592 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 4 JULY 2021
dle school (at Pembina Crest) and high school (at Vincent Massey Collegiate)
in Winnipeg.
Jodie was then, and is now, very active in her athletic pursuits and interests.
However, her choice of sports teams is, for some of us, profoundly suspect.
She was dancing at the age of three and played softball and ringette
until the age of 13, at which point she gave up other sports to focus on dance
and, of course, her studies. Many childhood weekends were spent travelling
for dance and hockey and ringette tournaments. She often jokes that
“hockey” was her religion, as her family spent most Sunday mornings at the
arena watching her brother play, and she would be there cheering him on
if she wasn’t dancing.
Jodie’s family attended Winnipeg Blue Bombers games and Winnipeg
Jets games starting when Jodie was young, and her love of the CFL later
morphed into a love for the NFL when she and her father Mel started watching
NFL games while she was in law school. Thus started an interest in U.S.
sports teams, a very fortunate turn of events when years later, in November
2002, she met Todd, an American who also loves the NFL. In rare moments,
and if they are not otherwise occupied, you can catch Jodie and Todd watching
the Bombers, the Jets, the Canucks, the Broncos and the Nuggets while
attempting to entertain their eight-year-old identical twins. Todd is indeed
the master of personnel management, and Jodie attributes much of her
ability to pursue her career as fully as she has to Todd’s mastery of the Harris
family management structure.
After graduating high school in 1991, Jodie moved on to a four-year bachelor
of arts program at University of Manitoba. Undergrad was paused when
Jodie took some time away from school to become a certified group fitness
instructor and strength and conditioning coach. She worked in fitness for a
few years. During this time, her family expanded and she added her stepparents
Bob (Harvey) and Maureen (McJannet) and four step-siblings and
she became part of a “large and loving family”, to use her words.
After finishing her undergraduate degree, Jodie started law school at the
University of Manitoba in 1999, where she experienced the internet for the
first time. She was second in her class in her first two years and recalls that
she may have been on the dean’s honour roll in her third year. Jodie
received the Blakes Scholar Award at the end of first year. This award
allowed her to quit her job at Applebee’s and focus on schoolwork. She
worked at the Blakes Vancouver office in the summer, and after law school
she moved to Vancouver to join that office as an articling student. She was
called to the B.C. bar in September 2003 and was a member of the commercial
litigation group at Blakes until 2006, when she made the decision to join
the Crown.