THE ADVOCATE 273
VOL. 79 PART 2 MARCH 2021
Kelly Ann Woods
Kelly was born two months prematurely at Toronto
General Hospital on March 28, 1959. In those days
very few premature babies survived, but Kelly was
lucky enough to be born across the street from the
Hospital for Sick Children, where pioneering pediatrician
Dr. Gus O’Brien saved her life. Not only was
he able to save her from drowning in the fluids building
up in her immature lungs, but he also gave her one of the first complete
exchange blood transfusions in Canada to treat her ABO incompatibility,
which also threatened her life. Kelly continued to fight to survive throughout
her early childhood, suffering repeated bouts of pneumonia, but survive
she did, and that fighting spirit never left her.
Kelly’s father is the renowned philosopher John Woods and her mother,
Carol, is a retired French teacher. It was through often heated debates at the
dinner table that Kelly honed her oratorical skills and reasoning ability,
which would serve her so well in her legal career. Kelly did not start out
wanting to be a lawyer. Her grandfather, John Woods, K.C., had been a distinguished
criminal lawyer in Ontario and was always disappointed that his
son did not follow in his footsteps. He would have been delighted to learn
that both of his granddaughters did. Kelly’s first love was art history and she
took a joint degree in this and French at the University of Victoria, including
a year abroad in France to study at the University of Nice. Recognizing that
employment as an art history consultant was probably not going to materialize
in Victoria, where she was determined to make her home, Kelly
decided to go to law school. Her UVic classmate Mary Margaret MacKinnon
remembers Kelly’s wonderful sense of humour. She writes:
When Kelly arrived at law school, she was full of mirth. She saw the
humour in everything. The cardigan-wearing poster preppy people made
her laugh out loud. We were a bit counterculture. We read great poets and
defied some norms. She really did crack open the world when we were
young. She was free.
It was while attending law school that Kelly met her husband, Don Bland,
then a constable with the Victoria Police Department. She was working there
as part of a pilot program operated through the law school, which placed law
students into summer positions with the Victoria Police Department so that
they could learn firsthand how the administration of justice worked from the
ground up. She and Don Bland went on to marry and have a daughter, Alexan-