After receiving her undergraduate and Masters degrees from the University of Toronto, Judge Maryka Omatsu received her LL.B. from York University’s Osgoode Hall law school. Judge Omatsu wanted the opportunity to learn first hand about poverty law at Parkdale Community Legal Services.

After graduation in 1975, she spent 16 years working in private and government practice. Her primary areas of practice were criminal, immigration, human rights and environmental law. Judge Omatsu was a legal counsel for the National Association of Japanese Canadians and helped negotiate her community’s successful claim for compensation and human rights guarantees for their WWII incarceration and confiscation of property. She wrote about the struggle in her award winning book, Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience.

Judge Omatsu became interested in a judicial appointment, after she spent several years as the part-time Chair of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and as an adjudicator for the Law Society. In February 1993, she was appointed to the Ontario Court of Justice, as the first Asian woman judge in Canada’s history. A judge for almost sixteen years, she sits at Old City Hall in the experimental Drug Treatment, Mental Health and First Nations Gladue Courts.