Joan Jack summed up her six-year legal saga with one word, using it several times: vindication.
A Court of King’s Bench has ruled in favour of the Indigenous lawyer, who filed a lawsuit in 2020 against a firm that represented survivors of federal Indian day schools.
“I feel vindicated for sure. I mean, I’ve been ridiculed. I’ve been ostracized. Some pretty important First Nations people have said nasty things about me,” Jack said in an interview on Tuesday.
“To have the judge in the Court of King’s Bench say, ‘Actually, no, this is wrong, and the only question here is the amount of damages,’ that’s great. It’s very clear, I wasn’t treated properly.”
Jack, originally from Berens River First Nation north of Winnipeg, alleged she had not been compensated for years of her work on the class-action case, which reached a $1.47-billion settlement in 2019.
It was Jack who filed the original statement of claim for the Indian day school lawsuit against Canada in 2009. In 2016, multinational law firm Gowling WLG took over and became the court-approved counsel for the historic class-action suit.
The 2019 settlement included $55 million in legal fees for Gowling. Jack says she received nothing.
She filed the 2020 statement of claim against Gowling and the Attorney General of Canada, claiming a breach of contract for her work.
“If Gowling had intended to do anything other than what they’ve done, they would have done that, and they haven’t, so I was forced to sue,” she said in her recent interview with CBC.
In her 46-page decision issued on Aug. 31, 2026, Court of King’s Bench Justice Shauna McCarthy ruled Jack’s fees — and those of Winnipeg lawyer Louay Alghoul, who began working with Jack on the case in 2012 — were a binding agreement when the file was transferred to Gowling.
The damages due from Gowling will be determined at a subsequent hearing, the decision states.
CBC News has reached out to Gowling WLG for comment on the decision but has not yet heard back.
Nearly 200,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forced to attend nearly 700 federally operated day schools for more than a century, beginning in the 1920s. They were shut out of the $1.9-billion Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement brokered in 2006.
Unlike residential school survivors, day school students remained in their communities and went home in the evenings, but they suffered similar abuse and faced cultural assimilation.
In late 2008, Jack was retained by day school survivors and advocates including Gary McLean, Ray Mason and Spirit Wind. On July 31, 2009, she filed the original proposed class action in what was then Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, McCarthy’s decision states.
Over the years that followed, Jack and Alghoul worked in communities identifying and educating potential plaintiffs and gathering evidence. By February 2017, Gowling had received the physical files and a database relating to approximately 12,500 potential class members.
Jack stepped away from practising in 2015 and her clients sought new counsel, retaining Gowling. During the transition there were discussions about the transfer of files belonging to Jack and Alghoul, and how their fees would be protected, McCarthy’s decision states.
In December 2016, Gowling took the case from Manitoba to federal court and filed a new class action.
There is evidence former clients of Jack and Alghoul viewed the work they did as having made the day school claims viable, McCarthy found, adding those clients also believed the fees owed to Jack and Alghoul would be paid out of any settlement that eventually occurred.
In light of that, McCarthy rejected Gowling’s claim that no work of value had been done by Jack and Alghoul.
McCarthy found Gowling breached its obligations to Jack and Alghoul but dismissed the claims against the attorney general of Canada and against Robert Winogron, a partner in Gowling. There’s no evidence the latter was personally or unjustly enriched, McCarthy ruled.
Despite the ruling in her favour, Jack said she expects Gowling “to appeal and keep fighting.”
“You don’t want to get too excited,” she said. “This is a long, long haul. So … don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.”
But “the win is the win” for now, she added, saying she sent the decision to a friend who is a long-serving lawyer, to get his reaction.
“He texted me back and he said, ‘This is a great day, Joan.’ He used the word that I was feeling — he said, ‘you’ve been vindicated.’ Vindicated, you know?”
Even in the case of an appeal, she’s in a strong position, the friend told her.
“If this is somebody senior, who has done a lot of litigation, thinking that I should be happy, I guess I’ll be a little bit happy,” Jack said.
“So often, we as First Nations, Indigenous people, were wronged, you know, legally. The Canadian state still determines who is registered as an Indian or not. That’s legalized racism. We live in that reality.
“So when … the system that oppresses us works in our favour, it’s cause for a little bit of breathing room.”
She also FaceTimed her mom in Manitoba with the news. After her mom used the word “vindicated” she said regardless of whether Jack sees any compensation “they don’t get to rewrite history. You did what you did.”
Jack, though, would prefer to see some money.
“This is a great portion of my life’s work. Of course I want to be paid,” she said.
“I’ve told my children I have a will, and if I die before this is settled, you make sure the estate lawyer tells my lawyer on the fee file here to keep fighting.”
