Last week the Ministry of the Attorney General announced that four new judges have been appointed to the Ontario Court of Justice to serve across Ontario, including one in Ontario’s northwest.
Justice Archana Arun Medhkar comes to Northern Ontario from India by way of a long career in Toronto, according to a release from Attorney General Doug Downey’s office, and will serve the Kenora and Fort Frances areas.
“Justice Archana Arun Medhekar was called to the Ontario bar in 2004, following her legal education in India,” Downey’s office said in its release.
“She was an associate with Satwant Singh Khosla Law Office in Scarborough, working in various areas including family, corporate and immigration law, before joining the former MW Lawyers LLP as partner in 2005”
According to the Attorney General’s office, Justice Medhekar established her own firm in 2008 where she practiced as a family lawyer, as a lawyer for the Office of the Children’s Lawyer (OCL), as duty counsel, mediator and arbitrator.
“From 2018 to 2025, Justice Medhekar represented over 350 young clients as an OCL legal panel member,” the release continued.
“She has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada, the Court of Appeal for Ontario, the Superior Court of Justice and the Ontario Court of Justice. Justice Medhekar was certified as a specialist in Family Law by the Law Society of Ontario.”
In addition to her career as a lawyer, Justice Medhkar has a variety of other interests.
“Justice Medhekar has volunteered with several organizations and has been honoured with awards including a Volunteer Service Award from the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration and a Top 25 Canadian Immigrants Award,” the Attorney General’s office said.
“Since 2023, she has volunteered with COSTI Immigrant Services, a community-based agency providing employment, educational and social services to immigrant communities. Justice Medhekar also volunteered with the United Nations working group of Mediators Beyond Borders International. In addition, she teaches at the York University School of Continuing Studies in the Certificate in Family Mediation program and at the University of Guelph-Humber. Justice Medhekar was president of the Ontario Association of Family Mediation. She is a longtime recreational softball player with Bloordale Baseball League.
Justice Medhekar graduated from Manikchand Pahade Law College in India and the National Committee of Accreditation and also received a Master of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University.
The appointment to serve both in Kenora and Fort Frances has been praised by the Rainy River District Law Association (RRDLA). The Fort Frances court house operated without a dedicated judge for an extended period before one was appointed in 2023.
“Until the appointment of Justice Terry Waltenbury in 2023, who continues to preside in Fort Frances, the Rainy River District had been without a local judge for 11 years,” the association’s release said.
“The Rainy River District Law Association thanks Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas for formally designating this additional judicial resource to serve Fort Frances, which recognizes the needs of the justice system in Rainy River District.”
RRDLA president Douglas Judson of Judson Howie LLP says the region’s lawyers are always happy to see new resources in the area.
“We’re always happy to see new judicial resources come to the Rainy River District, and I think that this joint position is a recognition that there is a need there, that there is a volume of cases in the district that will benefit from having another judge that is, at least notionally assigned to Fort Frances,” Judson said.
“To be clear, we don’t know if her honour’s chambers will be established in Kenora or Fort Frances, or where her place will be just yet. But certainly the Chief Justice has directed that she is splitting her time between the two locations.”
Technology has also changed things about the judicial system in recent years as well.
“I think a perspective that people might not have is that back, a decade ago, when we were still trying to get a judge in Fort Frances, when we didn’t have one, there was sort of an ongoing response we kept getting from government that was like, ‘oh, there’s not enough cases there. We can’t put a judge there. That doesn’t make any sense.’ But now, in the the modern hearing environment, so much of our court is taking place virtually that a judge who’s based in Fort Frances or Dryden or anywhere else can support sort of the caseload in other parts of the region,” Judson said.
“So I think you could expect that even though this judge will be based in Kenora and Fort Frances, they’re probably also going to be used to support courts happening in other parts of Northwestern Ontario.”
Judson says he does wonder whether the local court house has enough resources to support the expansion of the judiciary.
“The number of judges that we have in the Provincial Court between the Kenora and Rainy River Districts has doubled. There used to be, I think, five between the two districts, and now that number has doubled. So we are seeing an expansion of the judiciary, I think, in response to the justice needs of the region,” he said.
“One of the things that we are concerned about is that even though we’re seeing this expansion of judicial resources, we aren’t exactly seeing the same lock step expansion in other types of court resources, for example, in staffing at courthouses, which has been an ongoing challenge across Northwestern Ontario to make sure that there’s enough people to do the back office work and provide the clerk support for the judiciary in the in the courthouses, so we’re not seeing that that change.”
One of Judson’s other concerns, though, are the limits on the legal profession. There are only so many lawyers able to represent clients in the region.
“Our legal profession has been kind of stagnant in its size, and we haven’t seen it grow,” he said.
“So it is putting a lot of pressure on a finite number of lawyers to appear in more and more different types of specialized courts across the region. Certainly our office, as the largest law firm in the Rainy River District, we feel those pressures, that there’s a lot of courts that pull counsel in different directions on a day-to-day basis and it’s the same people appearing in different courts all the time.”
