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Les graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree from McGill in 1980, with a Bachelor of Laws degree from Queen’s University in 1986, and with a Business Information Systems Certificate from St. Lawrence College in 2006.. He was called to the Bar in Ontario in 1988, and has practiced immigration law in Kingston, in conjunction with some other types of law, since then.
For the first 30 years of his practice, he was an active litigator before all branches of the Immigration & Refugee Board, the Parole Board of Canada, and the Federal, Superior and the Ontario Courts. His practice was focussed on inadmissibility, refugee, and family immigration cases, and he was for a decade the Designated Representative, appointed by the Immigration and Refugee Board to assist mentally ill immigration detainees in the St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre.
A member of the Executive Committee of the Ontario Bar Association’s Citizenship and Immigration Section for 15 of the past 17 years, Les is a past President of the Canadian Prison Law Association, of the Frontenac Law Association, and of two of Kingston’s largest immigrant services organizations.
Over the years, he has given presentations respecting the interaction of immigration, criminal, and correctional law across Canada, and before sessions of many professional organizations; and has published numerous articles respecting these issues. For a time, he was co-host of DiverseCity, a cable television show about immigration and refugee issues.
When not practicing immigration law, Les likes to play guitar, to run for exercise, to travel to exotic places, and to give back to the community. Over the last 20 years he has been pleased to combine several of those interests together in trips to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in the Third World, starting with the one he took to El Salvador in 2006, which is memorialized on his website.