Justice Weiler makes law work for kids January 22, 2021
Over the course of six decades, Justice Karen Weiler has wielded the law in the service of kids. Semi-retired, honoured throughout Canada’s legal community and now with the Order of Ontario in her back pocket, she’s still doing it.
The board member for Covenant House was honoured with an appointment to the Order of Ontario, along with 24 others, on Jan. 1.
When Weiler started practising law in Thunder Bay in 1967 she stumbled across a problem, a big problem with the law. Legally, kids as young as seven in Northern Ontario could be shipped 1,500 km away to a training school in southern Ontario even for minor infractions, or no infraction at all. All that was necessary was the say-so of somebody in authority a police officer, a teacher, a social worker who deemed the child “unmanageable.”