Our Board

Derek was born to immigrant parents and raised in Vancouver. He grew up implicitly understanding that a society is defined by the way it protects the rights of vulnerable people and minorities. One of his first jobs was a youth worker in diversion programs for troubled youth. Now retired, he had a career with the federal government in policy related roles including program evaluation (regional lead), research on social policy issues such as labour market issues and the federal homelessness initiative.

Derek’s was active in his professional union where he served as National Director for several years, including two years as National Vice President. He participated on Collective Bargaining teams, and was active on Finance and Constitution and Bylaws committees. Locally, he was a long time steward, founding director of BC/Yukon Local, and represented members at several departments in the grievance procedure with excellent results, including issues of harassment, and health and safety.

Derek volunteers with Leadnow and with the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society. Derek has an MA in Economics, with a focus on labour economics and labour relations. This came with an understanding that economics is all about how members of the society relate to each other. He enjoys self propelled outdoor activities including backcountry skiing, mountaineering, hiking and sailing.

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.

Ian Bushfield is an advocate for Humanism, science and social justice living in Vancouver. He is the current and was the first Executive Director of the BC Humanist Association. He co hosts the PolitiCoast and Cambie Report podcasts covering BC and Vancouver politics, respectively. He earned a BSc in Engineering Physics from the University of Alberta and a MSc in Physics from Simon Fraser University, and has taken BCIT courses in non profit management.

He helped found the U of A Atheists and Agnostics in 2007 and led the group until graduating in 2009. In 2008 the group successfully challenged the University’s 100 year old convocation charge as it asked students to use their degrees “for the glory of God”. From 2013 to 2015 he lived in the UK, first in Leeds then London where he worked on science advocacy and transparency campaigns at Sense About Science.

Jay Krishan has a B.A. in Sociology from SFU. He is the Executive Director of the PSAEE which is a non-profit organization engaged in facilitating the development of a representative public service. His work in this area has been informed by his own experience with hiring and employment processes. Jay’s interest is in social systems with a mind orientated towards equity and equal citizenship. For this reason, definitions, interpretations, rationales, policies, and practices have been of great interest to him. He has worked to engage stakeholders in discussions on merit, hiring policies and barriers to entry and promotion for citizens of colour with an aim towards change.

Joey Doyle is a lawyer and activist based in Coast Salish territory (Vancouver). He has been practicing law since October 2019 as a solo practitioner, focused mainly on legal aid criminal defence work. Joey is a founding member of the revived Law Union of BC, is a director of Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada, and is a director of the Association of Legal Aid Lawyers. He is also a veteran of various political campaigns, electoral and issues-based. Unifying all his activities is a desire to fight injustice and to stand up for people who are oppressed by the status quo institutions within our society. Joey is grateful for the opportunity to continue this fight as a member of the BCCLA Board of Directors.

Karen is settler and a lawyer working on the traditional and unceded territories of the sɛmiˈɑːmuː, Q’e’yc’ey, kʷikʷəƛ̓əm, qiqéyt, and Səwaθn 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.

Kevin’s work focuses on building capacity to advance social and environmental justice in Canada. He is the co-founder and Director of Next Up, a national leadership training program for young people committed to social and environmental justice across Canada. He served as the first sustainability Coordinator for the Vancouver School Board, where his work focused on student and staff engagement in sustainability initiatives, which included focused efforts on local food security, transportation and climate action. In this role he served on several advisory groups for the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Plan, the city’s Local Food Action Plan and the Vancouver Park Board’s Access to Nature Plan. She worked to make connections between the city’s planning efforts and the sustainability work at the VSB.

Kevin has fundraising experience through his non-profit work and has served on funding advisory groups for the Vancouver Foundation, Vancity and The Small Change Fund.  He is a Dialogue Associate with SFU’s Centre for Dialogue and has been guest faculty at the SFU Semester in Dialogue program. He is currently board chair for both the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC Office and the Theatre for Living Society. From 2002‑2005, Kevin served as a Vancouver School Board Trustee where his work focused on youth engagement, sustainability and advocating for proper funding for public education. He is currently on advisory committees for Upstream.net, The Centre for Civic Governance and rabble.ca.

In 1998 Kevin co-founded Check Your Head, an organization that has worked with over 65,000 young people to become involved in global justice issues in BC. He served as the Executive Director of Check Your Head until 2009. He also co-founded Get Your Vote On, a campaign to register new voters in BC. Previous to Check Your Head, he worked for Katimavik, a national program for young people age 18‑21. Kevin’s formal training and education is in Theatre Arts, leadership development and facilitation for social change.

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.

Vanessa Wolff is a National Education Representative for CUPE National. Her roles in the past 24 years have been Education, Health & Safety and Servicing Representative.

Prior to her current role, she was a CUPE member from Local 2316, Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, the largest Child Welfare Agency in North America, where she worked in a variety of roles and was the chair of the Health & Safety Committee on the Executive Board. Vanessa was also instrumental in organising all social service agencies in Ontario to get certified Health & Safety training for their committees through the Workers Health & Safety Centre.

As a former foster parent of special needs children, she is very much aware of the struggles that exists in the school systems between services that are needed for the children; lack of proper support systems for mental health issues; and balancing the rights of workers for a safe workplace and a job.

Vanessa, who immigrated from the Netherlands, worked with the Ministry of Justice in Holland where they developed various systems to protect workers from violence in the workplace.

Vanessa is also an advisor for the CMHA on promoting the CSA National Standard on Psychological Healthy & Safe Workplaces.

Wassim Garzouzi is a labour lawyer, with a practice dedicated exclusively to the representation of unions and their members. In addition to litigating, Wassim bargains collective agreements and serves as a nominee on interest arbitration boards.

Wassim is the Past President of the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers and is a Part-Time Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, teaching the advanced Labour Law course, in both the French and English programs. In this same role, Wassim led a successful organizing drive resulting in the unionization of hundreds of faculty members.