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Alan Riddell is a bilingual labour relations lawyer and partner with the law firm of Soloway Wright LLP in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He is a former part-time course instructor at Algonquin College in Ottawa. He is also a co-founder, and director, of Young Voices Can!, an Ottawa-based registered charity dedicated to combatting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Ottawa-area schools and to fostering dialogue and mutual understanding between high school students from Ottawa’s Jewish, Muslim (and other) communities.

Early life and education

Riddell was born in Ottawa into a family of Canadian diplomats and was raised partly in Asia and Africa, He received three years of his primary school education, and all of his high school education at Ottawa (OCDSB) public schools (Rockcliffe Park Public School and Lisgar Collegiate Institute).

He received his post-secondary education in Toronto, Quebec City and France. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto (LLB, 1988) and of France’s Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (“Sciences-Po Paris”) (Dip.RI, 1984). While still a student, he worked for Senator Heath MacQuarrie, and later in the office of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Legal career

Riddell practices employment law, human rights law and public (administrative and constitutional) law. He does so in both English and French and has appeared before multiple different administrative tribunals and all levels of courts.

As a young lawyer, Riddell successfully argued a number of high-profile cases, including the landmark decision of Dagg v. Minister of Finance in the Supreme Court of Canada, which defined the privacy rights of federal public servants under Canada's new Access to Information Act in which he defended the access to information rights of federal public servants. He also appeared as legal counsel before the Supreme Court of Canada in two other reported cases and on several occasions before the Ontario Court of Appeal and Federal Court of Appeal.

Teaching and publishing

Riddell has published and lectured extensively, in both English and French in the fields of employment law and constitutional law. He is the author of multiple published articles, including "À la recherche du temps perdu: La Cour suprême et l'interprétation des droits linguistiques constitutionnels dans les années 80" [27 (1988 Les Cahiers de Droit) and "Beware of Prospective Employees with Legal Constraints: The Do's and Don't's of Hiring from a Competitor" (Canadian Employment Law Today, March, 2017).

In addition, Riddell has been a frequent speaker and lecturer at law seminars and conferences on labour, employment and human rights topics, and in the past taught the employment law course for human resources professionals at Ottawa’s Algonquin College of Applied Arts.

Community activism

Riddell is the Vice President, and a Board Member, of Samawada, a registered Canadian charity that builds village wells in East Africa so that local villagers there have clean drinking water. Samawada’s focus is on ensuring that all school-age children, and their parents have a safe and secure supply of water, in the face of the increasing desertification brought about by climate change.

Riddell is also a past member of the Board of Directors of Peace Camp Ottawa, a charitable organization formerly focussed on bringing together Jewish and Arab Canadian school children in Ottawa, Israel, the West Bank and the Middle East, for the purpose of exposing them to each other’s values and viewpoints, and of creating future leaders capable of building bridges between those communities.

In addition, Riddell is the co-founder and current Vice-Chair of Young Voices Can!, a registered Canadian charity that organizes interfaith programs for Ottawa school children with a view to combatting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Ottawa schools, and to promoting harmony and understanding among Ottawa’s different religious, and cultural communities. He and his co-founders created Young Voices Can! to build bridges between those communities on the premise that if students can be taught to respect one another’s cultural and religious values, they will eventually grow up into more tolerant adults who will accept, and even defend, Canada’s cultural and religious diversity.

Young Voices Can! seeks to promote intercommunal harmony among high school student by teaching them conflict resolution strategies, leadership and global citizenship skills, in a context in which they learn to respect each other’s different cultural and religious beliefs and backgrounds. Under the patronage of Rabbi Mendel Blum, Imam Ziyad Delic and the Hon. Yasir Naqvi, Young Voices Can! has successfully brought hundreds of Ottawa’s Muslim, Jewish, Christian (and other) high school students together for after-school programs and activities to promote the Canadian values of pluralism and tolerance towards religious and cultural differences. Out of concern for the safety and security of its student participants, Young Voices Can! had to temporarily pause its youth activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent fighting in Gaza that began on October 8, 2023, but is scheduled to resume those activities in 2027.

Past political activism

Riddell was a candidate in the 2004 federal election. Only a few days prior to the vote, the Ottawa Sun published a damaging front-page story about Riddell, that was later retracted as inaccurate. Despite this erroneous news story, and the last-minute shift in voter support, Riddell finished the election with more than 20,600 votes. After the election was over, the Ottawa Sun published a prominent retraction of its erroneous front-page story about Riddell in which it expressed regret at "the resulting prejudice to his campaign".

In 2006, Riddell was recruited to run again in Ottawa South but stepped aside, three days prior to the start of the 2006 election, to enable Allan Cutler, the public servant who had blown the whistle on the scandal, to run in his stead as the Conservative Party’s star candidate in Ottawa South. Party officials issued a press release thanking Riddell for his gesture and confirming that they "looked forward to having him run as a candidate in future elections".

Current political activism

In the summer of 2026, Riddell registered as a candidate for school board trustee with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board as part of the 2026 Ottawa municipal election.

Riddell stated reasons for running are (i) to foster to help restore parental confidence in Ottawa’s public school system; (ii) to try to help reverse the steady decline in student enrolment in the public school system; (iii) to help bring fiscal responsibility and quality education to the public school system; (iv) to implement extra-curricular student programs designed to foster greater understanding and tolerance of cultural differences; and (v) to try to persuade the Minister of Education to lift his current suspension of the Board so that its management becomes directly accountable to Ottawa parents rather than to the Ontario government in Toronto.