Belaiche's professional life centered on Toronto, the capital of Ontario and home to many of the province's law firms, hospitals, and government ministries. His legal training took place in the same city, at the University of Toronto, which he attended for both his undergraduate and law degrees.
Belaiche studied at the University of Toronto, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1983 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1986. Founded in 1827 as King's College, the university grew into one of Canada's leading research universities and a major centre of professional education.
The Bachelor of Laws was the standard first law degree in Canada at that time, and he completed it before his admission to the Ontario bar in 1988.
He is also associated with McGill University, a institution founded in 1821 in Montreal.
Belaiche entered the legal profession in Ontario after being called to the bar in 1988. Lawyers in the province are admitted by the Law Society of Ontario, the body that licenses and regulates the legal profession there.
He was a partner at WeirFoulds, a Toronto law firm founded in 1860 whose origins are tied to the city's commercial growth in the late nineteenth century. His practice also included work as legal counsel at the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, the provincial ministry responsible for administering publicly funded health services, and a firm environment at Miller Thomson LLP, a Canadian law firm.
He later served as general counsel at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, a downtown teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto. After about seven years in-house, he co-chaired the hospital's task force preparing for compliance with Ontario's freedom of information and privacy legislation, known as FIPPA.
In 2012 he left St. Michael's to establish Belaiche Law, a Toronto practice focused on health care. The firm's work included health, corporate and commercial, privacy and access to information, and employment law, as well as conflict management and dispute resolution in the health care environment.
