Raffi Balmanoukian

Raffi Balmanoukian has been the Province’s Registrar in Bankruptcy since 2018. He has also been a sole practitioner in New Glasgow since his call to the bar in 1992, at the time the youngest lawyer in Nova Scotia. Over time, he has developed an adjudicative practice in several fields, including as a member and current Chair of the Criminal Code Review Board, a Vice-Chair of the Nova Scotia Labour Board and a member of the Nova Scotia Assessment Appeal Tribunal in addition to his role as Registrar. He is a current member of the federal Payments in Lieu of Taxes Dispute Advisory Panel. He has also sat on the Barristers’ Society Complaints Investigation Committee, the Bar Exam screening and appeals committee, and has been an instructor of the Land Registration Act qualification course. He is the author of “Property Law in the Maritimes” used at the Nova Scotia Community College. He has been a three-term Small Claims Court adjudicator, a former member of the Nova Scotia Real Estate Commission Discipline Committee, the Motor Vehicle Appeal Board, and a former instructor in the Bar Admissions Course (where he remains editor of the contracts and real estate resource materials). He maintains his solicitor’s practice including a growing focus on wills, estates, and trusts as part of his service to an ageing clientele, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and symposia.

Raffi believes strongly that “justice comes to you,” and as such travels frequently around the Province so as to enable matters to be heard in the locale of the principal stakeholders.

An avid student of history, Raffi yearns for a return to the days in which his love-hate relationship with airlines takes him to various battlefields, monuments, and other sources of long rambling narratives of interest to exactly nobody. Since he is well into middle age, he splits his passion for Canadian military history with finding new ways to grill meat.