Profiles of Alberta Women
Halyna Freeland
Early life and education
Halyna Freeland (née Chomiak) was born on September 2nd, 1946 in a displaced persons camp in Bad Wörishofen, Germany after the Second World War. She was the third child of Alexandra and Mykhailo Khomiak (later Anglicized to Michael Chomiak), Ukrainians who met and married in Krakow, both having moved there as part of a flood of migration of Ukrainians departing Soviet-controlled regions of Eastern Europe.1 In Krakow Michael worked as the chief editor for Krakivs’ki visti, a Ukrainian language newspaper that was in operation from 1940 to 1945. The publication was established with the support of the Nazi government and its content was subject to the control of German censors.2
After some time spent in the displaced persons camp, the Chomiak family moved to Canada in October 1948. Initially the family lived in Cherhill, Alberta, staying with Michael’s sister Karetina Shulhan. After a couple of years, the Chomiaks, now numbering eight, relocated to a one-bedroom bungalow in Jasper Place in Edmonton.3 There Halyna and her siblings grew up and attended school, and in 1964 Halyna graduated with honours from Jasper Place High School.4
After high school, Halyna enrolled at the University of Alberta, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Philosophy in 1967. She then enrolled in the Law School at the University of Alberta and was one of only seven women in her graduating class in 1970. While a student she worked with The Gateway, the student paper at the university, serving as both a features editor and an editorial writer. She also found work with the Edmonton Journal during the summer as a reporter.
It was during her time as a law student that Halyna met Donald Freeland, a fellow legal student with whom she was married and had two daughters: Chrystia in 1968 and Natalka in 1970. Years later, Halyna would return to the University of Alberta to continue her education, completing a Master of Arts in Slavic and Eastern European Studies in the early 1990s.
Legal career
In 1971 Halyna was called to the bar and embarked on a career in criminal and family law. After passing the bar, Halyna practiced law in Peace River, Alberta where Donald Freeland’s family farm was situated. In Peace River, Halyna worked as a partner with Donald at their law firm Freeland and Co., offering primarily commercial and civil litigation services. She also involved herself in ensuring affordable legal services through the Peace River Legal Aid society, serving as counsellor to community members who couldn’t afford a defence lawyer. At the time of her arrival, legal aid in Peace River was a haphazard affair, and over the ensuing years was incorporated into a robust, regional system of legal aid under the Legal Aid Society of Alberta. In 1975 Halyna contributed to a 121-page report on the failures of existing legal aid programs for the impoverished in Alberta as a member of a subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Legal Aid.5 Among other things, the report called for the recognition of a specialization in poverty law for legal practitioners to help handle the unique legal needs of the poor.
In Peace River Halyna also embraced her Ukrainian heritage, working to found the Peace River Ukrainian Society and offering Ukrainian language classes in the community. At home, she raised her daughters to be bilingual, and encouraged a Ukrainian-speaking household. When, in 1978, she and Donald divorced and Halyna moved with her daughters to Edmonton, she continued her involvement with the Ukrainian community. She helped found the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in 1976 and held a position as a representative on the Ukrainian Canadian Committee. She also helped with the founding of the Hromada Housing Co-op in Old Strathcona, where she and her teenage daughters lived for a time.
In Edmonton Halyna’s legal career flourished. In April 1979 she was announced as a partner with Freeland, Robb, Royal, McCrum, and Browne Barristers and Solicitors. She worked as defence lawyer on a wide variety of cases, including ones involving impaired driving, robbery, and murder. She continued her involvement with the Legal Aid Society of Alberta, taking the position of northern director in 1978. Other legal organizations she worked with included the Alberta Law Foundation, the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, and the Women’s Legal Education Action Fund.
