Douglas Stollery built his career drafting construction contracts, not arguing landmark human rights cases, yet he ended up doing both. Born in Edmonton on August 1, 1953, to parents who came of age during the Depression, Doug grew up with two older sisters, Carol and Janet, in a household that valued hard work and community responsibility. A Grade 10 scholarship sent him to the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, an experience he has described as life-changing, and he returned to Alberta determined to study law.
A Construction Lawyer With an Unlikely Case
Doug earned his LLB from the University of Alberta in 1976, clerked for Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ronald Martland, and completed a postgraduate degree at Harvard Law School before joining the Edmonton firm Reynolds Mirth Richards and Farmer in 1980, where he built a specialty in construction law. He later served as general counsel, corporate secretary and a board member at PCL Constructors. It was a chance meeting with an old law-school acquaintance, Sheila Greckol, that pulled Doug into an entirely different kind of case.
Greckol was preparing an appeal on behalf of Delwin Vriend, a gay man fired from his job at The King’s College in Edmonton in 1991, after Alberta’s Human Rights Commission refused to hear his discrimination complaint because the provincial code offered no protection based on sexual orientation. Greckol wanted a gay man’s perspective on the legal team and recruited Doug as co-counsel, despite his lack of Charter litigation experience. The case reached the Supreme Court of Canada, where Doug delivered a closing argument he has described as one of the most emotional moments of his professional life. The Court ruled unanimously that Alberta’s law breached the Charter, a decision that helped open the door to further advances in 2SLGBTQ rights across Canada, including same-sex marriage.
The Vriend team had no real legal precedent to lean on, since no gay rights case had ever succeeded before the Supreme Court of Canada. Doug has since reflected that a loss would have set a precedent making future progress far harder, meaning the case’s success reshaped the legal landscape for the whole country, not just for Alberta.
Decades of Philanthropy Through the Stollery Charitable Foundation
Alongside his legal career, Doug built a long record of community service, including terms as president of the Canadian Bar Association’s Alberta Branch and board roles with the Legal Education Society of Alberta, the Alberta Law Reform Institute, the Stephen Lewis Foundation, Grant MacEwan College and CARE Canada, where he served nearly a decade helping direct anti-poverty and social justice funding around the world. In 1994 his parents launched the Stollery Charitable Foundation, and Doug joined its board before becoming president in 2011. The endowed foundation funds work in health, education, poverty alleviation and human rights, guided by Doug’s stated philosophy that the people doing the hard work on the ground know best how to find solutions.
Chancellor, Producer and Continuing Advocate
In 2016, Doug was selected as Chancellor of the University of Alberta, a role that also placed him on the university’s board of governors and as chair of its Senate. He has since received the King Charles III Coronation Medal in 2025, joined the Order of Canada in 2020, and collected honorary degrees from both MacEwan University and the University of Alberta. He continues to practice law part time as an arbitrator in Edmonton and recently served as executive producer of the 2024 documentary Pride vs. Prejudice, The Delwin Vriend Story, directed by Darrin Hagen, calling the project a genuine labour of love. As outlined in his official Alberta Order of Excellence profile, Doug was inducted into the Order in 2025 for his contributions to Canadian human rights law and Alberta philanthropy. His other honours include the Suzanne Mah Award from the Alberta Human Rights Commission, the Canadian General Counsel Lifetime Achievement Award, and recognition as a founding fellow of the Canadian College of Construction Lawyers and as King’s Counsel.
Doug divides his time between Edmonton and the west coast, where he lives with his husband, Scott Graham.
How many Albertans realize a construction lawyer from Edmonton helped change the course of human rights law across the entire country?
