Meet Craig E. Jones
Civil libertarian, one time UBC activist, lawyer, and general counsel to the Premier
“Harvard changed my credentials, but Open University changed my life.”
Craig E. Jones, one time UBC student activist, current professor of law at Thompson Rivers University and General Counsel to the Premier of BC.
Craig and I met late January 2023 over zoom. I had asked to interview him as part of A Campus Resident’s ‘meet our neighbour’ series. I had never met Craig when he was a student at UBC. I had, however, heard about him. He became part of the UBC/No to APEC story of the late 1990s.
We had a wide ranging conversation that shifted between the events of the No to APEC protests, how that moment of protest shaped his subsequent life, and his path to becoming a lawyer. Along the way we also spoke about his longstanding interest in music -he spent many years performing- and collectables. I left the conversation thinking I’d love to chat with this person again.
The APEC meeting and student protests at UBC prefigured a turning point in progressive opposition to the neo-liberal agenda. Events at UBC were soon followed by larger protests in Seattle (1999) and Quebec City (2001). The UBC protests were organized by militant students who, in the weeks leading up to the APEC summit, engaged in a running battle with campus security and the local police. Their tools were chalk and paint and shear creativeness. In the aftermath the police came across as over zealous and hamfisted in their management of the student protests. Among other things, the student protest had been infiltrated by undercover police officers who at times appeared to be instigating as much as they were observing.1 Craig and other students connected with the BC Civil Liberties Association had been planning to be protest observers while other students protested. As Craig explains, that wasn’t how his day ended up.
Craig and his UBC APEC Story
Early in his law student days Craig had become involved with the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA). In that capacity Craig was planning on being an observer for the student protests.
“The idea was that the role of the BCCLA was just going to be observe the anticipated protest. This was before the days of camera phones, so we were going to have little notebooks and just write people's names down as they're arrested and just observe the police behaviour.”
“As the day approached, it became pretty clear that the police were being very aggressive and proactively going against the protest organizers. They had sort of prophylactically arrested a fellow named Jaggi Singh, who was the de facto leader of the leaderless Anarchists. And they had only released the people that they were arresting in advance on condition that they didn't show up and protest on the day. And all of this stuff seemed pretty offensive.”
Craig was a resident of Green College which was located on the route the APEC leaders were taking to attend their meeting in the UBC President’s house.
“Green College was in a fenced off island within the exclusion zone. … So a few of us at Green College had this sort of mischievous idea that we would just roll out or hang some signs on the fence. We made three paper signs. One said Human Rights, one said Democracy, and one said Free Speech, which I thought were fairly uncontroversial positions to take. And we just hung them on the fence. The night before, I think, the police came around and ordered us to remove them because it was blocking [their] sight lines.”
“So we we took the signs off the fence and reattached them to rolling coat racks from Green College. On the morning that the motorcade was due to come by … the idea was we were just going to roll the coat racks out onto the sidewalk on our side of the fence and hopefully they'd see them as they went by. That was about the extent of it. Then we were all supposed to go through a police checkpoint in order to get to campus and for me to get on to the protests that were due to happen later in the day. A little group of us just got up in the morning, rolled these things out and prepared to get through the police checkpoint. But the police responded apoplectically to these things being visible from the road. A fairly self important police officer Inspector Dingwall approached us and insisted that our signs had to be removed because they were blocking pedestrian traffic. And you could imagine the absurdity of that statement, given that we were in this island and stopped from [going] anywhere.”
Anyway, we humoured him and we rolled [the coat racks] back onto the Green College lawn just adjacent to the sidewalk where we hoped they would still be seen. He ran back to his little checkpoint and we saw him pacing back and forth on his walkie talkie. Then he re-approached with a group of uniformed officers and said, you can't have signs here. It's not a designated protest area. He and I got into a discussion about the nonexistence of anything called designated protest areas and that this was our lawn and we leased this property and we're going to have our signs here. Some of the other people that I was with had made little cardboard signs of their own that were handheld. Anyway. My relationship with Inspector Dingwall deteriorated to the point where he said, well, if you don't take the signs away, we're going to seize them. I grabbed on to the nearest one and said, well, if you're going to take the sign, you have to be prepared to arrest me.
Before I know it, I'm sort of the meat in an RCMP sandwich with three cops on on my back and handcuffed and thrown into a cop car. And then just after that happened, the principal of Green College, Richard Erickson, he came out and just went up one side of the cops and down the other. As a consequence, the remainder of the students were permitted to stay with their signs, their handheld signs. And, yeah, he was terrific that day. So, incidentally, was Roger Barnsley, who was a visiting scholar at Green College at the time. He was later president of my university, Thompson Rivers University. When it changed from a college to a university, he was the president of that. He was a great guy, too. He went out and just laid into the cops. That was the events of that morning. And then throughout the day, of course, the larger protests happened, the pepper spraying and all that sort of stuff that people saw on TV. But this incident was much earlier than that, was just the sort of first shot across the bow.
