
argue a case … It consists of rummaging through the past and picking
out bits and pieces to sustain an argument … It is good law, or at least
good advocacy, but it is not history.
John Phillip Reid, Patterns of Vengeance: Crosscultural Homicide
in the North American Fur Trade
(Pasadena: Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society, 1999)
I.
Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie attracted controversy from almost the moment
he stepped off the boat in 1858 until a few years before his death in 1894.
After more than a century in relative obscurity, he is doing so again. On a
few occasions during his lifetime, his opinions even sparked petitions and
public protest meetings: for example, the case featured on a website called
Vancouver Is Awesome under the heading, “The Fight for Greer’s Beach”.1
This site provides a short account of the clash between one Sam Greer, an
evicted squatter on what is now Kitsilano Beach, and the Canadian Pacific
Railway (“CPR”). It also notes that the judge who presided at his trial was
Begbie.
In Vancouver and Victoria there are city streets named after both Greer
and Begbie, although recently the Law Society of BC and the City of New
Westminster have removed their statues of the latter. (This was not the first
time Begbie had offended New Westminster: in 1876 he publicly apologized
to its city council for his behaviour in two cases 14 years earlier—not something
judges often do.)2 As for Greer, historian Laura Ishiguro notes that in
addition to his street in Vancouver there is Sam Greer Place, a housing cooperative
established in 1977. It is named after Greer because, according to
the co-operative’s founders, he was “somebody who fought for housing
rights”. There is also a Greer’s Beach Brewery, where one can get a lager or