Willard Estey, the retired Supreme Court justice who was hired by the
federal government in 1997 to review Canada’s grain handling and rail
transportation system, has died at age 82.
In 1998, he recommended numerous changes to the system, most of which
are still hotly debated by industry players and elected officials.
Estey concluded that the Canadian Wheat Board had outlived its
usefulness to farmers and should play a smaller, regulatory role.
He also said the railways should be forced to compete with each other
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for prairie grain, sell rather than abandon branch lines, and pass on
to producers savings from rail line closures and other system changes.
Estey identified 15 areas for change, including replacement of the
current grain transportation rate cap with a revenue cap.
After the government enacted only a portion of his recommendations, he
told a House of Commons committee that the government had made a
“hopeless mess” of his report.
Estey was born in Saskatoon, was a Second World War veteran, Harvard
Law School graduate and former University of Saskatchewan law professor.
He practised law in Ontario from 1947 to 1973 and was appointed to the
Ontario Court of Appeal. He became chief justice of the High Court of
Justice of Ontario in 1975 and chief justice of Ontario in 1976. He was
appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1977, where he presided
until his retirement in 1988.
He died Jan. 24 in Toronto.
