A newly appointed judge opened up about her Cochrane roots and how rural living had a sway on her career.
On April 4, former Cochrane student L. Bernette Ho was appointed judge of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta in Calgary.
“I think a lot of it stems from having that sense of community that is really instilled in you when you grow up in a rural community,” Ho said.
The former lawyer has a reputation for her work in employment, human rights and privacy and disability matters.
But the start of her interest in working with people is rooted in Cochrane, she said, where she completed the entirety of her grade school education at the former Andrew Sibbald Elementary, followed by Cochrane’s trischools.
Ho, who immigrated to Canada in 1971 from the Philippines and is of Chinese descent, said it was her upbringing in a rural setting that drove home her sense of community and working with people.
“Our days started on the school bus ride back and forth with the same people,” she said, adding it was often a 20-minute or more bus ride to and from her family’s home in Bearspaw. “That in itself presented a really great opportunity to get to know other kids that were riding the bus.”
Ho said her Cochrane High School graduating class was around 120 students most of whom she attended classes with since Grade 1.
“When you’re going through year-after-year with the same group of people you really do get to know everybody really well and you do get that sense of community,” she explained. “Between that and the values my family instilled in me – that really has driven where I’ve pursued interest and driven my career and the areas that I have worked.”
It wasn’t immediately clear to Ho that she wanted to work in law, just that she wanted to work in the area of human interest.
“I started with an interest in pursuing journalism to be perfectly honest,” she said.
Following her undergraduate degree she considered attending Carleton University’s one-year journalism program in Ottawa, but ended up taking law.
She then landed an internship in Calgary at Norton Rose Fulbright, a global law firm, where she has worked ever since.
“I blinked and it’s now 20-plus years later,” Ho said.
With her new position at the Calgary courts, Ho said she hopes to apply the values she learned in her upbringing as well as her law background.
“It’s important to work hard, it’s important to listen and observe, pay attention to detail, it’s important to be thoughtful, it’s important to be respectful,” Ho said,
Since the announcement she said there has been an outpouring of support - including from her Cochrane connections.
“I have really fond memories of going to school in Cochrane and I continue to have a lot of friends from those days. In fact, the first person to send me a note of congratulations after my appointment was someone I met in Grade 1,” Ho said. “It just goes to show how those relationships from way back when have really continued and it’s been overwhelming the support that I’ve received from the people I met back from my schooling days.”
Her former principal from Cochrane High even left a Facebook comment following the announcement.
“We are very proud of you Bernie. I can recall you very well and I am not surprised by this latest achievement,” the comment read, signed off by Alf Gould.
Ho is replacing Justice A.D. Macleod, who elected to become a supernumerary judge as of August 2017.
