By Andrew Macdonald
At 81, you can say George MacDonald is the dean of the lawyers in Halifax, and the Atlantic region, who practice in commercial and construction litigation.
The Halifax resident has just celebrated a significant milestone: his 50th-anniversary call to the Nova Scotia Barristers Society.
He spent most of his adult life in the trenches at McInnes Cooper in Halifax and now hangs his shingle with Pink Larkin. Both firms have offices in New Brunswick.
MacDonald currently has some litigation files on the go in the Picture Province. Like many Halifax lawyers, he practices across the region.
He was called to the Nova Scotia Bar Society in 1970, the year he graduated from Dalhousie University Law School, and the same year he joined McInnes Cooper.
He also has a 1966 electrical engineering degree from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, now part of Dalhousie.
Question: At 81, is there any sign of retirement?
“I always say my standard reply if asked is, ‘What does retirement mean?’ And people say, ‘That is when you can start doing what you love.’
“And that is what I have been doing for 50-years.”
MacDonald says he is embracing the technological-digital world on his legal files during the pandemic.
Celebrating his 50th year to the call of the NS Bar Society, George MacDonald now heads up a burgeoning construction litigation and mediation team of lawyers at Pink Larkin.
“I have done Zoom calls from here. I do have some disadvantages: I am of an age where I like to see things in black and white; getting access to actual files is difficult”.
Over his lengthy career, he has taught on law files at Dalhousie University and says his “joy is mentoring” new law recruits and younger established lawyers.
MacDonald grew up among six siblings in the shadow of the now-defunct Sydney Steel Mill, in that Cape Breton city’s north end, where his father drew a paycheque.
As a youth, he loved to box and played hockey as a goalie. His teenage ambitions? “To play in the NHL – but I was not drafted,” he chuckles.
In the late 1950s, he went to a school in Saint John, where he learned to become a radio operator – the Morse code. The educational deal meant working for the federal government in the Arctic for a two-year commitment.
That was in 1957, the first time he ever left Cape Breton Island, and the first time he boarded an airplane.
He would later get a scholarship to study at Dal Law School and says his construction litigation practice “is what keeps me going. I enjoy it”.
Question: Is there a book project, a memoir of your 50-year legal career,?
He says people tell him all the time to retire. “People tell me I should sit down and write a book of my life and the career”.
He adds, “It is an interesting thought, it is one of the things I am considering, yes.”
Syd Dumaresq, the multi-generational architect also based in Halifax, is a big fan of MacDonald’s legal work.
“The best tribute I can think of is our belief that if you have to go to court on a construction issue, get George as your lawyer before the other party does, because you know that the party that has George is sure to win,” he said.
Highlights of a 50-year career
My chat with MacDonald was governed by solicitor-client privilege, and he avoided revealing the identies of his current clients, but over the years some files became news headlines.
In the 1990s, MacDonald travelled to Australia on a celebrated legal case that garnered national headlines in this country.
It was the Westminer file, involving a rural Nova Scotia goldmine that an Australian entity bought, only later to discover the property contained no gold.
The Aussie firm later sued in an unsuccessful attempt to get its multi-million dollar acquisition payout to the original mine prospectors back.
“It was a huge case,” MacDonald notes. He represented the original developers of the mine.
“The Australians jumped in and bought something without doing the homework they should have done,” he said.
Ben McCrea as a client
MacDonald had a life long association with one of Halifax’s most prolific office high-rise developers, Ben McCrea.
McCrea grew up in Salisbury, New Brunswick, and would get an engineering degree from UNB.
MacDonald began working with McCrea in 1971, and the lawyer-client relationship lasted until McCrea died at age 73, in 2013.
McCrea would develop many office high-rise buildings in downtown Halifax, sometimes while retaining the facades of heritage buildings.
Heritage buffs in Halifax rejected McCrea’s approach to preserving the city’s built heritage past, labelling his developments as heritage facade-ism reconstruction.
“I thought he was very much a visionary, very much a detailed guy. As a client, he was a great gem. He was a very bright fella”, MacDonald said.
A meaningful hug
“People often ask me, ‘What is the highlight of your career?’” he said.
It came in 1989 when he sat as a commission counsel on the Donald Marshall Jr. Royal Commission.
The late Marshall was a Mi’kmaw from Cape Breton, who was wrongfully convicted of killing a friend in 1971. He spent 11 years in jail before being freed.
“The Marshall Inquiry was just the most incredible experience you could ever imagine,” said MacDonald.
“The commission report said the justice system failed Donald Marshall at every step – and that included the police investigation, the courts and the court of appeal. Everything.”
He said the police repressed evidence that Marshall did not kill his friend – that another man did it.
“In those days, Mi’kmaw did not matter and police did what they wanted with them,” said MacDonald.
At the end of the Royal Commission, Marshall’s mother thanked MacDonald and gave him a hug.
“That was the highlight of my career.”
