Judicial misconduct denying Mandamus
and Justice Lyster's failure to attend court on Feb 14, 2022 and other problems...
If you prefer to listen I’ll read it for you. How about that for public service?
My letter to the Canadian Judicial Council, July 18, 2024
On December 3, 2021 I attended Court with Justice Lyster presiding and after hearing my argument she deferred her decision until Feb 14, 2022. On that day I attended and the Public Prosecutor was present but Justice Lyster was not. A dereliction of duty.
The judge that was there knew nothing and could find no reason for Lyster's failure to attend and the best that he could do was to suggest we return in two weeks, when Justice Lyster did show up, and when I asked her for an explanation, she responded, "on holiday".
A failure to do her duty according to 80 (c) of the Judges Act.
Unfortunately the decision also very strongly suggests a political bias as David Lametti was the Minister who appointed her as a judge only a year earlier.
Unfortunately Justice Lyster also denied a recusal request regarding a perception of bias which I feel is clear to the reasonably well informed observer, who is a member of the public, and not a member of a Law Society or the Judiciary.
Lyster was the member of the team at LEAF who made a judicial conduct complaint regarding Justice Robin Camp for his comments in court to a woman alleging rape on a bathroom sink but my evidence was of a man alleging corruption by a judge protecting a lawyer committing fraud on a court order and I had the best evidence that any Canadian could provide, the transcript.
Justice Lyster's complete denial of my lived experience as “irrelevant” because I am male, and yet hold a contrary perspective for a woman alleging rape, suggesting that a judge should never question her claim.
I believe that fits the test for judicial misconduct, "Is the conduct alleged so manifestly and profoundly destructive of the concept of the impartiality, integrity and independence of the judicial role, that public confidence would be sufficiently undermined to render the judge incapable of executing the judicial office?"
I know now that her failure to attend was because the Minister of Justice was enforcing the Emergencies Act on that day and my request before the court was for a writ of mandamus on the Minister of Justice, David Lametti; as I presented a documented failure in the rule of law throughout the Canadian legal system, including the Canadian Judicial Council approving of Justice Shaw's conduct, rejecting the transcript to protect a lawyer committing fraud on a court order.
Justice Lyster's decision was delayed several more times until my request for accountability from the Minister of Justice was dismissed as "irrelevant". My evidence included the assertion that the Minister of Justice lied in writing regarding his duties in order to avoid protecting the public and ensuring that the administration was in compliance with the law.
Some of the evidence before the Court included the acceptance of a complaint regarding Lametti to the Parliamentary Ethics Commissioner and the RCMP threatening to "destroy evidence" when I contacted them regarding the false and misleading statements.
There was no dispute regarding the evidence including the failure of the Attorney General of the Province of BC and of Canada to respond to the enforcement procedure of the Charter, the governing constitution of Canada and an unanswered constitutional question on the matter before the court.
The Public Prosecution ended up dropping one of the charges in the public interest. The other charge is waiting at the BC Court of Appeal for evidence deemed to be relevant, to be provided by the Registry, but they have refused to comply with the court order for court audio for over a year.
Part of that request relates to a complaint that I made in 2007 regarding a judge who had the transcript altered subsequent to a complaint to the Canadian Judicial Council and the judicial council claiming they had discretion over their acceptance of all evidence, including the transcript. That a judicial opinion was better than evidence.
How does a Canadian access justice under this regime?
Thank you for accepting my right to make a complaint.
I never got a response. The public’s only “right” in the system. We “may” complain. So I will.
February 6, 2026
Canadian Judicial Council
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0W8
By email: info@cjc-ccm.gc.ca
Re: Outstanding Judicial Conduct Complaint Against Justice Lindsay Lyster (filed July 18, 2024) — Concerns Regarding Independent Decision-Making and Request for Resolution Before Continued Proceedings
Dear Executive Director,
I am writing to request that the Canadian Judicial Council address, as a matter of urgency, the formal judicial conduct complaint I filed against Justice Lindsay Lyster of the BC Supreme Court on July 18, 2024. Over eighteen months have passed since I submitted that complaint, and I have received no acknowledgment, no update, and no indication of any screening, review, or disposition. The Council’s own Procedures for the Review of Complaints or Allegations About Federally Appointed Judges provide at paragraph 12 that “throughout the process, the complainant is kept up to date on the progress of his or her complaint.” Complete silence for eighteen months does not constitute compliance with this procedural obligation.
I raise this matter not simply as an allegation of bias, but as a concern about whether independent judicial decision-making based on the evidence before the court is occurring. As the Supreme Court of Canada established in Valente v. The Queen, [1985] 2 SCR 673, judicial independence must be assessed objectively, from the perspective of a reasonable and informed person. The Council’s mandate to protect judicial independence necessarily includes ensuring that the independence it protects is genuine—that judges are in fact deciding matters on the basis of evidence and law, free from institutional pressures or loyalties that may compromise the quality of adjudication. The evidence I have documented raises serious questions about whether that standard is being met in Justice Lyster’s handling of my proceedings, and the Council’s prolonged silence means those questions remain unexamined.