In addition to working as a legal professional, Halyna taught courses through the Faculty of Extension at the University of Alberta. In the 1980s she taught courses on law, feminism, and legal issues as they pertained to women. These included So This is Feminism, an introduction to feminist thought, The Law as it Affects Women, an overview of areas of law including marriage, divorce, abortion, and employment law, and Family Law, a course focusing on how family law impacts women, and which addressed differences in marriage and common law.6
Activism
Halyna was also a vocal critic of and commentator on legal issues, particularly those impacting women. In 1983 she voiced support for Bill C-127, a new law that replaced existing rape laws (laws written in the 16th century) with a more modern, nuanced system. Halyna and others argued that the previous laws included provisions that were hostile to the victim, including provisions such as the requirement that the complaint be recent, a provision that denied the realities of victims’ response to sexual violence.7
Divorce law was another legal area in which Halyna was both expert and vocal. In the late 1970s she lent her voice to those pushing the Alberta government to pass the Matrimonial Property Act, an act intended to address inequalities in property rights between men and women. Before the Act, the domestic duties performed by a woman, including childcare and housework, were not treated as having contributed economic worth to a household, and were thus not given weight when terms of divorce were being determined. Instigated in part by a divorce wherein a rural Albertan woman was denied a share of the family farm due to her contributions being given little weight, the Matrimonial Property Act was an attempt to address this inequality. While the legislation was being considered, Halyna helped to educate Albertans concerning its importance by writing Matrimonial Property, The New Legislation for the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee (ASWAC) in 1977. Her efforts and those of other activists and lobbyists were ultimately successful, and the Act became law on January 1, 1979.8
In 1986 Halyna, along with other feminists and legal experts, raised concerns around the ‘clean break’ principle included in the new Divorce Act. The old act had ensured that post divorce, the woman would be entitled to maintenance for life, whereas the new principle treated the former spouses as separate individuals and removed the right for continued maintenance. Halyna and others argued that this was unfair to women in their 40s and 50s who had taken on the traditionally female roles of childcare and home care. Of these women Halyna said “They made a bargain in their 20s to stay home and look after the children and, as a result, have no employment skills. Now the rules of the game have changed and they’re being told to get out and get a job.”9
Over her career, Halyna worked with a variety of groups, including ASWAC, the board of which she joined in 1983. That same year she helped to found the Alberta Women’s News Magazine, later serving as its director.10 Halyna was also one of the three founding members of Common Woman Books, a mail-order bookstore that produced and distributed catalogs of books relating to women and feminist literature. The women founded Common Woman Books after years of frustration with trying to get access to literature of that kind.
Starting in 1977 as a shelf in Halyna’s basement, Common Woman Books grew from humble beginnings to eventually occupy an upstairs shop, and later a street-level storefront in Old Strathcona, carrying thousands of titles on its shelves. In 1987 the bookstore relocated to a larger storefront on 109th Street, changing its name to Common Woman Books/The Radical Bookseller, and becoming the biggest women’s bookstore by square footage in Canada.11 The name change reflected a broadening in scope, moving to encompass liberation in a breadth of forms, including books on gay rights, ecology, Indigenous issues, and leftist politics. As an organization that was outspoken in support of feminism, homosexuality, and other social issues, the bookstore faced opposition from the conservative elements of the community, both in the form of critique and in the more malicious form of threatening phone calls.12 Despite these barriers, as well as financial and staffing issues, the bookstore ran for 13 years before closing in 1992.
Politics
After over a decade of legal work and activism championing women in Alberta, Halyna turned to politics to try to enact further change. In Canada’s 1988 federal election she ran as the New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate for the riding of Edmonton Strathcona. A statement of her position in the Edmonton Journal read “There are five issues we think are most critical to Canada: opposition to the Mulroney trade deal, protection of the environment, choices for women, economic development, and the threat to Canada created by the arms race and international tensions. This election is an opportunity for Canadians to demonstrate that we want justice and caring in a peaceful world.13
Her grassroots campaign, which at the time broke the record for the largest ever number of volunteers in a Canadian federal election campaign, drew broad support from diverse groups, including feminists, Ukrainians, members of the legal community, and even current and former members of the Liberal party, some of whom worked with her campaign.14 All told, Halyna’s campaign is said to have drawn over 700 workers, and Ed Broadbent, the federal NDP leader at the time, twice visited her riding during the election to show support.15
While Halyna ultimately lost the election to Conservative candidate Scott Thorkelson, she gave voice to her self-proclaimed “Ukrainian socialist feminist” values, using her platform as a candidate to raise various issues.16 She was one of a small number of New Democrats in Alberta who opposed the Meech Lake accord, a pact that New Democrats in other parts of the country had opposed for not sufficiently protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples.17 Halyna was also one of the party members who developed a ‘left caucus’ within the federal NDP, a movement that sought to pull the party further left along the political spectrum. Speaking of the left caucus, Halyna said “We work for democracy, socialism and feminism … I think that the party is very much at the crossroads and has to decide the direction in which it’s going. And I think the party would be well advised to pursue a social democratic program and not step back.”18
Ukraine
In the early 1990s, Halyna turned her attention and expertise to the developing legal system of the newly independent country of Ukraine. She was already an involved member the Ukrainian-Canadian community in Alberta, and in addition to her work founding the Peace River Ukrainian Society and the Hromada Housing Cooperative she served with the Ukrainian Community Development Committee. In 1990 she began her Master of Arts degree in Slavic and East European Studies at the University of Alberta, completing the degree in 1992. That same year she was asked by President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine to serve in an advisory role as the executive director of the newly-formed Ukrainian Legal Foundation, a non-profit organization created to assist in the establishment of the rule of law in Ukraine.
