THE ADVOCATE 201
VOL. 79 PART 2 MARCH 2021
law firms beginning in the 1970s. They now represent the majority of law
students, although they have yet to achieve equality in numbers or opportunities
in the practice of law itself.
So who are those guys?
George Hungerford, O.C., O.B.C., Q.C., Blair Horn and Kyle Hamilton won
Olympic gold medals in 1964, 1984 and 2008, respectively. George became
an officer of the Order of Canada and was appointed to the Order of British
Columbia not for his rowing prowess but for his public service. Both Blair
and Kyle sat in the stroke seat of the Canadian eights that won gold medals
in 1984 and 2008. David Gillanders, the manager of the UBC rowing crews in
the early 1960s, coached George and his partner Roger Jackson.
David Anderson, who occupied many federal Cabinet positions and also
led the B.C. Liberal Party, was a silver medallist in rowing in the 1956
Olympics. A crew mate of Anderson’s was Phil Kueber, who went on to
become a prominent corporate lawyer in Calgary.
Tricia Smith is the current president of the Canadian Olympic Committee.
She was part of the vanguard of women in the sport of rowing in the
early 1970s. She was named to four Olympic teams from 1976 to 1984,
including the team that suffered the disappointment of not being able to
compete because of Canada’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In
1984, she was a silver medallist at the Los Angeles Olympics in the pair. For
her exemplary contributions to the sport, she is a member of the Order of
Canada and the Order of British Columbia.
Hamar Foster, Q.C., professor emeritus at the University of Victoria Faculty
of Law, and Rory Morahan, a Victoria-based criminal defence lawyer,
were members of the first men’s crew to compete for the University of Victoria.
Now in their seventies, Hamar and B.C. lawyer Tom Lathrop still regularly
compete in masters events for the Victoria City Rowing Club.
Suzanne Anton, Q.C., B.C.’s Minister of Justice from 2013 to 2017, was a
member of the first women’s crew to compete for the University of Victoria
when she was an undergraduate.
Tim McGee, Q.C., the executive director of the Law Society of British
Columbia from 2005 to 2017, had considerable success as a rower at Harvard
in the late 1970s.
Lance Finch, O.B.C., Q.C., the recently deceased former Chief Justice of
British Columbia, was a most distinguished lawyer and jurist, but not a particularly
distinguished rower. He rowed for UBC in the mid-1950s but never
competed on any international crews.
British Columbia’s first Chief Justice, Matthew Baillie Begbie, rowed and
captained at his Cambridge college, Peterhouse, in 1840 but never made the