“That's a pretty striking kind of experience to have,” I said to Craig. I asked him if he thought that experience played a pivotal role in the path he subsequently followed in life.
“I was lying on the ground with cops on my back,” Craig said, “and appreciating that it was probably an entirely undocumented incident. So I was going to be completely at the mercy of what the police said about it because who's going to believe the little gaggle of protesting students compared to Inspector Dingwall, for heaven's sakes, right? So I really thought that I was in trouble.
I quickly found out that I wasn't. I was already working at a big firm downtown Vancouver, a job that I sort of lucked into through civil liberties work and I thought, well, they're going to run screaming from me, right? But I got a phone call from one of the partners the very next day, said don't you worry at all about this. We're all very proud and don't think you're going to suffer. From a career point of view it did a few things, I think. One, it's you know, what Wilde said there's only one thing worse than being talked about and that's not being talked about. Right? So it focused a lot of attention on me over the next couple of years because then I became president of the Civil Liberties Association and there's an awful lot of media exposure and so for a baby lawyer, for someone just starting out, everybody knew who I was.”
“On the personal level, which I think is sort of what you're more asking about, I was in jail for about 9 hours, I think,. On the global scale of human rights abuses, this doesn't move the needle. But nevertheless there's something about being locked in a cell and knowing that you're completely at the mercy of some frankly kind of arrogant and offhandedly cruel people that just really didn't give a shit. You were just a piece of meat in this machine that was going through and to the extent that you registered on the radar at all, it was just as a bother. That was 9 hours. It very much came home to me that I had to remember that feeling of humiliation and helplessness and vulnerability, which was kind of new to me, because there were people, some of whom arrived later that day with the protests; people who live that every day of their lives.”
“To that extent, I think at moments since when I've had to choose between taking a pro bono case or not taking it and I've had good excuses not to take it and feeling really busy and that kind of stuff. Then I think I've relied on that memory to sort of push me in that direction, maybe for better, maybe for worse. … So from a personal level, that was the effect. And the aftermath of it, while it was very good for my career, I think was very bracing personally. I had just met my wife at the time, we'd just begun dating and so the first couple of years, that was a very uncomfortable level of public profile. Like genuinely for a couple of years I would have, it would be very difficult for me to go out with without someone in the street saying, hey, it's the APEX guy. … CBC did a profile and interviewed my mom and all this stuff, like, it got kind of crazy for a little while. That made me determine that whatever I did do, I wasn't going to go into politics or expose myself or my family on that sort of scale to the extent that I could avoid it.”
Journey to Law
I asked Craig to explain what motivated him to become a lawyer.
“I graduated at Vernon Senior Secondary, back when that's what it was called, in 83.”
“I more or less misspent my 20s playing in bands and served in the military a little bit and did just this and that and here and there took a little bit of post secondary Okanagan College and Malaspina College. When I got serious in my late 20s about wanting to go to law school, I signed on with the Open University, which was at the time in Burnaby. They had a credit bank where they would assess all of your miscellaneous stuff and life experience even in some cases. Then they gave you credits towards a general studies degree. I started taking open university courses to build up to the three years needed to apply to law school and wrote the LSAT and did very well. I applied at UBC Law with three years, essentially, of Open University and got accepted, started law school and then realized that, hey, maybe this credit bank is so loose that they'd actually let me credit back my law school credits toward my undergrad degree.”
“I talked to the Open U person and they said, ‘well, we'd certainly take those and give you credit for them, but then you'd lose credit from UBC.’ So then I went to Liz Edinger, the associate dean at UBC, and she said, ‘no, we don't care, go for it.' That sounds like a great idea.’ So that's what I did. I actually earned my undergraduate degree from Open University in 97 and my law degree in 98. So it looks like I only spent a year in law school.”
“The the TRU connection was that in 2004, I think sometime around that, the University College of the Caribou as it then was, merged with Open University to become Thompson Rivers University. So all the Open University stuff was moved to Kamloops and it's now the center. It's now Open Learning, which is a division of Thompson Rivers University. And so Roger Barnsley, who was by then, [the Green College visiting faculty resident] was by then president of TRU said, if you lose your Open University script, we'll give you a new one saying Thompson Rivers University.”
