The first Indigenous appointed to the role and Top 25 honouree spoke to CL Talk about leading change
Leonard Marchand was appointed Chief Justice of British Columbia in 2023 and is the first Indigenous person appointed to this role, being a member of the Okanagan Indian Band. Before joining the Court of Appeal in 2019, he practised civil litigation for nearly two decades and served as a judge of the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Chief Justice Marchand spoke to the CL podcast about his path to the bench, the challenges of judicial reform, and how he’s working to make the justice system more accessible, inclusive, and responsive to all Canadians.
Last year, Chief Justice Marchand was recognized as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers by Canadian Lawyer magazine.
Below is a summary of the conversation:
Leonard Marchand didn’t begin his career in a courtroom. He started in a chemical plant. “I was pretty good in chemistry, math and physics, and I decided that that meant I should study chemical engineering,” he says. That decision led him to work as a production engineer at a multinational oil company. But something didn’t sit right. “The corporate mission was stated to be maximizing return to corporate shareholders… this is important, but this is not my life mission,” he explains.
Born and raised in Kamloops, British Columbia, and a member of the Okanagan Indian Band, Marchand came to law with a clear sense of purpose. “When I went back to law school, I had the idea in my head that I would help people,” he says. He envisioned a path working with Indigenous clients. After law school, he returned to Kamloops and focused his legal practice on the liability of public authorities. That soon evolved into work for survivors of residential schools.
“I learned a lot about how our people have come into conflict with the law,” he says. “I developed some pretty strong feelings about how we should address those issues, how people should be treated.”
Those convictions led to his appointment as a Provincial Court judge in 2013. In that role, he sat in Indigenous sentencing court, developing healing plans with elders for Indigenous offenders, “to try to help them get their lives back on track for themselves, their families, their communities, and really for all of us,” he says.
In 2017, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of British Columbia – on National Indigenous Peoples Day by Canada’s first and only Indigenous justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould. “That was… seemed fitting, and it was something that I’ll always remember,” he says. While there, he served on a generalist trial court, handling a wide variety of cases. Two years later, he moved to the Court of Appeal, and in 2023, he became Chief Justice of British Columbia, the first Indigenous person to ever hold that role.
He describes his motivation for pursuing higher judicial office as a matter of necessity. “If qualified Indigenous people never apply, qualified Indigenous people will never be appointed,” he says. “So, I put my hand up.”
With each role, Marchand has carried a consistent mission: ensuring the courts reflect and respect the people they serve. “We have a justice system that’s for everyone,” he says. “A lot of people don’t feel the justice system is for them, including a lot of Indigenous people. And I’d like to right that ship, or be a part of that.”
Much of his current focus is on how the court functions – both in outcomes and in process. “You want to treat people right,” he says. “You want to make sure that people understand that their issues are important, that they have a place in our courts… that they’ll be treated with respect.”
That means rethinking the way the court uses technology. “Technology is really important at our court, and we’re always looking to innovate,” he says. One legacy system they still rely on, a 20-year-old scheduling program, is constantly being patched. But the broader goal is full digitization. “We’re broadcasting our appeals… we’ve even digitized the signing of our judgments,” he says.
There’s also a new “courtroom of the future” in the design stage, with upgrades to accessibility, lighting, acoustics, and AI-driven transcription. “We’re designing a courtroom not for 50 years ago, but for today and tomorrow,” he says.
At the centre of all this reform is access to justice. Marchand describes three groups the court is thinking about: people facing barriers to entry, people avoiding the system entirely, and those consuming more than their share of resources. “There’s also well-resourced parties with good counsel… their trials are too long. They’re putting in too many documents,” he says.
He cites efforts to streamline processes, simplify language in forms, and revise outdated rules. “We provide the public with… clear, accessible information about our processes,” he says. “We have helpful, well-trained registry staff… we have [a] self-help website… we update that website annually or as needed.”
Self-represented litigants now receive a letter with contact info for Access Pro Bono, and partnerships have been formed with Indigenous justice centres and student-run legal aid programs. “We’re working on improving our education and awareness, on building relationships, and on ensuring that we have an accommodating and inclusive space for Indigenous people and communities,” he says.
He’s also candid about the slow pace of change in judicial diversity. “The bench has become a lot more diverse, but we have a ways to go,” he says. Still, he remains hopeful, citing changes in legal education. “When I go to law schools today… I see a lot more diversity… Provided that the profession welcomes and supports these diverse faces… there’s no reason that they won’t eventually be great candidates to become judges.”
His court has introduced several practical steps to support inclusion. Participants are invited – but not required – to share preferred forms of address. Attire policies have also been updated to reflect cultural considerations.
There’s also an internal effort to recruit from diverse student groups. “We do outreach to invite law applications from different student groups, including Indigenous student groups,” he says. “Diversity doesn’t carry the day on our hiring decisions, but it’s an important consideration.”
Even in appellate courts, which often feel remote from daily life, Marchand is pushing for public engagement. “Trust in our public institutions is eroding,” he says. “We believe we have a role to play in enhancing public understanding of the role of the court and the functioning of the justice system more generally.”
That effort includes public reporting, plain-language summaries of judgments, and broadcasting hearings. “We hope that our public engagement work will increase public trust and confidence in our work and in the justice system as a whole,” he says. “I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but if we lose that, our democracy is literally at stake.”
While traditionally judges were expected to speak only through their rulings, Marchand believes that approach no longer serves the public. “It’s 2025, and that time has passed,” he says. “We’re developing a communications, public education and outreach framework… One [goal] is to combat misinformation and disinformation, and another is to raise public understanding about the justice system and our role within it.”
To Marchand, it’s not about performative transparency. It’s about legitimacy. “We’re hoping that people will get to know us as experienced, caring, careful human beings,” he says. “Not some cloistered law robots who are just purely analytical and cold about things.”
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