Valley resident Beggie Palsson has had an extensive career practicing law in northern Manitoba, between The Pas and Swan River. At first, Palsson didn’t set out to become a lawyer, but fate had opened several doors leading him to law school and taking the bar exam.
“I was working in The Pas as a probation and parole officer,” said Palsson. “My territory included Gilliam, Churchill, The Pas, Moose Lake and the surrounding area. Back then, when you worked in that field, the only way to succeed in that department was to have a degree in social work. People who work in the child and welfare, probations or parole fields were trying to get their Master of Social Work.
“I just had an Arts Degree at the time, so I applied to the University of Manitoba to study a sociology course. I applied for that and was going to take the summer off to go to summer school. Before I went, the probation officer from Flin Flon was going to Winnipeg and he stopped to talk to me. He told me he was going to pick up an application for law school and asked if I wanted him to get one for me too. I told him they would never accept me in law school and I was thinking of going into social work to advance in the job I had. He told me he would get me a form, so when he came back, I filled it out and sent it in.
“The day before I was supposed to leave my job and take a sociology course, I got the letter from the law school accepting me into the program,” said Palsson. “Going into law was kind of an accident, but believe it or not, one professor I had in law school who taught an introductory course, said he bet half of us were there by accident. So, lots of people went to law school without originally planning to. It was one of the best decisions I made.
“I loved law school and found everything I studied relevant, and much to my surprise, I did very well in it.”
After passing the bar, Palsson started his legal career by articling for a firm in Winnipeg. From there, he went on to work for Legal Aid and focused on the Child Welfare System. Palsson gained a lot of valuable experience from his time working at Legal Aid.
“After law school, I articled with a private firm in St. James,” said Palsson. “They had the Chapman Building just east of Portage and Ferry Road. They were Chapman, Chapman and Chapman. It was a father, two sons and two other lawyers who made up this law firm. I articled for one of the Chapman boys.
“Then once I got my call to the bar, I went to work in the Legal Aid Office in Winnipeg. They were looking for a child welfare specialist. I never wanted to do much court work and there I was going to court four to five days a week because there were so many cases of child welfare in the system. I was taking on Paul Walsh who had been a very good criminal lawyer and became counsel for the Children’s Aid Society, which in some cases was trying to take children away from their parents. I was up against him four or five days a week. It was a good experience for me.
“I recall one day, one of the judges asked me to come to her chambers when there was a break in court,” said Palsson. “She told me that between her and I, we taught Mr. Walsh a little humility today.”
Palsson recognized early in his law career that family and child welfare law was one of the toughest areas to practice. It was apparent to him that the Child Welfare System was overrun based on poverty and some racial profiling.
“It was a hard line of work to be in because I was watching families being broken apart,” said Palsson. “A lot of it was due to poverty and some racial aspects. Unfortunately, those were mainly the clients of the Children’s Aid Society. Even now, 90 percent of the children apprehended are from low-income and Indigenous families.
“I knew of a lawyer in the legal aid offices in Winnipeg, who was very sensitive. Over time this lawyer left practicing law because of the difficult nature of these case types and the stress.”
After gaining some experience in Winnipeg, Palsson returned to northern Manitoba and The Pas to continue working in Legal Aid.
“Back when I worked probations, there weren’t many supports or lawyers working in northern Manitoba,” said Palsson. “There weren’t very many at all. Thompson had a couple of firms, there was a lawyer in Churchill, and Evans Premachuk was working in The Pas. There were some that I knew of, but overall, there was a great shortage of lawyers in northern Manitoba.
“I ended up going back to The Pas to open a Legal Aid Office for the Province in 1975. I was up there for three years before I came to the Valley. We used to fly in for court and back then I could see the ridiculousness of it. The plane would land and the judge, the Crown Attorney, two other lawyers and a court reporter would get off. The local people were kind of laughing because they knew nothing was going to be solved in terms of justice when judges and lawyers were only there for a certain amount of time.
“One of the guys who came up with me, was just called to the bar,” said Palsson. “I had been practising law for a couple of years before coming back to The Pas to work, which was still not a lot. He was a very outspoken fellow and went on to become one of the top-notch criminal lawyers in Manitoba. His name was Norm Cuddy. He was fantastic and a natural criminal lawyer.
“Norm later went on to Winnipeg with a sole practitioner, where he learned a lot about criminal law. Then he joined one of the top firms and quickly became a partner. He did very well for himself, but then got cancer and passed away at a young age. He was a good guy to work with.”
Once again opportunity presented itself to Palsson and he had the opportunity to leave Legal Aid and get into private practice. This started a new chapter for Palsson and a move to the Valley.
“Once again, my move to Swan River was purely by chance,” said Palsson. “The Crown Attorney, Ed Sloane, from Thompson, who I met once or twice, stopped by my home in The Pas. He asked me if I was sick of Legal Aid yet. At that point, I felt I had done it all in Legal Aid and was repeating it over again, doing the same thing. Sloane told me he felt the same about prosecuting. He found a law practice for sale in Swan River that belonged to Florence Matthews. He had made an appointment to speak with the owner and asked me if I was interested in becoming a partner. It had me intrigued and I told him to check it out and let me know what he thought.
“He came back and told me he felt there was great potential in the firm and that there was a very good practice setup. He felt there was room for two people to work there, so we made her an offer and she accepted. Sloane had been an RCMP officer before he went to law school so he always worked with the criminal side of law, then he became a prosecutor, so he hadn’t done any private law. I had articled with a private law firm and had done quite a bit of law in that area. Sloane went earlier and worked under Florence for a bit, then I came down and we opened up our law firm on May 1, 1978.
