Daniel is a criminal defence lawyer practicing in Vancouver and Edmonton. He conducts serious and complex criminal trials, regularly litigating the boundaries of civil liberties protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He has challenged the Director of Civil Forfeiture in the longest running forfeiture action in BC. And he was counsel in proceedings arising from the largest money laundering investigation in British Columbia’s history, which was a catalyst for the Cullen Commission.
He has extensive experience as criminal appellate counsel in the Alberta Court of Appeal and British Columbia Court of Appeal. He has also acted for litigants at the Supreme Court of Canada more than twenty times.
Daniel is an adjunct professor at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law teaching “Legal Rights under the Charter.” He has made many contributions to the legal community, including authoring papers and lecturing on the law of search and seizure for lawyers, police officers, and judges.
Daniel was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2022, and he was inducted as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers in 2024.
Haran is the CTO and in-house counsel for a Vancouver- based legal technology company. In previous careers he was a criminal defence lawyer and a software developer.
His role as defence counsel introduced him to seeking justice and protecting rights on an individual client level. He expanded that interest to include more systemic actions including being a founding member for both the campaign for collective bargaining rights of Legal Aid Ontario lawyers and Comdu.it, a volunteer network dedicated to sustainable development in war-affected regions of Sri Lanka. He has previously served on the Boards of the BCCLA, the Elizabeth Fry Society of Greater Vancouver, and as a steering committee member for the Law Union of BC.
His interests focus on criminal law reform, privacy, and algorithmic accountability – particularly in how these intersect with Indigenous and racialized communities.
Hasan (he/him) is a Staff Lawyer at the BC General Employees’ Union, where he practices Labour and Human Rights Law and advocates on behalf of workers. He is also the Supervising Lawyer for the Archway Migrant Worker and Poverty Law Clinics.
Hasan serves as the Advisory Director (past president 2021/2022) for the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers of BC, a diverse coalition of legal professionals that work to promote greater equity, justice, and opportunity for the Asian community.
He also serves as the Community Liaison for the Islamophobia Legal Assistance Hotline, a free service he helped co-found which provides free and confidential legal advice to anyone that has been discriminated against because they are Muslim or are perceived to be Muslim.
Joanna Joniec is a governance and risk management professional with a strong regulatory compliance and enforcement background. She works with companies navigating dynamic risk and emerging regulation and specializes in building cultures and systems that earn the confidence of investors and stakeholders.
She moved to Toronto in 2022. Joanna grew up in Vancouver and had a diverse career as an accountant and fraud examiner. Previously, she and her family lived in the Yukon, where she worked for the Yukon Government. She also served on the Boards of CPA-Yukon and the Yukon Housing Corporation.
Joanna’s family came to Vancouver from Poland as refugees in 1987, a couple of years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a result of this experience, she understands the fragility of human rights and civil society and is committed to supporting the work of the BCCLA
Joseph Pallant is a climate finance leader working to make carbon markets a practical bridge between climate action, Indigenous-led forest stewardship, and re-imagined economic systems that pay people for their work to keep carbon out of the atmosphere. He is the Chief Executive Officer of a 100% Indigenous-owned company representing First Nations along BC’s North and Central Coast and Haida Gwaii. In this role, he leads the organization’s work to manage and sell carbon offsets generated through Ecosystem-Based Management and conservation in the Great Bear Rainforest. These revenues are distributed directly back to the owner Nations to fund stewardship, and community priorities.
Throughout his career, Joseph has done leading work across the private, public, and non-profit sectors to develop and implement innovative climate policy, standards, and project-development tools that deliver emissions reductions – with a particular focus on First Nations-led stewardship and positive outcomes for nature. He is committed to growing models of conservation finance that advance Reconciliation, good governance, and robust community benefit.
A lifelong environmentalist with a deep love for nature, Joseph’s commitment to climate action is ultimately rooted in countering the threat that unchecked climate change poses to the work of advancing equity, progress, and the conditions for human flourishing.
Kareem Hassib is a student leader and political organizer based in Vancouver. He is currently studying Urban Studies at UBC, where he is currently serving as a member of the UBC Senate. He has also previously served on the UBC Board of Governors, as the youngest Board member in the university’s history.
Kareem grew up in Nanaimo, where he graduated secondary school at the top of his class, being awarded the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He was involved in many leadership initiatives, including being on School District 68’s Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability Advisory Committee.
Kareem serves in leadership positions in several organizations, including as a member of the City of Vancouver’s Transportation Advisory Committee, a member of the National Youth Advisory Committee at the Centre for Youth Crime Prevention, Mentorship Director for the BC Young New Democrats, and Vice-President of the Vancouver Quadra NDP EDA.
Kareem has also worked as a Communications Assistant at the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, a Project Assistant and Fundraiser at UBC Development and Alumni Engagement, and a Socio-Cultural Assistant at the UBC English Language Institute. Kareem is also a musician who plays seven instruments, enjoys photography and is passionate about the fine arts.
Karen is settler and a lawyer working on the traditional and unceded territories of the sɛmiˈɑːmuː, Q’e’yc’ey, kʷikʷəƛ̓əm, qiqéyt, and Səwaθn Məsteyəxʷ First Nations, known as Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and New Westminster, BC. She has nearly two decades of experience in private practice doing criminal defence, civil disobedience and police misconduct cases. Her non-profit experience includes work as staff counsel for Pivot Legal Society, where she focused on grass-roots campaign work, sex work, and policing advocacy. In that role, she sat on civic committees and worked as media liaison. Her governance experience includes chairing the boards of Pivot Legal Society (2005-2007) and PACE Society (2009-2013), before stepping back to focus on her family and her practice. Karen has been a member of the BCCLA Board of Directors since 2018.
