For labour lawyer Fred Hamilton, the goal of negotiation was compromise - not wars of attrition - where everyone could leave the table feeling that something worthwhile had been accomplished.Courtesy of the Family
For Fred Hamilton, discretion, creativity and integrity were watchwords over a path-breaking career in labour law that spanned over 60 years. You would not find his name in the headlines, or in the body of news stories because he believed that his clients should take centre stage.
“One of Fred’s rules was ‘don’t be a showboater,’” said Craig Rix, the managing partner of Hicks Morley Hamilton Stewart Storie LLP, the law firm Mr. Hamilton helped found in Toronto in 1972.
It was a rule that helped the firm, which specializes in representing management in both the public and private sectors, attract and keep over 1,000 clients over the years. So, said Mr. Rix, were the rules to work hard, work smart and listen to what other sides had to say, rather than dismiss them out of hand. The goal was compromise, not wars of attrition, he continued, where everyone could leave the table feeling that something worthwhile had been accomplished.
The founding partners set the tone from the get-go, where, to avert an upstairs-downstairs dynamic, all the lawyers, no matter their status, had offices with the same-sized dimensions. Mr. Hamilton also made it a point to know every staff member’s name, and the names of their partners and children, too.
“It was entirely consistent with his philosophy that we’re all in this together,” Mr. Rix said. “And it is an approach to staff that has been imprinted on all of us.”
Mr. Hamilton died on Sept. 2 in a hospital in Southampton, on the shores of Lake Huron, from complications with bacterial pneumonia. He was 90 years old, a bespectacled husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather who was interested in the goings-on at the law firm and in his family members’ lives right to the end.
Although Mr. Hamilton made it a point to never speak of cases or clients, occasionally a glimmer of the past shone through, such as the time he was packing up his office in preparation for retirement and called in Mr. Rix. The younger man found him holding a file that contained a sheaf of papers that were the original draft for Ontario’s 1975 Colleges Collective Bargaining Act, the main components of which are still in effect today.
Back then, Thomas Wells, the Conservative education minister at the time, had reached out to the firm on a Friday to ask for legislation to not only set up the framework for collective bargaining in that sphere, but have it ready to be presented in the provincial legislature on the Monday.
“Fred told me they had the weekend to pull it together,” Mr. Rix recalled. “That accomplishment was just the tip of the iceberg.”
Stephen Wahl, a labour lawyer now retired from Koskie Minsky LLP, noted that Mr. Hamilton was a tough negotiator who pushed his adversaries to their limits and “ably advised his loyal clients how to avoid, evade and/or defeat unions.”
One of his sons, Doug Hamilton, an Olympic rower who is now the chair of the Niagara 2022 Canada Games, recalled being disheartened at the end of one season because he had an injury that would not go away and was wondering whether or not he should quit. When he asked his father for advice, the older man listened but did not say much.
The next day, when the son opened his journal, taped into it was a quote by Theodore Roosevelt that his father was fond of. It read: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
In the end, Mr. Hamilton quietly guided the way and let his son learn the lesson – and make the decision on his own.
Frederick Gladstone Hamilton was born in Toronto on Oct. 6, 1931, the youngest of Frederick and Ruth (née Cormack) Hamilton’s three children. His father was a well-known athlete turned baseball team manager, city alderman and controller who remained passionate about the development and maintenance of parks, sports facilities and playgrounds for young people. In his memory, a 1.6-hectare playground on Roxton Road, near the junction of Ossington and College Streets, bears his name.
Young Fred’s mother died suddenly when he was 10 (following a surgical complication), and his father died when he 26 – losses that spurred him, no matter his workload, to be a present, engaged parent to his four children throughout their lives.
Educated at Upper Canada College, Mr. Hamilton graduated from the University of Toronto in 1954 with an Honours Engineering Business degree, then attended Osgoode Hall for law. He was called to the bar in 1958, a career choice he told a 1986 edition of Business Journal that he could not clearly explain, save that “in engineering, you’re working towards a finite answer [while] in law, there are infinite solutions.”
Mr. Hamilton loved the challenge of “infinite solutions,” of finding creative compromise in a field such as labour law, which, when he began, was in a stage of rapid development.
Over the years, he was dedicated to causes such as Bikes for Tykes, an event that, between 2000 and 2018, raised funds for children’s charities through a team spinning competition in which stationary bicycles would be set up once a year in the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Centre, where the law firm had offices. There he would be, front and centre, broadly smiling, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a name tag that read, ‘Hi, my name is Fred.’
Said Mr. Rix: “Fred’s superpower was being a problem solver. When this firm was created in 1972, Fred and the other founding partners realized that the work we do revolved around relationships, not transactions. Their mission was to learn their clients’ business, but they wanted to create long-standing relationships.
“True to form,” he continued, “the firm’s very first client, which I won’t name [because of confidentiality] is still a client today.”
Mr. Hamilton leaves his wife of 66 years, Joan (née Turnbull) Hamilton, whom he met when he was doing his engineering degree and she was studying nursing; their children, Doug, Marni and Beth Hamilton, and Paula Beaton; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.