The only game I was ever any good at in my 20s was Trivial Pursuit, and to this day I unconsciously collect trivial information from a wide variety of sources to either make sense of the world or to make use of in articles like this one. Of course, I can never remember where I put my keys, but I know my trivia.
Last summer, the Vancouver Sun published an article examining the richest neighbourhoods in Metro Vancouver, based on median income. Extrapolating data obtained from the 2006 census, the study showed the richest neighbourhood wasn’t in West Vancouver, nor was it in Kerrisdale, Shaughnessy, or Point Grey Road. It was in Surrey, in a neighbourhood called Rosemary Heights, near 152nd Street and 32nd Avenue, where the median income was $44,301 — the highest in the entire region in 2006.
I confess I have never been there, but if it’s in “South Surrey,” I can assure you its pretty nice there.
This information says a lot of things, but I suppose one of the first things is that Surrey, that city south of the Fraser that everyone north of the Fraser likes to make jokes about, is eclipsing Vancouver on a number of levels — something those at the start of their legal careers should take note of.
It’s already eclipsed my old hometown, Victoria, in terms of population; Surrey having a population of 465,000 and Victoria capping out at 360,000. Surrey is B.C.’s second largest city, and is projected to surpass Vancouver as B.C.’s most populous city by the 2020s.
Let me say that again to make the point: Surrey will be B.C.’s largest city as early as 2020 – eight years from now. That’s like discovering Manchester will be larger than London in eight years.
A poor (but apt) metaphor is that Surrey’s like the mousey girl in your elementary school class who you ignored because she was from the wrong side of the tracks, only to discover later in life that she became Jennifer Lopez.
So like it or not, the 21st century, at least in B.C., belongs to Surrey. Surrey will shape the political and economic direction of the province like no other city.
Although a drive through parts of Surrey would suggest this is a city of urban sprawl, strip malls, baseball caps, double-wide trailers, and a rather uncomfortably high murder rate, it has a lot of what Vancouver and Victoria don’t have: lots of land, direct access to the United States border, comparatively affordable housing costs, and people from all over the world moving there.
Transit within Surrey is poor, but transit to Surrey is good. The Expo Line to King George Station makes the northern part of Surrey accessible to people who live in Burnaby, New Westminster, and Vancouver. It may be that proximity to Vancouver in the coming years will be less important for commuters than proximity to Surrey; something that hasn’t hurt the house prices of my neighbourhood in New Westminster, just across the river.
In fact, I can see Surrey from my house. But I can’t see Vancouver.
If you’re a lawyer, there’s something else Surrey has: clients, many of them in real estate, real estate development, or other small or medium-sized businesses. Other clients are seemingly in need of family and estates lawyers to deal with their divorces, their custody battles, and their probate work. And if you’re into criminal law, the newspapers would suggest that opportunities abound.
After articling at an established medium-sized Vancouver firm myself 26 years ago, and pretty well staying with downtown Vancouver firms for most of my professional life, I’d have to say that students who article in Surrey or practise for their first few years there (or for that matter, any place outside of downtown Vancouver), may have a greater opportunity for getting into court on a regular basis than their downtown counterparts, who can be stuck compiling lists of documents on multimillion-dollar deals and doing memos of law while their Surrey colleagues are in trial after trial, and chambers application after chambers application, cutting their teeth in front of judges.
So here’s my point. The soon-to-be second largest city in British Columbia should have a law school.
I know there’s a new law school at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops that admitted its first class in September, and it will hopefully fill the void for legal counsel in B.C.’s interior.
But the sizeable growth of communities south of the Fraser River, and the need for more lawyers in light of the onslaught of retiring lawyers in the coming decade, suggests B.C. needs one more law school. Indeed, I was at a speech delivered by B.C. Chief Justice Lance Finch last year in Phoenix, where he discussed the potential of doubling the number of people being admitted to the bar each year. The thought was that this would help deal with an “imbalance” between the demand for legal services and the supply of lawyers, thereby lowering the cost of justice to the public.
So if we need more lawyers, we need more law schools.
Fortunately, the facilities for a new lower-mainland law school have already been built. Not only is there a modern physical campus at Simon Fraser University in Surrey where classes could be held, but there is infrastructure in place through the School of Criminology that could administer a new law school and provide perhaps a third or more of the faculty.
No new buildings need to be constructed. There is a university department already there that could administratively “transform” itself into a law faculty without much of a fuss. A new law faculty at SFU could concentrate in certain areas of law where it might well have an academic edge, such as forensic evidence, criminal law, cybercrime, and the regulation of the Internet. And from personal experience, I can tell you that SFU leads the way in educational programs delivered remotely using modern technology.
The legal community in Surrey, Langley, and other communities south of the Fraser, the City of Surrey, the Law Society of B.C., and the B.C. government should be persuaded to put in motion a plan to create a new law school for the Surrey campus of SFU, and this should be publicly endorsed by the president, the chancellor, and members of the board of governors of SFU.
A no brainer, it would appear, and it may politically reward the governments who get behind the initiative. But it won’t happen unless it’s on someone’s agenda, so my view is “get it on the agenda.”
Remember, the 21st century belongs to Surrey.
