35 Facts About Gary Botting

Gary Norman Arthur Botting was born on 19 July 1943 and is a Canadian legal scholar and criminal defense lawyer as well as a poet, playwright, novelist, and critic of literature and religion, in particular Jehovah's Witnesses.

Gary Botting was christened in the Church of England Parish Church of St James the Great in Radley, Berkshire.

Gary Botting attended the Church of England Primary School in Radley.

On Elizabeth's eighth birthday, 8 January 1954, the Gary Botting family arrived in Fort Erie, Ontario as immigrants to Canada.

Gary Botting received the US National Pest Control Award when he demonstrated that his experiments had practical applications beyond producing finer silk.

Mavis and Gary Botting attended the semi-official Theodena Kingdom Boarding School in Suffolk, run by Rhoda Ford, the sister of Percy Ford, at that time the head of Jehovah's Witnesses in Great Britain.

Gary Botting later documented the harsh discipline by caning meted out to him at the hands of Ms.

Gary Botting's lay preaching continued after his arrival in Canada at age ten.

Gary Botting entered the "industrial arts" stream in high school, majoring in drafting and machine shop.

In July 1955, Gary Botting was baptized as a "dedicated" Jehovah's Witness at a convention in New York City.

From 1961 to 1963, Gary Botting volunteered in Hong Kong as a "pioneer" missionary, supporting himself by working as a journalist for the South China Morning Post.

In 1993, Gary Botting published Fundamental Freedoms and Jehovah's Witnesses, an academic work about Jehovah's Witnesses in Canada and their role in pressing for the development of the Canadian Bill of Rights and what eventually became the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Rather than regarding himself as an essentialist like Iris Murdoch or an existentialist like Jean-Paul Sartre, Gary Botting has described himself as an extensionist: all things, including human understanding, can be explained as extensions of mind and body in space and time.

In September 1961, Gary Botting left Canada for Hong Kong initially to become a missionary for Jehovah's Witnesses; but he had to support himself, and soon became first a proofreader and then a full-time reporter for the South China Morning Post.

Gary Botting returned to Canada and in 1964 began to work for the Peterborough Examiner, then owned by Robertson Davies, at the same time attending Trent University, where he was editor of the student newspaper, Trent Trends, and literary magazine, Tridentine.

Gary Botting became fast friends with Farley Mowat and wrote several features about the popular author, describing their shared escapades on The Happy Adventure, including speculation as to whether sharks had invaded Lake Ontario via the newly opened St Lawrence Seaway.

Gary Botting first became active in theatre in the 1960s, when he acted in Academy Theatre and Peterborough Theatre Guild productions in Ontario, Canada.

Now a full-time novelist, Gary Botting wrote his first semi-autobiographical novel Through Freedom's Curtain, in Hong Kong in 1962.

Gary Botting discovers himself, but first must learn to live with the anguish of self-realization.

Gary Botting obtained his Master of Arts degree in English from Memorial University of Newfoundland, where his focus was largely on Shakespearean authorship and textual criticism of the quarto and folio editions of de Vere's Hamlet.

From 1972 to 1986 Gary Botting taught English literature and creative writing at Red Deer College.

Gary Botting was at various times the college's media relations coordinator, chairman of the English department, editor-in-chief of Red Deer College Press, and president of the Faculty Association.

Gary Botting taught English and creative writing at Maskwachees Cultural College in Hobbema, establishment of which he initially proposed in the early 1970s.

In 1985, Botting came to national attention when he warned of a threat to academic freedom after the RCMP removed copies of banned books from the stacks of university libraries, including University of Calgary Library.

In 1986, Gary Botting resigned as professor of English at Red Deer College and entered law school.

Gary Botting eventually articled for Christie in Victoria, at the same time continuing to teach English literature and creative writing at Simon Fraser University.

Gary Botting was elected vice-president of Victims of Law Dilemma, an independent watchdog group designed to keep lawyers responsible and to pressure Canadian law societies to appoint lay benchers.

When he was in second year, the Law Society of Alberta "investigated" Botting for representing Howard Pursley, an alleged white supremacist refugee claimant who was eventually flown directly from Calgary to Texas in a form of disguised extradition later known as extraordinary rendition.

That year Gary Botting represented the first dozen Chinese students in Canada to be granted refugee status after they publicly protested China's 1989 clampdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Gary Botting pioneered the use of video appearances of witnesses in jury trials before Canadian courtrooms were equipped with video machines, in one instance convincing the judge that she and the jury should move from the courthouse to a nearby hotel in Victoria, BC to hear the live evidence of a witness in New Brunswick.

Long a strong advocate of advanced education for practicing lawyers, Gary Botting completed his Master of Laws in 1999 and a second PhD, in law, in 2004 at the University of British Columbia, and went on to publish a number of scholarly works on Canadian and international law.

Gary Botting was recognized as "Canada's leading legal scholar on extradition law" by Larry Rousseau, executive vice president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

Gary Botting's US-published Extradition between Canada and the United States, cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, criticized Canada's level of cooperation with the United States in international criminal matters, arguing that Canada's policy of placing international comity over individual rights had dangerously expanded executive discretion and damaged human rights protections.

Gary Botting has four children by his first wife, Dr Heather Gary Botting.

In 2011, Gary Botting married Australian-Canadian speech language pathologist Virginia Martin.