Date: September 23, 2024

Time: 7:00 p.m.

Location: Microsoft Teams Link (Note: the link will be shared with all registrants prior to the event.)

Panelists: Christine E. Hart ('70), Payton Wood ('18) and Katie Mowat ('21)

Please join Christine E. Hart ('70), Payton Wood ('18) and Katie Mowat ('21) as they chat with Executive Director, Alumni Relations Oonagh Proudfoot (’93, ’06) on Monday, September 23, 2024 at 7 p.m. AT. They will discuss their paths to becoming lawyers and detail the strategies and efforts that led to their success.

Register HERE.

Bio:

Christine E. Hart (’70)

Christine Hart, President of Accord/hart & associates inc. (A...HA!), has practiced for 45 years in the field of dispute resolution - as a mediator, facilitator, negotiator, adjudicator, arbitrator, legislator and litigator. After successfully leading the first court-connected mediation project in Canada, Christine went on to develop a comprehensive conflict management practice, first as a partner of KPMG, and later as founder of A…HA! Her consulting practice has included coaching executives in negotiation techniques, designing employee and customer complaint processes, fact finding in workplace harassment cases, mediating commercial, governance and technology issues, facilitating hospital restructuring, and arbitrating securities and transportation issues.

Christine has been a member of not-for-profit boards for the past 45 years, including The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the General Insurance OmbudService. Her previous governance roles include 10 years as a Director of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), a not-for-profit corporation that operates as a public company because it issues public debt. Other not-for-profit corporations on whose boards Christine has served include Kingsway College School, Sheridan College, the Ontario Bar Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation, the Canadian Stage Company and the CNIB Library Board. She is a past member of the Ontario Cabinet as Minister of Culture and Communications, and was a member of the Senior Management Committees of four different Ontario ministries: Finance, Environment, Health, and Culture and Communications. She is also a past member of the Ontario Bar Association’s Executive Committee and a past chair of the OBA’s ADR Section.

Christine has been a lawyer since 1975, practicing in the area of commercial, environmental and transportation litigation until the early 1990s, when she became one of Ontario's pioneers in Alternative Dispute Resolution. In 1994, she was asked by the Chief Justice of the Superior Court and the Attorney General to lead the pilot project in mediation for the Court. Mediation is now part of all litigation in the Supreme Court, a change which has been called "one of the most significant in the last 100 years." She also established and managed the first year of implementation of the Investment Dealers Association Arbitration Program for disputes between dealers and their clients in Ontario.

Christine holds designations in law (Ontario and N.S.), mediation, dispute systems design, facilitation, fact-finding, and partnering in complex business arrangements. In 2005 she graduated and became an accredited Corporate Director through the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business and the Institute of Corporate Directors. She is the co-author of Bypass Court: A Dispute Resolution Handbook (Lexisnexis Canada, 5 th ed., 2015). Christine has for more than 10 years acted as a mediation instructor for the National Judicial Institute, training newly appointed judges.

Bio:

Payton Wood (’18)

Payton is originally from Brantford, Ontario. She is proud to be the second generation in her family to graduate from Acadia, receiving her Bachelor of Business Administration in 2018. During her time at Acadia, Payton was involved with Acadia’s Sensory Motor Instructional Leadership Experience (S.M.I.L.E.) program and had the opportunity to help establish the Acadia Students’ Union Food Cupboard – the first student-run emergency food resource on Acadia’s campus.

After graduating from Acadia, Payton attended the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, where she received her Juris Doctor in 2021. Deciding to put down permanent roots in Nova Scotia, she now works as a lawyer at the law firm of McInnes Cooper in Halifax. Payton primarily practices in real property, assisting clients with residential and commercial transactions, commercial financing and condominium matters. She regularly acts for clients on acquisitions and dispositions, commercial leasing, land use planning matters, and both borrower and lender side secured financing transactions.

Payton also has experience assisting developers and investors navigate the condominium registration process. Payton understands the complexities of navigating the real estate market in an ever-changing landscape and is happy to work with her clients to create unique solutions that fit their needs. Payton is a member of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society and the Real Estate Lawyers Association of Nova Scotia.

She currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Acadia Alumni Association as Chair of the Governance Committee and a member of the Executive Committee. She is also a volunteer ski instructor with Canadian Adaptive Snowsports. In her free time, Payton can be found running, cycling, and forever cheering for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Bio:

Katie Mowat (’21)

Katie Mowat has been deeply passionate about politics for the majority of her life. When she was in Grade 7, she worked at the Ontario Legislature as a Legislative Page and has volunteered in more than nine elections at all three levels of government. Mowat was on her high school’s Arts Student Committee, Social Issues Awareness Student Committee, a music mentor to junior music students, and a student ambassador. She organized the Student Mayoralty Vote and the White Ribbon Campaign, and in her final year was a Co-Music Director for the Jazz band, for which she won the Performance Character Award upon graduation. She has been a leader in the jazz and music community in Toronto and has performed in various Toronto music venues, including Roy Thomson Hall, the Old Mill Toronto Jazz Lounge, the Jazz Bistro, the Rex Hotel Jazz and Blues Bar, and the Emmet Ray Whisky Jazz Bar playing saxophone. She is also a classical and jazz pianist, while also dabbling as a guitarist, bassist, and drummer. She is a successful music producer and ghostwriter. She has written songs for notable recording and performing music artists of various music genres. Many of the songs she has ghostwritten have been regularly played on the radio in Canada and worldwide, been nominated for a Grammy Award, performed by her clients in small music venues and big stadiums, and even on The Tonight Show.

Mowat is a graduate of Acadia University with a degree in politics, specializing in international relations, comparative politics, and international security. She was on the executive team of the Acadia Politics Students’ Association (APSA), a saxophonist in the Acadia (Jazz) Big Band, and participated in numerous initiatives that aimed to bring Acadia together with the Glooscap First Nation community. She was hired to lead the Junior and Senior Jazz bands at Horton High School in Wolfville, which included arranging music, leading rehearsals and sectionals, organizing and leading music clinics, conducting, providing extra playing and theory tutoring, and prepping the jazz bands for adjudication at the Annapolis Valley Music Festival. Mowat took all the law courses offered by the politics department at the time, sparking her interest in expanding her political knowledge base.

After graduation, Mowat moved to Scotland to complete her MSc in Global Crime, Justice, and Security at the University of Edinburgh. She became well-versed through her coursework and independent research in anti-terrorism policy and Middle East conflict. Her thesis focused on the impacts of COVID-19 on migrant workers’ security in Canada. In particular, she utilized Agamben’s rereading of Foucault’s biopower and biopolitics, international human rights law, and Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to analyze how and why the Canadian government's COVID-19 policy responses resulted in migrant insecurity. Mowat identified the need for the government to actively take on a human rights- based approach to their policymaking and, more specifically, that migrant rights should be elevated and built into border, migration, labour, and economic policies that are legitimately grounded in social justice and human rights. She was a member of the Editorial Team for The Contemporary Challenges: The Global Crime, Justice, and Security Journal, a member of the Edinburgh University Ladies’ Golf Club and varsity team, a member of the Jazz Society, and was the Program Representative for her master’s program.

Mowat took time off to work before returning to the University of Edinburgh to complete her next master’s degree, an LLM in International Human Rights Law. During this degree, she immersed herself in a wide range of legal areas including, but not limited to, International Criminal Law, EU Immigration and Asylum Law, International Migration and Refugee Law, Human Rights and Conflict Resolution during intra-state conflict, Human Rights Law and Armed Conflict, and International Humanitarian Law. She completed her thesis on Canada’s use of public interest immunity claims in terrorism prosecutions and provided best-practice recommendations for safeguarding the right to a fair trial. She is one of a small number of academic scholars working on this topic as it relates to criminal rather than civil prosecutions. She was once again the Program Representative of her master’s program.

Mowat is currently a law student at the University of York in England. Her approach to a law career is somewhat unorthodox, but Mowat considers this a strength because of the broader range of opportunities and education she was afforded in the process. She hopes to eventually become a practicing lawyer specializing in international law and human rights.