“I knew at some point I would go into private practice, but it just came a little sooner and unexpectedly,” said Palsson. “I hardly knew Sloane and just a few weeks ago I thought about why Ed Sloane would have stopped in back then and asked me if I was interested in joining him in practice because he didn’t really know me. Then it hit me. The prosecutor in The Pas was from Clearwater and so was Ed. I’m sure he phoned and asked what I was like, and I know the prosecutor in The Pas would have given him a good report on me. This is likely why he asked me to form a practice with him.
“Working in a private practice is different than working in Legal Aid. You have clients coming in who want certain services that you weren’t doing as part of Legal Aid. Legal Aid is limited because the clients can’t afford legal representation. This can lead to a different type of law being practiced with different expectations. I got to do so much different work.”
Palsson was quick to integrate into the Valley community. He found himself joining some local community groups and volunteered to help make the Swan Valley a better place for everyone. Palsson spent a good portion of his time giving back to the community.
“I joined the Swan River Kinsmen shortly after I moved here,” said Palsson. “Then my banker was a Swan River Rotary Club member and coaxed me to join that group too. I aged out of Swan River Kinsmen when I turned 40 and stayed with the Rotary Club until it disbanded this summer. We have no Rotary Club in Swan River anymore, and that’s unfortunate.
“When I worked in The Pas for Legal Aid, they used to have community committees that were supposed to be advisors to the office to let them know what were things in town that needed to be looked at from the legal perspective. One of the committee members in The Pas was a Captain for the Salvation Army. He got me doing volunteer work for the Salvation Army. One year I collected donations from every business in The Pas by myself. Then when I came to Swan River I thought I was done, but the first call I got was from the Captain from Dauphin. He asked me if I would continue doing that in the Valley, so I wound up looking after the Salvation Army Kettle here on my own for a year or two, until the Swan River Rotary Club took it over. We raised a lot of money for the Salvation Army over the years.
“I was part of forming the Community Foundation of Swan Valley said Palsson. “I can’t say I was the head or idea of it, but I did some legal work incorporating it. That was a fun time and project to work on. I was invited to their Spring Granting Meeting earlier this year, and I believe the Community Foundation of Swan Valley has grown to almost $4 million now, with five percent going out to the community every year. It’s amazing to see how that project started and has grown to what it is today.
“When it came to volunteering in the Valley, I had a lot of help and support from good people.”
Palsson’s partner decided to move on from the Valley and this began to cause a shift in not only the law firm itself, but the type of law Palsson practiced.
“After about six and a half years, Sloane had moved on,” said Palsson. “We had an agreement back when we were in practice that he would take the criminal cases and I would handle the civil and family ones. After he left, I had to oversee them all, but eventually, I stopped going to court. I never enjoyed it and was too busy to be out of the office for a week. We’re still very close friends and he is a great guy.
“My first partner after Sloane left was Roger Gregoire. Roger had been my articling student in The Pas with Legal Aid. After he got his call to the bar, he was lured away by a firm in Flin Flon. He practiced with them until I phoned him a couple of years after Sloane left. I asked him if he wanted to move south and work with me. He moved down within a couple of days and worked here until the Province appointed him as a provincial court judge. He too was an excellent partner and that helped.
“After that, I had a couple of different lawyers work with me,” said Palsson. “I went on to do a lot of mortgages, wills, estates, corporations. After Sloane and I bought the practice and by the time I retired, it had grown to represent and establish over 200 corporations.”
Over the years, Palsson refined his law practice and no longer practiced family law. Family law had undergone too many changes and became so complicated over the years, that Palsson felt it was a field that a lawyer should strictly practice to be good at it and he had so many other clients to represent for different matters, that he wanted to focus on that instead.
“I got out of practicing family law because they had changed all the laws surrounding it and how one got to court,” said Palsson. “I just didn’t have the time to focus on that, and with family law, a lawyer needs to be dedicated to it 100 percent of the time, to be any good at it. Things seem to change so much and it has gotten to be a more stressful type of law to practice.
“I didn’t want to give up the other aspects of law that I was working on at that time, so I let go of family law and would refer people to another firm.”
It’s been over a decade since Palsson retired from practicing the law. He was fortunate to find someone to take over his practice in the Valley. The one aspect of practicing the law that Palsson misses the most and still to this day, is getting the opportunity to see his clients regularly.
“By the time I retired from law, I had been acting legal representation for grandchildren of the clients who first came to see me when I started in Swan River,” said Palsson. “It was grandchildren, not children, who were starting to farm and wanted to buy land. It was so much different. In the beginning, I was forced to do court work and that was never my intention to be in the courtroom that much. Law is made up of barristers and solicitors. Barristers go to court and solicitors do paperwork, and my goal was to be a solicitor.
“I retired from practicing law on April 1, 2014. It was hard for me at first, because I missed a lot of the clients. I had lots of really good clients. I was fortunate to turn over my practice to a very competent and good lawyer, Laurie Oakes. She worked with me for a year and then bought the practice.
“Once I retired, I spent time socializing with my coffee group,” said Palsson. “We go to the Legion every day now to have coffee and visit.
“The people were always nice to work with when it came to opening a business or purchasing land or homes. The clients were the most enjoyable part of my career in law. I met some really great people.”
Palsson and his wife Karen are in the process of saying goodbye to the Swan Valley as they are moving to Winnipeg. They will be greatly missed.