Twenty-nine years ago this week, on Sept. 26, 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on a question it had never before been asked: could a Black judge speak about racism in policing from the bench without being biased? The judge was Corrine Sparks of Nova Scotia, the first Black woman appointed to the bench anywhere in Canada. The answer the court gave was split, and the way it split still says a great deal about how Canadian law has learned, slowly, to see race.
A judge from Lake Loon
Sparks grew up in Lake Loon, outside Halifax, in what Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law describes as a historically racially segregated community. According to the law school, she is a descendant of Black Loyalists and Black Refugees and the eldest of nine children. When she entered Dalhousie’s law program, she was one of only three African Nova Scotians in a class of 120, and the only Black woman. She graduated in 1979.
On March 27, 1987, she was appointed to the Family Court in Halifax, becoming the first African Nova Scotian judge and the first Black woman to serve on the judiciary in Canada. In 2001, the law school notes, she completed a master of laws thesis on reparations for the residents of Africville.
A bicycle, a chokehold, a youth court
The case that carried her name to Ottawa began on Oct. 17, 1993, on a Halifax street. As summarized in the Supreme Court record and in legal historian Constance Backhouse’s 2022 book Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case, a white police officer was arresting a Black teenager when the boy’s 15-year-old cousin rode up on his bicycle and asked whether he could call his cousin’s mother. The officer put the 15-year-old in a chokehold and charged him with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. Court records identify him only by the initials R.D.S., and this article does not name him.
At trial in youth court, the evidence came down to two accounts: the officer’s and the youth’s. Sparks found that the Crown had not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt and acquitted him. In her oral reasons she added context. Police officers, she said, “do overreact, particularly when they are dealing with non-white groups,” and she referred to “a prevalent attitude of the day,” according to the passage reproduced in the Supreme Court’s decision.
Backhouse’s research, as reported by the Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine in 2025, found something unusual about that courtroom: every figure of authority in it, including the judge, defence counsel, court reporter and sheriff, was Black.
Tried for naming what she saw
The Crown appealed, arguing that Sparks’ remarks raised a reasonable apprehension of bias against the officer. The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal agreed and overturned the acquittal. A Black judge’s acknowledgement of racism in policing had been treated as a sign she could not judge fairly.
The Supreme Court restored the acquittal in R. v. S. (R.D.), [1997] 3 S.C.R. 484, but the nine justices were divided three ways. Justices Claire L’Heureux-Dubé and Beverley McLachlin wrote that a reasonable, informed person aware of the history of racism in the community would not see bias in Sparks’ comments. Justice Peter Cory, joined by Justice Frank Iacobucci, agreed the acquittal should stand but was critical of the remarks. The three dissenters went further: Justice John Major, writing for himself, Chief Justice Antonio Lamer and Justice John Sopinka, objected to what he saw as a generalization about police made without specific evidence.
Counted one way, the vote was 6-3 in her favour. Counted another, five of nine justices criticized a Black judge for mentioning racism. Backhouse’s publisher, the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, calls it “Canada’s most momentous race case,” and notes that the comments were heavily criticized on the basis of legal traditions that ignored racism in the justice system. According to the National Magazine’s account of Backhouse’s book, Sparks’ career suffered significantly afterward, even as she became a symbol of courage to many people concerned with fairness in the courts.
From rebuke to recognition
What makes the case matter today is how far appellate courts have moved since. This article is not claiming that later rulings rest on R.D.S.; the connection drawn here is an analysis of the direction of the law.
In 2019, in R. v. Le, a 3-2 Supreme Court majority held that a racialized person’s experience of policing is relevant to deciding whether police have detained them, according to the court’s case summary. In 2021, in R. v. Morris, 2021 ONCA 680, the Ontario Court of Appeal opened its reasons by stating that “it is beyond doubt” that anti-Black racism continues to be a reality in Canadian society, as quoted in analyses by York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Toronto’s Asper Centre. The court held that judges may take judicial notice of anti-Black racism, and that a Black offender need not prove a direct causal link between that racism and the offence for it to bear on sentencing.
That same year, in Sparks’ home province, a five-judge panel of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal ruled in R. v. Anderson, 2021 NSCA 62. Writing for the court, Justice Anne Derrick held that impact of race and culture assessments, reports that document anti-Black racism and its effects on an African Nova Scotian offender’s life, are credible and relevant to sentencing, and that ignoring such evidence may amount to an error of law, according to analyses published by Osgoode Hall and the Dalhousie Law Journal.
Set side by side, the distance is striking. In the 1990s, a Black judge’s passing reference to police overreaction toward non-white youth was enough to carry a youth court acquittal all the way to the country’s highest court on an allegation of bias. By 2021, two provincial appeal courts were telling judges that failing to engage with the realities of anti-Black racism could itself be the legal mistake.
The recognition that came later
Dalhousie’s Black Law Students’ Association created the Judge Corrine Sparks Award in 2007, and in 2020 the law school gave her its Weldon Award for Unselfish Public Service. Those honours are part of the record too. So is the fact that the question she was forced to answer in 1997, whether seeing racism disqualifies a judge, was put to the first Black woman ever to sit on a Canadian bench.
If you find reporting like this useful, consider supporting Canada News Media, an independent Canadian newsroom with no corporate parent.
Sources: R. v. S. (R.D.), [1997] 3 S.C.R. 484; Supreme Court of Canada, Case in Brief, R. v. Le (2019); Constance Backhouse, Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case (Osgoode Society/UBC Press, 2022); CBA National Magazine (Aug. 20, 2025); Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law (2020); Osgoode Hall Law School, TheCourt.ca (2022); Asper Centre, University of Toronto; Dalhousie Law Journal blog (2021); Slaw (2020). Photo: Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, by Wikimedia Commons user “Dig deeper,” CC BY 4.0.