Kevin is the executive director and co-founder of hua foundation, an organization with the mission of strengthening the capacity among East Asian diasporic youth, in solidarity with other communities, to challenge, change, and create systems for a more equitable and just future. His work centres on creating opportunities for racialized communities to participate in civil society and in social change agendas on their own terms. Kevin’s work has influenced public policy and practices in areas of food security, neighbourhood planning, climate emergency, community engagement, and electoral reform. With this multi-sectorial set of experiences, Kevin is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer. Kevin often comments in the media on issues relating to ethnocultural foodways, Chinese-Canadian communities, Chinatown, race relations, and racial inequities.
As the executive director of a small non-profit, Kevin has experience directly working on and overseeing both the operational and programmatic parts of the organization. Having built several nonprofits from its beginnings, he now actively shares these experiences with others starting their own initiatives. Kevin has a keen interest in organization behaviour and how organizing and places of work can structurally be more equitable for people involved.
Kevin currently serves on committees with City of Vancouver, Vancity, Vancouver Foundation and advises a number of grassroots groups. Outside of his local community involvement and work, Kevin organizes to support the freedoms of people in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He spends his free time finessing family recipes and playing video games.
Kyla Lee’s legal practice focuses on defence of driving-related offences, and alcohol-related driving prohibitions. Kyla is actively involved in her community. She is a member of the TLABC Criminal Law Committee, the Editorial Board for The Verdict, the Board of Governors, and a former member of the Executive Committee. Kyla represents the CBA on the Criminal Law Section executive, and formerly served on The Advocate’s Society Criminal Law Practice Group. Kyla is the CLE Co-Chair and on the Board of Directors for the DUI Defence Lawyers Association. She also serves as a National Ambassador to the Universal Women’s Network. In 2019, Kyla was recognized as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada. She was awarded the Universal Women’s Network Indigenous Leader Award. Kyla was named the recipient of the DUIDLA BadAss award in 2019. In 2020, Kyla was named a regional finalist in the RBC Women Entrepreneur Awards. Kyla hosts popular YouTube series Cases That Should Have Gone to the Supreme Court of Canada, But Didn’t! and Can You Fail It and the Driving Law podcast which spread legal education and awareness. She is the author of two textbooks published by LexisNexis, Cross-Examination: The Pinpoint Method and Immediate Roadside Prohibitions in Western Canada. Kyla is a proud Métis woman.
Mark (he/him) is a lawyer practicing criminal, constitutional, and administrative law as a sole practitioner in Vancouver.
Dr. Melissa Lem is a Vancouver family physician who also works in rural and northern communities, Past President of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in founding and leading system-wide initiatives that lower barriers for health professionals to engage in meaningful action on the triple planetary crisis. An internationally recognized leader in the field of nature, biodiversity and health, she has also spearheaded advocacy and policy work on a broad range of other issues, from local health impacts of the fossil fuel industry to extreme heat protections and accessible, low-carbon transportation.
Previously a senior writer for the CBC, and widely published in other media outlets, one of her major priorities is knowledge translation. Dr. Lem is CBC Vancouver News at 6’s in-house medical columnist and a climate change panellist on CBC Radio’s Early Edition. She holds multiple other advisory and editorial board positions, including with Movement YVR, the Journal of Mental Health and Climate Change, and IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Health and Well-being Specialist Group.
Dr. Lem was named to Vancouver Magazine’s Power 50 List, and recipient of Canada’s Clean50 Award, the Canadian Eco-Hero Award, a YWCA Women of Distinction Award in Environmental Sustainability and Nature Inspiration Award from the Canadian Museum of Nature. She has also been honoured with the King Charles III Coronation Medal and Meritorious Service Medal from the Governor General of Canada for her dedicated work to advance planetary health and nature prescribing.
Paul Champ is a labour, employment and human rights lawyer in Ottawa who is also well known for public interest and constitutional litigation. Paul and his clients have established legal precedents in privacy, discrimination, freedom of association, mobility, corporate liability for human rights abuses in foreign countries, and First Nations’ health care and child welfare. Paul has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada on numerous occasions and was lead counsel in Fraser v Canada, a landmark case on adverse effect discrimination.
Paul has fought for prisoners’ rights before human rights tribunals and the courts. He was co-counsel in the Christina Jahn case which led to province-wide reforms in Ontario meant to eliminate the use of solitary confinement for inmates with mental illness. Paul has also acted on several cases of Canadian citizens facing human rights abuses while detained abroad.
In 2010, Paul received the Reg Robson Civil Liberties Award from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. In 2013, he was honoured by the International Commission of Jurists with the Tarnopolsky Award for outstanding contributions to domestic and international human rights.
Tristen was born and raised in Kxeen (Prince Rupert), his traditional territory as Ts’msyen and where he cultivated his deep interest for psychology, mental health and social service. An active union member, Tristen has been a part of organizing, bargaining, and other efforts alongside his career spent delivering and developing various support services. Throughout Tristen’s life and work, he has supported others with experiences of prejudice, discrimination, systemic and state violence which, in tandem with his own experiences, guided him in his approach to advocacy and activism.