“So my degree on my wall says Thompson Rivers University. A few years after, I think when I was just back from Harvard, someone from TRU got in touch and said, look, you've been nominated as Distinguished Alumnus at Thompson Rivers University. Would you accept? I said, Well, I'd be honored, but you have to know I've never set foot on your campus. And so they said, no, that's fine. We've got an open learning division. They essentially inherited all of that from Open U. So that's neat.”
“It so important,” I said, “to have the opportunity of choosing one path in life and then having that flexibility and the possibility to make a major change. To have something like the Open University, the possibility of late return to school, is a critically important social asset.”
“I'm a huge believer in that,” Craig said. “My life since would not have been remotely possible without that opportunity. I mean, the Open admissions, the credit bank. When I was accepting my Distinguished Alumnus Award, I said that going to Harvard changed my credentials, but going to Open University changed my life. I was living paycheque to paycheque with credit card debts. I could not afford to just drop my world and go to university at any point in my twenties. Not even with $3,500 law school tuition of those days.
Music and Collectables
All during our zoom conversation I noted Craig’s collection of guitars. He had mentioned his “misspent youth” playing in bands. I had come across a more recent mention of his involvement in a local Kamloops rock band.
“If you don't mind me asking a little bit about the music,” I said. “My understanding from looking at some of the stuff you were doing recently, relatively recently, in Kamloops is kind of folk blues. Is that right or no?”
“I played with a band, they're still going, of middle aged folks it's sort of morphed from roots rock blues focus to more of a general cover band and we’re really popular. We can see, maybe on my wall behind, a plaque for oh yes, Kamloops best band voted. We got that two years in a row.”
“Nice,” I said.
“So yeah, we were good. It was a lot of fun and I'm glad I did it, but I'm kind of glad I'm not doing it anymore. I've got a strange sort of serial obsession. I was diagnosed late in life with Asperger's, with autism.”
“When I look back in life it makes episodes very focused, right? You go, ‘oh, that's why.’ Which has been a fascinating exercise. One of the things I think that it leads to, at least with me is a serial obsession of certain things. So for the time that I was playing music in Kamloops and probably in my twenties, I would think of nothing else. It would be all my spare time running scales and whatnot. Since I retired a year and a half ago, I haven't picked up a guitar except maybe to change its position on the wall. For a while it was wrist watches, right? Like I can tell you everything you need to know about my 2003 Rolex Submariner. But now it sits on the desk and I wear my little Garmin watch because I'm trying to lose some weight and count my steps. … It all seems to sort of happen in those in those phases.”
“If you don't mind me asking about the diagnosis coming later in life. Did it help settle your mind and sort of understand yourself a bit or not?”
“It's been absolutely revelatory. One of the best things I've ever done, I think, was to get it confirmed. I mean, my wife, who's a school teacher, has been telling me ever since we met that she says, you're so spectrumy, you don't even know it, right? But you realize why. You look back on episodes, right? One of the things about Asperger's and autism is that you have extremely low empathy and it's very difficult for you to put yourself in another person's position. Now, when I look back on my relationships, all kinds of relationships over the years, I go, oh, my God, it wasn't them, it was me. Right? And I could probably spend most of the rest of my life just finding people and apologizing to them for how I behaved. But from a law point of view, I think it's probably the reason I've done so well. I don't think I'm that much smarter than your Oxbridge lawyer, but you have an incredible intensity of focus and sort of obsessiveness. And I think the lack of empathy coupled with the organizational abilities of Aspergery people suit a litigator very well, at least to a certain level.”
“If you really wanted to be a super successful partner in a big firm, you have to be able to flip back and forth among many different files. I'm more of a single fold. Yeah. Obsess on it. And then I move on to the next one and I completely forget details of the one that I just finished. It's been one of the very cool revelations of my life. For sure.”
Fabric of the University
The fabric of the university is woven by the actions of people like Craig. He very much didn’t plan on being a student protester arrested and hauled off by the RCMP in 1997. Yet, that moment played a role in crafting a part of UBC’s history and influenced the path he took subsequently. The protest and student arrests occurred in a constrained period of time, the aftermath wound itself out over several years (for example, CBC reporter suspended and then cleared, 1999; Hughes inquiry, 2001;).
Much of what builds a sense of place and community is not plannable, but arise serendipitously out of our actions. Craig’s story is part of a longer history of civil disobedience in society that takes serious ideas of free speech, human rights, and democracy. Universities that fail to support these three ideas, that hide decision making process in secrecy, and invite policing of dissent by exclusion or removal lose the right to call themselves places of learning.
Hewitt, Steve. 2002. Spying 101 : The RCMP's Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997 University of Toronto Press.