Members of the Elections Canada Advisory Board

The Honourable Justice Ian Binnie

Ian Binnie is Counsel with Lenczner Slaght. He is one of Canada's most respected advocates and the second Justice in modern times to be appointed directly from the bar to the Supreme Court of Canada, where he served for nearly 14 years. When he retired in 2011, The Globe and Mail described him as "arguably the country's premier judge" and La Presse as "peut-être le juge le plus influent au Canada dans la dernière décennie."

Mr. Binnie authored more than 170 opinions during his tenure at the Supreme Court of Canada, including on landmark cases on patents, protection of trade-marks, media law, commercial disputes, punitive damages, expert evidence and many aspects of constitutional, criminal and administrative law.

Over the course of his career as a litigator, Mr. Binnie argued cases in most of the common law provinces and appeared regularly before the Supreme Court on a range of constitutional, civil and criminal matters. He has also often taken on public service roles. In the early 1980s he served for four years as Canada's Associate Deputy Minister of Justice. He was later appointed Special Parliamentary Counsel to the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons on the Meech Lake Accord. An elected member of the International Commission of Jurists, he has appeared before the International Court of Justice and various international tribunals on governmental litigation matters, and has acted as the Canadian representative in high-profile disputes involving France and the US.

Mr. Binnie graduated from McGill University in 1960, and went on to study law at Cambridge University (graduating with an LLB in 1963 and an LLM in 1988) and the University of Toronto (LLB in 1965).