Our country’s long‑term stability will hinge on how we support these often-overlooked legal teams
When we talk about how Canada will navigate an era of geopolitical shocks, fragile supply chains, climate pressure and polarized politics, we tend to picture our political leaders calling on CEOs, entrepreneurs and corporate deal-makers to help build resilience.
But in conversations for Lexpert InHouse, I’ve been struck by how many of the people quietly holding the system together sit inside public-sector or public-mandate institutions. They are lawyers whose job descriptions rarely make headlines: designing procurement frameworks, stewarding worker capital, regulating energy markets, modernizing tribunals, and structuring government-backed investments.
If Canada is going to shine in an uncertain world, these public-interest lawyers will be as important as any private-sector rainmaker. Our resilience depends on whether we let them do their work in innovative and efficient ways, while remaining anchored in the public interest.
No one embodies this better than Rosslyn Young at Supply Ontario. Today, as chief supply chain officer and general counsel, she helps centralize and professionalize purchasing for the broader public sector.
What’s striking is not just the complexity of the rules Young must navigate – bidding contracts, trade treaties, overlapping statutes – but how consistently she pushes against a purely process-driven mindset. The real risk in public procurement, she argues, is not that a document is imperfect; it is that hospitals, schools and agencies fail to get the goods and services they need, when they need them.
In Quebec, Natalie Brown at Fonds de solidarité FTQ leads a 40-lawyer team at a worker-sponsored fund with roughly $23 billion under management. She runs legal operations with a businesslike mindset: off-the-shelf tools, internal dashboards and a “flywheel” model that ties people, service quality and internal reputation together, so scarce legal capacity is focused where it adds the most value.
The energy transition is another area where public-interest lawyers sit at the centre of the action. When I spoke with Louis Legault at Quebec’s Régie de l’énergie, he was the head of legal for the tribunal that regulates the province’s energy sector, after years at Hydro-Québec. The Régie’s decisions on rates, infrastructure and market structure will determine whether Quebec can maintain reliable, affordable power while meeting decarbonization goals, even as new demands from electrification and data centres strain capacity.
Resilience also depends on the rules that shape investment and the less visible parts of the justice system. Yasmin Shaker at Invest Ontario sits on a $700-million provincial investment fund, embedding trade-law experience into how Ontario structures government-backed investments. ESG principles that have become hard law are incorporated directly into Invest Ontario agreements, ensuring capital flows align with long-term policy goals.
Meanwhile, Harry Gousopoulos at Tribunals Ontario is focused on administrative justice resilience. After early years at Torys and the United Nations, he has helped shift regulators toward outcomes-based approaches and is now driving modernization and digital transformation to reduce tribunal backlogs. For many people and businesses, tribunals are the face of the justice system. If they cannot resolve disputes in a timely, fair way, trust in institutions erodes – with economic as well as social consequences.
Talk to any of these lawyers, and you hear a common theme: they are motivated by public service. They choose roles where they can see the impact of their work on citizens, workers, communities and the broader economy. When public-interest lawyering works, nothing dramatic happens: the shelves are stocked, the lights stay on, investments close, and hearings proceed.
If Canada is to grow stronger through waves of uncertainty, we need to see these lawyers clearly – and give their institutions the tools, talent and political backing to do their jobs. The private sector will remain a vital player. But without innovative, efficient public-interest legal teams in the background, even the best private-sector strategies will be building on sand.
