The late Jim Flaherty, finance minister in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, once introduced his brother David, the speaker at a formal dinner in Toronto, as “the one with the real brains in the family.” Without benefit of a law degree, David Flaherty cut a path through the newly planted field of privacy law, taught at some of the top universities in the U.S.
Both of them had a sophisticated appreciation of the pleasures of the table and were members of La Confrerie de La Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, an international dining society whose roots go back to pre-revolutionary France. It was this gastronomic connection that led to their meeting. Jon Tupper, recently retired as the director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, was a close friend who admired the breadth of Prof. Flaherty’s interests: “He was a scholar and an intellectual and he read history and biographies but he also understood pottery and ceramics,” Mr. Tupper said. “He had a fine collection of Canadian ceramics in his house. He was always giving to arts organizations and to individual artists, and encouraging others to do it. I learned a lot from him.
He returned to Montreal and transferred to McGill, winning the gold medal in history when he graduated with his BA in 1962. That same year he married Kathryn Kindellun from a large and wealthy Catholic family and the two moved to New York so that he could continue graduate work at Columbia University.
It was while he was in New York working on his doctorate, that David Flaherty discovered he could obtain student tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Opera became his lifelong passion. He particularly loved Mozart’sTeaching stints at Princeton University and the University of Virginia followed before he completed his doctorate in 1967. In the 1970s, he was a fellow at Harvard in liberal arts, a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford and visiting scholar at Stanford.
He greatly influenced David Loukidelis, B.C.’s second privacy commissioner, who admired Prof. Flaherty’s reasoning and his ability to analyze privacy legislation. Mr. Loukidelis recalled in an interview: “He ran the organization in an efficient, astute way and he kept the staffing lean. When I was there, we had 21 people working in the office. He recognized talent and saw potential in people.