Calitze Aimé Dugas

Calitze Aimé Dugas came to the Yukon from Montreal. He arrived in Dawson on the steamer Ora in October 1898.1) On his way north, Dugas was present at the official ground-breaking on the Canadian side of the White Pass & Yukon Route railway. Dugas cut the first sod and drove the spike at a meadow five miles from the White Pass summit on October 4, 1898.2)

The Canadian Government appointed T.H. McQuire as the Judge of the Court of the Yukon Provisional District in August 1897. He resigned as Yukon’s first judge three months after his appointment and was replaced by C.A. Dugas on October 7, 1898.3) Justice McQuire left the Yukon in August 1898 so the Yukon was without a superior court judge for about two months.4) A Dawson newspaper predicted that Dugas would remedy the congested condition of the docket.5)

Prime Minister Laurier appointed Dugas to placate the interests of Yukon francophones. The 6,000 residents had complained to Ottawa about the lack of French-speaking civil servants and about Commissioner Walsh's lack of respect for their cultural and political rights. The French speaking dissidents and some American miners held public meetings during the summer of 1898 to protest the mining laws and for representative government. Dugas joined fellow Quebecker J. E. Girourd, registrar of lands, to advocate for equal treatment.6)

During his time in Dawson, Dugas was involved in mining speculation. On January 18, 1898, cabinet passed a new method for registering gold claims where prospectors were required to have a Free Miner's Certificate. No one but the lawyers were forewarned of this legislation and they travelled to the creeks and staked half of the claims registered between January 18 and April 1. The Commissioner was determined to deny the claims but Dugas was one of those affected and he threatened violence. Ogilvie asked Sifton to send another judge to the Yukon, but Cabinet did not respond.7) Dugas’ interest may have been in coal. In May 1902, he was a member of a group that bought forty acres at the mouth of the Chindindu River.The group included Thibaudeau, Croteau, Houle, and Eugène and Ferdinand Bourbeau.8)

The Yukon Act of 1898 established Yukon as a separate territory and the judicial system was changed to replace the court to a superior court styled after the Territorial Court with one or more judges. An amendment to the Act made the Supreme Court of British Columbia the court of Appeal for the Yukon. Another amendment in May 1901 provided for a police magistrate at Dawson and Whitehorse with jurisdiction in cases of theft, claims of debt, breach of contract, and other personal actions under $500. In March 1899, the Yukon Bar Association petitioned the federal government for two more judges and James Craig and C.D. Macaulay were subsequently appointed. Until 1912, the three-judge territorial court handled appeals from the police magistrate decision, with rulings defined in 1903 as being made by two of three Territorial Court judges. In 1912, an amendment to the Yukon Act reduced the number of judges to one, and Dugas and Craig left the Yukon. Judge Charles Daniel Macaulay remained in office until his retirement from the bench in 1940.9)

1)
“The Judge Arrives.”Klondike Nugget (Dawson), 19 October 1898.
2)
Jim Wallace, Forty Mile to Bonanza: The North-West Mounted Police in the Klondike Gold Rush. Calgary: Bunker to Bunker Publishing. 2000: 130.
3)
“Inventory to the Records of the Yukon Government, YRG 1, Series II, Territorial Court Records, 1897-1950, held at the Yukon Archives,” Yukon Government, reprinted 2003: i-ii.
4) , 6)
Hamar Foster and John McLaren, ed., “The Yukon Legal Profession” in The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Vol. VI British Columbia and the Yukon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1995: 466, 487.
5)
“The Judge Arrives.” Klondike Nugget (Dawson), 19 October 1898.
7)
Hamar Foster and John McLaren, ed., “A Case Study of R. v. Nantuck” in The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Vol. VI British Columbia and the Yukon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1995: 99-101, 107.
8)
Empreinte: La Presence francophone au Yukon. Tome 1. Whitehorse: Association franco-yukonnaise, 1997: 42.
9)
Inventory to the “Records of the Yukon Government, YRG 1, Series 11, Territorial Court Records, 1897-1950” held at the Yukon Archives. Yukon Government, 2003: ii.