“It’s a huge, huge task we’re faced with … Basically, we’re going to create an independent legal profession which is willing and able to challenge the government and to ensure that it operates within the limits of the new constitution that is currently being charted.”
Ed Struzik, “Coaching from Canada,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), May 31, 1992.
Halyna had already traveled to Ukraine earlier in the decade to do research for her thesis, which looked at the impacts of the changes in Ukraine on women. After taking the position of executive director she returned, moving to the country in 1992. At the time, Ukraine had little in the way of a legal system. Gaps such as a lack of contract law and no legal framework for mortgages were hindrances to the growth of the country and its economy. With the Ukrainian Law Foundation, Halyna spent the next decade assisting with the drafting of the Constitution of Ukraine, the writing of its Civil and Criminal Procedures Codes, the creation of a legal publishing program and establishment of legal library collections, the creation of the Ukrainian Centre for Human Rights, and various other tasks relating to the creation of a legal system in Ukraine.
In 2001 Halyna moved to London to live with her daughter Chrystia and to help her with balancing a career and a growing family. In September of 2006, Halyna was diagnosed with cancer. She died the following year on July 6, 2007. After her death, the Halyna Chomiak Freeland Memorial Award was created to offer funding to law students at the University of Alberta.
Whether serving as a lawyer, teacher, politician, bookstore owner, or activist, Halyna Freeland brought to her work a resolute worldview rooted in socialism and feminism. The same attitude that earned her the nickname ‘The Little Communist’ among prosecutors in Alberta put her in a position to push the Canadian New Democrat Party towards a more socialist position as a member of the ‘left caucus.’ It was the same attitude and concern for those most vulnerable that led her to study the experiences of women in the newly-formed Ukraine, that drove her to found Common Woman Books, and that saw her help found the Hromada Housing Co-op, which still operates today.
Read more about Halyna Freeland
Footnotes
1 “Alexandra Chomiak,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Feb. 18, 2005.
2 John-Paul Himka, “’Krakivs’ki visti’: An Overview," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 22 (1998): 256-7.
3 Myrna Kostash, “Not a White-Bread Childhood: Chrystia Freeland’s Alberta Roots,” Alberta Views, April 1, 2021. https://albertaviews.ca/not-white-bread-childhood/
4 “Halyna Chomiak Freeland,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Jul. 12, 2007.
5 “Committee Urges Legal Aid Overhaul,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Oct. 17, 1975.
6 “Extend Yourself: Enjoy a Life-Enriching Course at U of A Extension,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Jan. 4, 1982; “Enjoy a Life-Enriching Course at U of A Extension,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Jan. 3, 1985.
7 Lois Sweet, “In Defence of Change,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Feb. 9, 1983.
8 Catherine Carson, “MLA Defends Property Legislation,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Jan. 12, 1978.
9 Catherine Carson, “Divorce Act’s ‘Clean Break’ May Be Costly,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Oct. 26, 1986.
10 Ukrainian Archival Records at the Provincial Archives of Alberta: An Annotated Guide (Alberta: Provincial Archives of Alberta, 2016), 22.
11 Lynne Van Luven, “Bookstore Seeks Social Change,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Sep. 17, 1989.
12 Lynne Van Luven, “Our Main Man’s Multicultural Connection Clearly Confirmed,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Jan. 19, 1992.
13 “Election ’88,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Nov. 18, 1988.
14 “Halyna Chomiak Freeland,” Edmonton Journal.
15 Mike Sadava, “Personality Contest’s Raging in Strathcona,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Nov. 19, 1988.
16 Ibid.
17 Mike Sadava, “Meech Support an Error, NDP Candidate Says,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Nov. 25, 1988.
18 Mark Lisac, “Grant Notley: Gauging His Impact on Alberta,” Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, AB), Oct. 1, 1989.
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