Nawel Izard is the host of a popular radio program on Cortes Community Radio and the head of the Polaris Law Collective, whose head office is in Campbell River. She was born in Algeria, but lived almost her entire life in Canada. In this morning’s interview Nawel describes her motivations and something of her legal practice.
(This podcast opens and closes with Dahmane el Harrachi mazalni m3ak nqassi دحمان الحراشي مزالني معاك نقاسي)
Cortes Currents: What motivates you, especially towards law?
Nawel Izard: “A deep curiosity to ask questions, but more importantly I want to help people and if knowing where to find things is a way to help people, why not? Service plays into it as well in that I’ve always hoped that I would end up a lawyer.”
“It’s been my focus ever since that citizenship ceremony moment where I see these lawyers participating in something that felt so grand. Making you go from being an immigrant with no status – to now you are Canadian with the pride and a sense of relief in knowing that you are now transitioned. The change was legal and if you have to be a part of that legal bracket, you were a part of this magical institution that made these types of things happen. I think that’s where the hook came in.”
Cortes Currents: Tell us about the day you decided to be a lawyer.
Nawel Izard: “I was five years old at my citizenship ceremony. My parents were put through all of the tests, paperwork, fingerprinting and whatnot. I remember standing on a chair and not really singing. I would really categorize it more as a toddler yelling the Canadian anthem, and was just so proud!”
“Watching the team of lawyers do this paperwork, it was like live streaming wizardry to take you from being almost ‘non status.’ You’ve left your country and you’re not really one of us yet and this ceremony makes you Canadian. I just remember thinking and looking at that female lawyer and saying, she’s free. I want to be her. I want that.”
“As a teenager, I had a very short stray from my lifelong objective of becoming a lawyer. I thought pathology would be really cool and that if I was an autopsy doctor I could always figure out what happened to people. The math component shocked me right back to law. I said, “Nope, I will help people as a lawyer, keep your chemistry for yourselves, and then I carried on.”
Cortes Currents: How Algerian are you? You don’t have an accent.
Nawel Izard: “You could never tell from my voice that I’m a polyglot and English is actually my fourth language. I also speak Algerian, I speak Arabic (and French), but I studied in Canada and I did all my post-secondary education in English.”
“I’m very close with my family actually, and was just at a cousin’s wedding in the summer. They all joke that it’s like I never left the village because I’m really down to earth and I love to cook from scratch.”
“Fun fact: I do know how to pluck a chicken and butcher a chicken from scratch. That’s just a weird skill that you get when you’re from Northern Africa, but I don’t necessarily pick up raw chicken. I buy the packaged clean chicken breast at the store.”
Cortes Currents: Are there any other ways that your Algerian heritage comes into your life here in Campbell River?
Nawel Izard: “Through music for sure. I love to sing and I love to listen to music pretty much all the time. In my son’s life, I try to incorporate Algerian music every day.”
“There’s something about, we’ll say poetry in your home language that you can’t quite translate. Sometimes a sentence is like a paragraph and then it just loses its luster. So I try to share stories or jokes in Algerian with my kiddo because I want him to understand it in Algerian because it’s funnier.”
“I’ve struggled with this identity, so it’s interesting that you ask ‘how Algerian are you?’ Some days, I don’t know if I’m Canadian or … – it’s a bit of an interesting thing being an immigrant, it varies.”
”I got asked this in an interview I did last year, ‘Have you ever had to deal with multiple cultures, balancing multiple worldviews and problem solving? How did you do that?’ I just sort of giggled and I thought, “I’ve been doing that every single day since the day I got sworn in as a Canadian citizen and I will keep doing it every single day until I die.”
“I have cultural training and religious training because my family is Muslim. Growing up in Canada as a Muslim, especially out west, everyone assumed I was half black, which I’m not. I’m 100% North African.”
“This is what ‘figure skating culture’ is about. Well, it’s Ramadan, so do I eat or am I not eating? (As kids) we’d sneak food at the rink when our mom wasn’t looking because we didn’t want for her to feel like we … and so there was just this constant negotiating internally of who’s winning today. Sometimes I’m a bit spicier, that’s for sure. I think that comes out when there’s perhaps confrontation and folks are like, ‘Ooh, I don’t like confrontation.’ I’m like, ‘I’m ready.'”
