From Hamilton to Haiti: What led retired Superior Court judge Jim Turnbull to a law career and building schools overseas

When Jim Turnbull first visited Haiti in August 1989, the amount of poverty and despair he witnessed was overwhelming.

The first day he was shocked; then he got mad. How did the world allow this to happen?

You sort of think, what difference can I make?" he recalls.

Unsure of what to do, he spoke with a missionary who had been working in Haiti for 25 years. The man gave Turnbull his motto for life.

He said Jim, it took 200 years for this country to decline into its present state. There's no easy or quick fix, and he said, what you've got to do is understand this: inch by inch life's a cinch, yard by yard life is hard."

Come back and help just one family and then maybe come back again and help another. And that's exactly what he did.

Turnbull founded Joy and Hope of Haiti, which has built 27 Christian schools in the north of the Caribbean country in the years since that first visit. He's probably been to Haiti 60 times, although he's lost count.

Back on that first trip, Turnbull was a lawyer practising in Hamilton. In 2005, he was appointed as a judge to the Superior Court of Justice, where he served until his retirement this May. For a time, he served as the regional senior judge overseeing all Superior Court judges in the south central region.

The same guiding principle that led him to Haiti is what led him to a career in law: the desire to help people.

His Christian faith is his compass, he says.

Turnbull grew up in Hamilton and graduated from Westdale, before studying at McMaster and Queen's universities.

At Queen's, he excelled at football and was coached by legendary coach Frank Tindall. In 1970, he was drafted by the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Turnbull recalls going to Tindall for advice and getting an honest opinion: Turnbull wasn't big enough, fast enough or good enough to play professionally.

He said to me, Jim for three years, you've been talking that you wanted to go and see the world, do it, you're never going to get another chance," Turnbull recalls.

So in September 1970, before becoming a lawyer and marrying his wife, Joan, Turnbull left on a year-long trip around the world.

Turnbull hitchhiked across Canada and then flew from Vancouver, B.C. to Hawaii. Then he went to Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar), which had only recently opened its border, and Calcutta, India. For much of that he hitchhiked. He rode on the back of a cement truck to Kathmandu to see Mt. Everest.

I probably learned more in that one year of travel than I did in six years at university," he says.

When Turnbull returned home, he began his law career in Hamilton, practising civil and criminal litigation. In 1982, he joined Mackesy Smye LLP, where he eventually became partner. For most of his law career he focused on civil litigation, doing everything from personal injury to commercial cases to estate cases.

As a lawyer and judge, Turnbull had a reputation for dedication.

He's usually the quickest guy in the room," says Hamilton lawyer Peter Boushy. You won't find anyone speaking remotely negatively about him and that's a difficult thing in this profession."

Boushy knows Turnbull from court, but also personally through LeaderImpact, a Christian men's group founded by Canadian hockey great Paul Henderson. Turnbull was asked to lead the Hamilton group, which Boushy joined.

Boushy now serves as the director of the board for Joy and Hope of Haiti.

I've learned a lot from him about putting your faith into action," Boushy said.

It was through LeaderImpact that Turnbull first decided to go to Haiti in 1989. He and the group of about eight men were looking for somewhere to travel where they could help.

Turnbull's grandparents were missionaries in Haiti, but he didn't know them well and had never really considered going there. But before he began the search, his mom had shared a National Geographic article about Haiti that got him thinking about the plight of people in that country where there is unstable government, a lack of jobs and infrastructure and extreme poverty.

Turnbull ran into a woman he knew who worked with a mission organization. What were the chances of getting a group into a place like Haiti? She asked when they wanted to leave.

By 1990, his wife Joan travelled with him and has continued to return year after year through Joy of Hope, where she is also a founding member of the board of directors. Both of their adult children have been to Haiti. Perhaps his granddaughter will go one day too, Turnbull says.

All 27 schools built by the organization are in the north of Haiti around Cape Haitian, which has been spared in the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and this year. Ten of the schools have stable funding, the others operate on a shoestring," Turnbull says.

The schools are built in communities where local pastors have graduated from seminaries through the Christian missionary organization One Mission Society. Turnbull stressed the importance of partnering with locals.

In Haiti about 50 per cent of children do not go to school because it's not publicly funded. Teachers are not paid and often stop working. The Joy of Hope schools are run by local partners and the communities where the schools are located share some of the costs. But the need is great and their local partners always find a way to find a space for children.

The hardest thing about going is not being able to help everyone, Turnbull says. Seeing children running around with clear signs of malnutrition. Turnbull has had mothers beg them to bring their babies back to Canada.

In 2007 Turnbull's two worlds collided when the National Judicial Institute in Canada considered working with the judiciary in Haiti. Turnbull believed they could help the justice system in Haiti, including a possible mentorship program for Haitian judges and training. But it never went anywhere.

That weeklong trip was different than others. He was in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, where it's much more dangerous than Cape Haitian. The risk for Turnbull to be targeted for kidnapping was real, so he had a security team with him.

Most memorable was a lunch he had with the country's chief drug prosecutor, a young lawyer, who travelled with a heavily armed security team and said he had to sleep in a different place each night. Haiti doesn't have an air force and it's an easy drop spot for drugs being flown in from South America.

The prosecutor told Turnbull about one time where they caught those transporting drugs, but when it came time for trial the drugs had disappeared from police evidence.

It gave me just a further eye-opening as to just how difficult things are," Turnbull says.

Yet despite the corruption and suffering, there is also joy, especially with the children who are so excited to go to school.

Some of the children who have gone to the schools they built have gone on to medical school, or to become architects; others have gone to vocational schools or trade schools to become carpenters and mechanics.

Turnbull's last trip to Haiti was January 2020 and he hopes to return in January 2022.

His retirement at the end of May was mandatory, because Superior Court judges have to retire when they reach 75, something Turnbull supports.

On the day he moved out of his court offices, the moving truck brought his things straight back to his old law firm Mackesy Smye where he's been doing mediation and arbitration between trips to a cottage, spending time with family and regular exercise.

One of the things Turnbull wants to do in retirement is write 20 short stories about the things he's seen in court over the years, from the electric silence in a courtroom as everyone is waiting to hear a jury's verdict, to the absurd.

Turnbull says he doesn't want to publish these short stories, just share them with family to understand both the importance and weight of what happens in court.

When I became a judge, it quickly hit me. You know, when you're sitting in court getting ready to sentence somebody and then you look on one side of the court and there is the victim and the victim's family and relatives and friends, and then over here, the accused person's family and relatives and friends," he says.

If only we all would learn that every action has a consequence. There are ripple effects ... some actions cause ripples of waves and they cause so much harm and hurt."

It's that same mix of outrage, empathy and a desire to help that continues to draw Turnbull to Haiti.

If two people boarded planes, one bound for Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the other for Victoria, B.C., from Toronto at the same time, the flight to Haiti would land first.

That's how close those 11 million people are to Canada," he says. And look at the conditions they live in, it's appalling."

To learn more about Joy and Hope of Haiti, visit joyandhopeofhaiti.com, email joyandhopeofhaiti@gmail.com or call 905-577-5482.

Nicole O'Reilly is a Hamilton-based reporter covering crime and justice for The Spectator. Reach her via email: noreilly@thespec.com