The concern is illustrated by Justice Lyster’s own decisions. In R. v. Cancela, 2025 BCSC 2008 at paras. 70–71, Justice Lyster held that an RCMP officer had failed to make full and frank disclosure and had exaggerated the strength of the evidence in the Information to Obtain, in a manner that risked misleading the issuing justice. In a subsequent ruling under s. 24(2) of the Charter, she concluded that admitting the resulting evidence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute because “the greater societal interest is to ensure the long-term repute of the administration of justice”: R. v. Cancela, 2025 BCSC 2066 at paras. 37–40. As a consequence, evidence including 222 grams of cocaine and over $78,000 in cash was excluded.
Those decisions demonstrate Justice Lyster’s capacity for rigorous, independent, evidence-based adjudication when Charter rights are engaged. The question the Council must address is why that same rigour was absent in my proceedings, where documentary evidence of ministerial misstatements, judicial dereliction and obstruction of Charter enforcement procedures was dismissed as “irrelevant”. When materially misleading state conduct is subjected to searching scrutiny in one case, but documentary evidence raising serious constitutional and institutional concerns is excluded without engagement in another, this raises a legitimate concern about the consistency and independence of judicial decision-making. That concern falls squarely within the Council’s mandate.
To summarize the structural concern: Justice Lyster was appointed to the BC Supreme Court by David Lametti in 2021. I appeared before her seeking a writ of mandamus to compel that same Minister Lametti to perform his statutory duties under the Department of Justice Act and respond to a properly served Charter enforcement procedure. On December 3, 2021, Justice Lyster heard my application and reserved her decision for delivery on February 14, 2022. On that date, she did not appear in court. The Crown prosecutor was present; another judge attended but had no information about her whereabouts. When she finally appeared weeks later, her only explanation was that she had been “on holiday.” She never addressed the mandamus application in her eventual ruling. At a subsequent recusal hearing on January 11, 2023, Justice Lyster herself acknowledged that “there could be no judge” who could hear my matter impartially, and Crown counsel admitted that my application sought to “put the entire system on trial.” Yet she refused to recuse herself and continued to preside over my proceedings.
The reason this matter is now urgent is that Justice Lyster remains seized of multiple proceedings involving me, including a potential mistrial application and a civil action against a school for colluding with the mother of my children to alter official school records in order to improperly assert sole custody rather than primary care. The civil case concerns the manipulation of official documentation to serve a false narrative, the same species of misconduct that has defined my case from the beginning. In 2006, Justice Shaw preferred perjured testimony over official court transcripts to protect a lawyer who had committed fraud on a court order. Now I must bring evidence of official records being altered before the very judge who termed my documented evidence of this pattern “irrelevant.” The question of whether evidence will be weighed independently, on its merits, is not hypothetical, it is the central issue in every proceeding Justice Lyster is positioned to hear involving me.
I ask the Council to consider what a reasonable, informed member of the public would conclude about the independence of these proceedings, applying the objective test articulated by the Supreme Court of Canada in Committee for Justice and Liberty v. National Energy Board, [1978] 1 SCR 369, where the presiding judge was appointed by the minister whose constitutional violations the litigant seeks to remedy, failed to appear on the day that minister invoked emergency powers, acknowledged that no judge could hear the matter impartially yet refused to recuse herself, applied Charter protections with full rigour in a drug trafficking case (R. v. Cancela, 2025 BCSC 2008) but dismissed documentary evidence of institutional misconduct as “irrelevant,” and is the subject of a formal judicial conduct complaint by the litigant before her that has gone unaddressed for eighteen months. That is not a question about Justice Lyster’s subjective intentions, it is a question about the objective conditions necessary for public confidence in judicial independence, and no informed person viewing the matter realistically and practically would conclude those conditions are met.
Public confidence in the independence of Canada’s judiciary is a matter that extends beyond domestic institutional arrangements. Canada is bound by Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees every person the right to a fair hearing before an independent and impartial tribunal established by law. That commitment exists not because confidence in the judiciary has never been challenged, but precisely because all democratic systems require mechanisms to restore confidence when legitimate concerns arise. The purpose of the Council’s complaints process is to serve as one of those mechanisms, to examine concerns about judicial conduct, to provide transparent resolution, and through that transparency to strengthen rather than diminish public trust in the administration of justice. Eighteen months of silence in response to documented evidence does not restore confidence. It erodes it, and it creates a record of Canada’s failure to provide the institutional accountability that its international commitments require.
