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SNOW, ALEXANDER JOHN RUSSELL, lawyer and office holder; b. 2 Dec. 1857 in Hull (Gatineau), Lower Canada, son of John Allan Snow*, a surveyor, and Emma Catherine Bradley; m. 25 Nov. 1885 Katherine Elizabeth Beaty (1860–1940) in Toronto, and they had 11 children, of whom 3 sons and 4 daughters lived to adulthood; d. there 20 Oct. 1937 and was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Alexander John Russell Snow (he signed A. J. Russell) came from a privileged, upper-middle-class background. His father was born in Hull, and his mother’s family hailed from New Brunswick. He grew up comfortably in a large stone house in Hull. He was educated privately and then at the Ottawa Collegiate Institute, and in 1876 he was admitted as a student-at-law by the Law Society of Upper Canada.

After he was called to the Ontario bar in 1883, Snow established a practice in Toronto, working mainly as a barrister in civil and criminal cases. He would be appointed a kc in 1908. Among his most widely publicized cases was his defence of a member of one of the country’s largest real-estate companies, McCutcheon Brothers, whose directors would be acquitted in 1916 of conspiracy to defraud their investors and clients through a scheme involving overvalued land. A successful and respected litigator, he also argued several cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

Snow, a Conservative, was an acquaintance of Premier James Pliny Whitney*, who appointed him on 5 Oct. 1906 to head a royal commission inquiring into the Ontario Institute for the Education and Instruction of the Blind in Brantford; the principal, Herbert Fairbairn Gardiner, was accused of financial and administrative mismanagement. After the mother of a former student at the Ontario Institute for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, which was based in Belleville and headed by Robert Mathison*, alleged that her daughter had been beaten there, Snow was given the task of investigating that claim as well. In separate reports issued the following year, he criticized Gardiner and praised Mathison (who had retired in the previous November) while concluding that both schools had inadequate facilities and substandard teaching methods. He recommended numerous changes, and his suggestion that the Belleville institute focus more on the oral method of instruction (as opposed to sign language) probably contributed to its official adoption by the school in 1912.

Snow continued to practise law after the outbreak of the First World War, during which two of his sons served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force overseas: Geoffrey Allan was killed in action at the battle of Courcelette, and Gerald Bradley was wounded during the Last Hundred Days campaign [see Sir Arthur William Currie]. A. J. Russell contributed to the war effort in a different capacity: in January 1915 he volunteered to be appointed Toronto’s registrar of alien enemies, following the resignation of Judge Emerson Coatsworth. The office had been created in urban centres across the country according to an order in council (28 Oct. 1914) instituted by Sir Robert Laird Borden’s Conservative government. Registrars served under the authority of Dominion Police commissioner Arthur Percy Sherwood and as adjuncts to the military forces garrisoning their respective districts. Each registrar was responsible for ensuring that within his district’s 20-mile radius all adult male residents born in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, or the Ottoman empire registered with his office and then reported regularly for inspection. If an alien enemy appeared to pose a threat or failed to report, the registrar could order his internment.

As a respected member of the bar, Snow was an obvious choice for this most difficult task, which he carried out until the war’s end. On the one hand, the Canadian government had legitimate security concerns, based in part on British intelligence, that enemy reservists or saboteurs might be operating in Canada. On the other hand, wartime propaganda and jingoism incited nativist and racist sentiments among the Anglo-Saxon population, leading to the false denunciation and wrongful imprisonment of thousands of immigrants, some of whom were naturalized British subjects. Snow understood that many so-called alien enemies had lost their jobs, and he was sympathetic towards those who seemed to be law-abiding and desirous of work. In an interview that appeared in the Toronto Daily Star on 15 May 1915, he remarked, “If they show a disposition to be good citizens, to keep quiet, and make no trouble, and to be loyal to Britain, there is no need to disturb them.”

Snow could be both fair and compassionate. On one occasion a pale, gaunt Austrian named Jozef Furman reported to him as required. “You look hungry,” Snow observed. “Have you had any breakfast?” When the man shook his head, Snow handed him a coin and said, “Take this, get your breakfast, and go to the City Relief Office, and see if they can do anything for you.” At other times, however, when faced with a lack of evidence or conflicting interpretations, Snow, like others in his position, fell back on intolerant assumptions about aliens that were moulded by his own experience, social position, and occupational class. In August 1915 Frederick Edward Riethdorf, who taught German at Woodstock College, was scheduled to address a meeting of the Speakers’ Patriotic League in Lake of Bays Township, in the Muskoka region north of Toronto. Snow and Toronto South mp Angus Claude Macdonnell demanded that the event be cancelled. It was. Although Riethdorf supported the war effort (he strongly opposed German militarism and would later join the Canadian Army Medical Corps), Snow and Macdonnell argued that because he had been born in Germany, he was unfit to address a British audience. As a registrar, Snow helped shape public perceptions of immigrants and mediate their evolving relationships with the federal government and Canada’s majority population.

Following the war, A. J. Russell Snow continued his legal practice at the firm of Beaty, Snow, and Naismith, served on the executive committee of the Ontario Bar Association between 1919 and 1920, and became vice-president in 1922. He kept up an active caseload until a few months before his death on 20 Oct. 1937 at the age of 79.

Mark Osborne Humphries