Chris Dassios

Chris Dassios attended Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, where he earned several academic prizes, worked at a legal clinic (Parkdale Community Legal Services), and sat on the Board of Directors of that legal clinic before he graduated with an LLB in 1984. He was called to the Ontario Bar in 1986. He practised labour, constitutional, and administrative law as an associate and then a partner with Gowlings in Toronto until 1995, when he was recruited by one of his clients, the Power Workers’ Union (PWU), to establish a legal department and manage the union\’s legal affairs. He is General Counsel to the PWU, which represents the majority of industrial electrical workers in Ontario, owns and operates a training company, and holds an equity stake in the partnership that operates the world\’s largest operating nuclear generating facility, the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. In addition, he was for 21 years an Adjunct Professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School, retiring from that post in 2014. He is a former staff member of the editorial board of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal and a former editor of the Tenant and Landlord Law Reports. He has written and lectured extensively on issues relating to constitutional and labour law and is co-author, with Andrew Lokan, of Constitutional Litigation in Canada (Carswell, looseleaf, 2006). Since 1998, when the PWU and Ontario Hydro established an expedited arbitration system, he has managed the system on the union side through a period of the most dramatic change in Ontario’s electricity industry since the establishment of public power in the early part of the 20th Century.