Justice of the peace may be removed from office

Richmond Hill's Dianne Ballam engaged in judicial misconduct, review panel finds

Yorkregion.com
July 18, 2022
Jeremy Grimaldi

A justice of the peace from Richmond Hill has been recommended for removed from office after a panel found she committed judicial misconduct.

The Justices of the Peace Review Panel sanctioned Richmond Hill’s Dianne Ballam on June 20 using the most serious disposition available to the panel after finding the complaints by Andrew Locke, director of Crown operations, at the Ministry of the Attorney General, amounted to impropriety.

The complaints were in relation to allegations she represented three clients, one in a criminal case, without a licence to practice or insurance since 1998.

She did all this, according to the panel’s findings while on long-term disability from her judicial office since 2015 after a car crash left her concussed and with ongoing cognitive challenges and physical pain.

The panel found that in doing so she misrepresented her status as a lawyer to those courts.

And finally, the panel found, that she acted improperly by working as a lawyer in front of two judicial colleagues and a superior court justice from the same jurisdiction where she was working as a justice of the peace, namely Central East, Lindsay.

“She ought to have known that acting as a lawyer while a justice of the peace could have given rise to real or perceived conflict of interest,” the decision reads.

In one particular section of the review hearing, the panel found that at one point Ballam ‘alarmingly’ claimed to have acted as a lawyer to ‘test her cognitive capacity’.

The panel also found Ballam’s decision to act as a lawyer while taking strong pain medication as ‘particularly troubling’.

“These actions raise serious concerns about (Ballam’s) integrity and judgment,” the panel found. “(Ballam) failed to uphold the standards of personal conduct and professionalism expected of judicial officers and undermined public confidence in her judicial officer and the administration of justice.”

At her disciplinary hearing, she told the Tribunal she felt ‘terrible’ about her actions, repeatedly maintaining her mistaken belief that she wasn’t ‘doing anything improper’ and her belief she was trying ‘to act within the rules’.

“My lifetime of public service and 26 years of adjudicative work should not be cancelled out by an isolated series of well-intentioned acts over a short period of time while I was on LTIP and on medication that could have affected my judgment without me knowing it,” the hearing heard. The panel found aggravating factors to include that her actions were not isolated and occurred over long periods.

Mitigating factors included that these complaints marked Ballam’s first time before the panel.

“(Ballam’s) admission to some of the underlying conduct continues to be mingled with a continuing effort to deny that her conduct constituted legal services and to minimize her level of responsibility. This is troubling to both the integrity of and public confidence in the judicial system. The Panel concludes that (Ballam’s) failure to acknowledge or understand her misconduct are so manifestly and profoundly destructive of the integrity of the judicial role that no disposition other than removal from office can restore public confidence in the administration of justice.”

The Attorney General is currently reviewing the panel’s recommendation in relation to Ballam, but said it would not be commenting further on the issue at this time.