Members’ Book 2026

2026 Members Book

Our members’ book for 2026 is Earl Cherniak, In the Courts: A Counsel’s Memoir, published by the University of Toronto Press. As the title suggests, this book is a memoir of one of Ontario’s leading litigators over the last 50 years. Cherniak has been involved in literally thousands of cases, mentored hundreds of young lawyers, and won numerous awards for his professional accomplishments. His high profile cases included, but are by no means limited to, the well-known ‘trilogy’ of Supreme Court judgments which revolutionized personal injury law and the litigation over, and inquiry into, the tainted blood scandal.

First Optional Extra

We will also publish five optional extras in 2026. The first of these is David Berg, There is No Place for Sympathy Here: On Trial in the Belcher Islands, published with McGill-Queens University Press. David Berg is a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice. In the late summer of 1941, the Belcher Islands in Hudson’s Bay were the scene of a series of murder trials that became a cause célèbre in southern Canada. Hardly known to the vast majority of Canadians at the time, and inhabited only by small bands of nomadic Inuit, the murders of nine people and the trials put the Islands on the front pages of many newspapers. The trials brought the full panoply of the Canadian state – an RCMP Inspector, a trial judge from the Ontario Supreme Court, a court reporter, and crown and defence attorneys – to one of the remotest parts of the country. Seven people were tried and all were either acquitted or found guilty only of manslaughter.  As in earlier encounters between the state and Indigenous people reservations about bringing the full force of the law down on people with their own cultural understandings modified its application.

Second Optional Extra

Our second optional extra is Tom Mitchell and Reinhard Kramer, ‘P.S. Burn after Reading’: The Kellock-Taschereau Commission and Soviet Espionage in Canada, published with the University of Toronto Press. In September 1945, Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected to Canada, and revealed that Canadians were spying on their own country. Canada used the Kellock-Taschereau Commission – sometimes appropriately, sometimes inappropriately – to thwart these homegrown agents and defend Canada’s national security. Others have written about the Gouzenko affair, but this deeply-researched account brings forward new and crucial details about the legal proceedings.

Third Optional Extra

Our third optional extra is Ian Radforth, Making a Killing: Murder and Life Insurance in 1890s Ontario, published with the University of Toronto Press. Ian Radforth is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Toronto. In late nineteenth-century Canada, the life insurance industry expanded impressively, offering policyholders a sense of greater security, but insurance fraud accompanied the expansion with murder sometimes being a deadly outcome. Radforth examines six legal cases in 1890s Ontario where the Crown alleged men or women had murdered for the life insurance payouts. This book uses principally legal records and newspaper reports to reconstruct these alleged insurance murders and situate them in their late Victorian context. Together these fascinating cases reveal how insurance fraud emerged as a prominent public concern in Ontario.

Fourth Optional Extra

Our fourth optional extra is Robert Bothwell and Patricia McMahon, In the Shadow of the Manhattan Project: Radium, Larceny, and Secrecy at Eldorado, published with the University of British Columbia Press. Robert Bothwell is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Toronto, and Patricia McMahon is Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. This book recounts a poorly understood chapter of Canadian history and offers a cautionary tale of how secrecy can undermine accountability. During the Second World War, a Canadian company became a crucial supplier of uranium for the Manhattan Project, the program which developed the atomic bomb during World War Two. With uranium came radium. In the name of “national security,” ordinary safeguards were ignored: auditors were excluded, directors were kept uninformed, and public scrutiny disappeared. Focusing on the Eldorado Mining and Refining Company, the book shows how prioritizing secrecy over accountability created the conditions for fraud, environmental contamination, and decades of unanswered questions. It argues that historical transparency and strong institutional memory are essential to protecting public trust and ensuring legal accountability.

At the centre of the story is Eldorado, Canada’s uranium company, and three of its key employees: Carl French, Boris Pregel, and Marcel Pochon. Purporting to operate under wartime secrecy, Eldorado supplied uranium, the key component for the atomic bomb. Radium was a by-product of uranium processing, and even more valuable commercially. Although political authority rested with the powerful wartime minister C.D. Howe, day-to-day operations fell to a trusting company president, Gilbert LaBine, and a small circle of insiders. Weak oversight, immense value, and strict secrecy combined to create the perfect opportunity for multimillion-dollar fraud.

Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the discovery, production, and theft of radium within the broader wartime effort to supply the Manhattan Project with uranium. It shows how radium was diverted and land was contaminated, and explains why these events remained largely hidden for decades. Critically examining criminal investigations, abandoned prosecutions, and a series of civil lawsuits, the book shows how secrecy delayed justice until decades after the war’s end.

Fifth Optional Extra

Our final optional extra for 2026 is Colin Campbell and Robert Raizenne, A History of Canadian Income Tax Volume 3: Tax Reform and the Modern Act, published with the Canadian Tax Foundation. Colin Campbell is Professor of Law at Western University and Robert Raizenne is a partner at Osler’s. This final volume in the history of the emergence and development of the federal income tax in Canada addresses the extended tax reform exercise which produced the Income Tax Act which went into effect on January 1, 1972.  The Carter Commission’s report in 1967 proposed a radical revision of the tax law based on the concept of the comprehensive tax base.  This book analyses the Carter recommendations and their lasting influence.