Cortes Currents: Do you find that you have many immigrants as clients?
Nawel Izard: “I do actually, I work with the Conseil scolaire francophone, so they’re the academic entity. They’re kind of their own school district. So I work with them as well as the French Association. I do have clients that are from abroad, but not necessarily just French speaking or Arab Muslim. I get a whole mix of them. I think something that is maybe not as obvious to a lot of people. There’s lots of immigration happening and so we have a really diverse demographic North island. More so than I remember 10 years ago or so, which is super cool.”
Cortes Currents: “When I look at the 2021 census, Vancouver is very multicultural, but I had the impression that Campbell River was more British in terms of ancestry. There’s also more Americans, especially on Cortes and Quadra Islands.”
Nawel Izard:”Yep, but that’s changing certainly with respect to immigrants from places like Zimbabwe, or India. I’ve met with several clients from Nigeria. There’s a lot of movement coming from other parts of the world and folks choosing Vancouver Island, which is very interesting to see.”
Cortes Currents: Then I have to ask, what does that mean for Campbell River?
Nawel Izard: “I think Campbell River is shifting, and it’s almost in a redevelopment, but in a transition in the same way that parts of the mainland were. I didn’t grow up on the island. The name Izard is an old Campbell River family and I married one of their boys. Local folks hear that name, they’re like, oh, are you so-and-so’s son? daughter? Whatever? It’s that family, but I didn’t grow up here.”
“Just observationally speaking, I think that Campbell River is booming with new businesses, booming with fresh ideas and lots of people that are looking for services and different options than what was here before. Or perhaps just more options because there’s more of us that need them. You see that entrepreneurial energy every day. It’s an exciting time for Campbell River and the North Island.”
Cortes Currents: Would you say we are becoming more of a world culture?
Nawel Izard: “I would definitely credit the islands more for world culture because of the music, because of the focus on arts and bringing that to the island. This past Saturday, I took my son over to the Quadra Community Centre and we watched the African chamber music performance. I absolutely loved that! And it was blowing my mind: thinking about some of the artists on stage being from Africa, like myself, and here we are on Quadra Island. For me to hear this music, it had to be on Quadra. It definitely is becoming a bit more cultured and diverse.”
Cortes Currents: Where do you get your passion for helping people?
Nawel Izard: “Some of my early childhood experiences: I learned the power of advocacy. Not everybody has the gusto to stand up and say, ‘Hey, that’s not right’ but then when someone does you almost realize that everyone is feeling like that. It just takes one person to pop the seal and there’s support there.”
“When you choose to do the right thing, it’s never a bad thing and the power of advocacy is exactly. It’s turning the light switch on. It’s saying the thing that perhaps everyone else is too nervous, worried, concerned, stressed, anxious, scared to say, but that if you can liberate yourself and others by saying, ‘Hey, I saw that, and that’s not cool.’ It can really make an impact.”
Cortes Currents: What kind of law do you practice?
Nawel Izard: “I focus primarily on paperwork crafting. I do estate planning and I work with businesses and I work with families doing estate planning.”
“I think some of the most meaningful work I do is with palliative patients who don’t have any planning in place and who are either at the hospital or at home and truly facing their final days, hours. I attend either in person or at the hospital. I come to them, I get it done within 24 hours or faster if the case requires that, and just the feeling of relief is, I don’t want to say special, but it’s a meaningful way to help others.”
Cortes Currents: You don’t have to mention names, but do any specific cases come to mind?
Nawel Izard: “I had a woman that I met with at one of the hospitals here in the North Island, a really lovely family and just a real tragedy. Helping her on Friday night and then hearing the news of her passing on Sunday morning and really understanding how urgent her ask was, sharing a hug with her at the hospital. I do a job, but I am a human being and I think just that connection in the world that we’re in now is really important.”
Cortes Currents: I’m going to have to transition to your coming to radio. How did that happen?
Nawel Izard: “I can only force my friends to listen to my music, so I thought, well how do I force more people to listen to my choice of music?” (Laughter)
“In all seriousness, I started my practice really just posting on social media, posting reels with like, here’s two things you should know and then offering myself to say, ‘Hey, I’ll come to Quadra, I’ll come to Cortes and meet with people on the island.’ Then I would offer free seminars.”
