A disgraced former lawyer spent eight years working as a part-time instructor at Algoma. He is now fighting to regain his law licence, propelling his past into the spotlight
On paper, Myles McLellan seems qualified — maybe even overqualified — to teach in the Law and Justice department of a Canadian post-secondary institution. But the decades of experience he brought to his job at Algoma University also included something else: a criminal fraud conviction and a ban on practicing law in Ontario.
In a ruling released over the summer, a Law Society tribunal decided not to reinstate McLellan’s licence, concluding he “still has not demonstrated the moral fibre to do that which is right, no matter how uncomfortable.” “The optics of an individual — despite the vast array of prosecutions and convictions by the Law Society and the courts for offences of dishonesty — teaching a course on the wrongfully convicted was of deep concern to me,” Broadbent told SooToday. “My concerns were widely shared with faculty and others but Mr. McLellan continued to teach and so I discontinued my association with the university.”
By 2006, McLellan was experiencing financial difficulties with his home, cottage, an inherited residential property, his business premises and an investment retirement home subject to multiple collateral mortgages and principal debts. In 2009, he was disbarred by the Law Society of Ontario in light of serious criminal charges against him. He later served jail time after a 2010 Superior Court conviction for criminal charges of fraud over $5,000, forgery, as well as two counts of uttering forged documents.
The Law Society accepted McLellan’s evidence of a mental illness between the years 2000 and 2004 that he said primarily led to the misappropriation. The panel also found McLellan was not always compliant with his medication and posed a threat of relapse.In 2011, McLellan unsuccessfully appealed the decision to revoke his licence and in 2018 he formally applied to Law Society be reinstated as a lawyer.Fabiano and McLellan shared an office in the university for a time.
When Jackson retired in 2015, McLellan took over the slate of Indigenous courses he had developed over a span of 30 years. "In short, we find still has not demonstrated the moral fibre to do that which is right, no matter how uncomfortable." According to his C.V., McLellan received an advanced postgraduate academic degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2010 and a Ph.D. In Criminology from the University of Ottawa in 2016.
McLellan told SooToday the university was aware of his criminal record and even if it wasn’t, the details and news accounts of his conviction were only a Google search away. Broadbent was particularly concerned after he alleges a student informed him McLellan had used his own legal matters as a case study in his course on the wrongfully convicted.
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