I note that Parliament has recently enacted substantial reforms to the judicial conduct process through Bill C-9, motivated in significant part by public concern that the existing system lacked transparency, timeliness, and accountability. The legislative intent was to strengthen public confidence in the complaints process, not to perpetuate the pattern of unresponsiveness that undermined it. The Council has demonstrated that it is capable of acting decisively when it chooses to do so, in Cosgrove v. Canadian Judicial Council, 2007 FCA 103, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the Council’s recommendation to remove a judge whose conduct was incompatible with judicial office. The Council’s treatment of my complaint, eighteen months of complete silence in response to documented evidence of dereliction of duty, structural conflict of interest, and selective application of constitutional protections, is precisely the institutional conduct that Parliament sought to remedy. I respectfully submit that the spirit of those reforms, and the Council’s own demonstrated capacity for decisive action, requires it to act.
I am requesting the following. First, that the Council acknowledge receipt of my July 18, 2024 complaint and provide an immediate update on its status, as required by the Council’s own procedures. Second, that the Council address the complaint on its merits before Justice Lyster continues to preside over any of my proceedings. Third, and most importantly, that the Council take or recommend the minimum step necessary to protect the integrity of these specific proceedings: the assignment of a conflict-free judge to hear the matters in which Justice Lyster is currently seized involving me. This request is not punitive toward Justice Lyster, it is the practical measure required to ensure that the proceedings are conducted before a tribunal whose independence is beyond question, which serves the interests of justice, the public, and the judiciary itself.
The Council’s mandate, as articulated by the Supreme Court of Canada in Moreau-Bérubé v. New Brunswick (Judicial Council), 2002 SCC 11, asks whether judicial conduct is “so manifestly and profoundly destructive of the concept of impartiality, integrity and independence of the judicial role, that public confidence would be sufficiently undermined to render the judge incapable of executing the judicial office.” I have provided documented evidence that bears directly on that standard. The Council’s response has been eighteen months of silence. I am not asking the Council to prejudge the outcome of its assessment, I am asking it to perform the assessment, transparently and within a reasonable time, so that public confidence in the independence of my proceedings can be restored rather than further diminished. That is the Council’s purpose, and the public interest requires it to act.
I look forward to your prompt response.
Yours sincerely,
Trevor Holsworth
bcc: Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, The Honourable Sean Fraser
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia The Honourable Ronald A. Skolrood, Chief Justice
Other Judicial misconduct complaints on my substack
Complaint to Chief Justice of BC Provincial Court
Justice Lyster
Recusal request - Justice Lyster
A further recusal request, along with lots of other goodies
Judge Shaw and the CJC
Some more details on Judge Shaw
The abusive system that is the Canadian Judicial Council
My suggestion for reform of the Judging of judicial misconduct as clearly Judges are not capable of judging themselves. Nobody can be a judge in their own cause. That is a principle of fundamental justice. The citizens of Canada are the acknowledged most legitimate judges of judicial conduct.
Thanks for reading. A similar concept is appropriate for a number of other applications like law societies, police misconduct boards, parliamentarians.
The Jury system is long recognized as a bulwark against tyranny.
Wow, she just didn’t show up, wtf. If a litigant did that there would be consequences.
“It has become increasingly evident that our procedures for dealing with serious judicial conduct complaints are outmoded, slow, and opaque. Furthermore, while Canadians expect transparency and accountability, we continue to operate under 1970s models of judicial administration.” - The Chief Justice Himself.
Also from the Chief Justice, “We must remember that confidence in our justice system relies not only on justice being done, but also on justice being seen to be done. To me, this means that we must take concerns that are raised by litigants and other members of civil society about transparency, privacy and procedural fairness seriously,” Is any Judicial body in the Justice System really taking "concerns that are raised by litigants ...seriously?"
The Chief Justice again, "We can take pride in our judicial system, and how it serves Canadians with fairness and impartiality,”
"Judges have judicial immunity and bear no liability for their judicial errors" - Why?
The "COA" also affirmed the test for establishing a reasonable apprehension of bias, saying, “that the seemingly gratuitous statement of the Trial Judge concerning the appellant's credibility before the conclusion of the trial was not appropriate and raised a serious issue regarding the Trial Judge's impartiality” Accordingly, a new trial was ordered.” However not in my case - why?
Is it any wonder that the Canadian Justice System has become: "A nightmare of bias, incompetence, and unchecked power and the judicial system has no one to blame for this but themselves". “Our justice system is self-destructing before our eyes because too many lawyers, judges and elected or appointed government officials place their profession, friends, and profits before the rule of law.”
"The legal system in Canada has let down its users, the communities it serves, and its own values of fairness and equality. So many people now experience the courts or lawyers or the law as a club that excludes them, a tight clique that always looks down on them as “outsiders”, and will never see them as equals or peers."
Why do these officials do what they do - The short answer is that only people who try to hide their actions are those who know their actions are wrong or shameful. In this case the Crown does not want the Public to know."
"My hypothesis is that people were more willing to accept the notion 35 years ago that courthouses were places where justice was done. Today, people are more likely to look at them as places where injustice will be done" - Canadian Constitution Foundation.