“I booked the Nook on the island there at Mansons Landing and then on Quadra, I’m at the Quadra Community Centre often. Then I thought, okay, how do I get this information out more? Because even though I’m doing the seminars and I post about this, I’m still getting asked the same questions.”
“I just feel that in the same way that like financial literacy is so key, legal literacy is very important too. Understanding the landscape that you’re dealing with is step one. So many of us don’t actually know what we’re interacting with and once you take actions blindly, it’s really hard to backtrack. Law is a fast moving beast in some ways. You can’t undo actions taken or advances made and whatnot.”
“I think the radio show was just a natural way to speak to more people, share cooler information and give myself a creative space to apply law in a really unique way.”
“Every episode has a theme and then the music goes with a theme. Sometimes I play Taylor Swift and sometimes I play John Coltrane. It really depends.”
Cortes Currents: How did your radio program come into being?
Nawel Izard: “Bryan McKinnon at Cortes Community Radio and I had a bit of a connection. Then we reconnected for Tideline because I wanted to let people know like, ‘Hey, I’m around and I can help you on the island.’ We sort of just tossed around the idea like, ‘Hey, would you consider giving me some time on the radio so I can share this legal information?’ So we tested it out and we’ve gotten good traction, so we’ve carried on.”
Cortes Currents: Tell me about a typical program. What kind of issues are you addressing?
Nawel Izard: “One that I really love is beneficiary hiccups, issues and conflicts. One of the episodes I did in the fall started out the reading of a will. Someone’s passed and everyone shows up in the room. I created a fictional case study based on some cases that I have worked on and then created the episode.”
“The issue with wills in small communities is really different than when you live in, let’s say New York City. When someone passes on Cortes we all hear about it. It affects the community in a very different way. A will becomes a document that yes, applies to the family, but perhaps the repercussions of that document may ripple in the entire community.”
“Just to know the importance, for myself, of working with clients directly and knowing that I have their specific wishes, not their daughter-in-law’s wishes about what should happen with the jewelry collection in the basement or something like that.”
“So that episode takes you through a bit of a case study and songs are woven throughout. On that episode, there’s Leonard Cohen. In a small community, we all know who went on a coffee date with who, and who kissed who behind … That’s just how it works. There’s something so beautiful about that, but immense responsibility that comes with it, when you work in small communities.”
“I go all the way to Gold River, I’m going up to Port McNeill soon. I’m putting myself out there. It’s really important that I’m aware of how much the relationships matter.”
Cortes Currents: Is there anything more you would like to add?
Nawel Izard: “I think just an appreciation for the forum and the space on CKTZ that I was given, and even this conversation now is like a beautiful connection that I’m gaining through that channel and network, I’m very grateful for that. I love the openness to learning and just the sense of support that I have felt on Cortes and Quadra for that matter. Folks that are just ready, willing, and able to help. They want to learn and they want to grow together, and there’s really nothing you can’t achieve in a community like that. I’m very grateful to be a part of it in a broader sense.”
Cortes Currents: When is your program?
Nawel Izard: “It is on Thursdays at 10:00 AM. I try to do a fresh episode every week. Of course in the winter I slowed down with fresh episodes ’cause I was opening the office in Campbell River, but folks can expect a new episode every Thursday at 10:00 AM and then online, you can listen to a podcast on the CKT Z SoundCloud anytime,”
Cortes Currents: how do people get hold of you, if they want your services?
Nawel Izard: “You can reach me online. I’m just rebranding away from my personal name, but you can find me under Polaris Law Collective. The website is polaris law.ca and Polaris, of course, is the North Star. It’s spelled just like that.”
Cortes Currents: Would you have a message for the listeners to the radio?
Nawel Izard: “I think a message just of gratitude and something that I didn’t have in my life before moving to this part of the world is really just a deep appreciation for the natural beauty that’s around us. Sometimes; on my roughest worst days, getting to look at the mountain scape or be in the forest and truly be safe and free is something I don’t take for granted.”
“I hope that each of you, whether you’re having the best day of your life or perhaps a less so day, take a moment to appreciate where we are and just how lucky we are to be in a glorious place in the world.”
Links of Interest:
- Polaris Law
- In Session with Nawel Izard (podcasts) – Cortes Community Radio
All photos courtesy Nawel Izard
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