Injustice in the making

The Globe and Mail reports that the Cons are right back to their efforts to pick fights with the judiciary, this time by changing the judicial appointment process without consultation:

Beverley McLachlin, Canada's Chief Justice, along with a powerful council of the country's top judges issued an unprecedented rebuke yesterday to Justice Minister Vic Toews for hatching a plan to arbitrarily change the way judges are chosen.

The Canadian Judicial Council expressed dismay that Mr. Toews is planning to introduce "significant changes to the composition and functioning of the Judicial Advisory Committees," secret groups which are set up in each region to vet candidates for the 1,100 federal judgeships across the country.

Chief Justice McLachlin, who chairs the council, urged Mr. Toews to include the judiciary and key legal bodies in any discussion of changes to the committee vetting process...

(T)he committees are typically composed of five senior members: one nominated by the federal government; one by the chief justice of the province; one from the provincial bar association or law society; one from the provincial government; and a lay member.

They rank nominees as being very qualified, qualified or not qualified. The federal government is then free to choose from the large pools of judges who have been vetted in each region. They almost always choose someone in the qualified or very qualified category.

Mr. Toews also said the government plans to move to a simple pass or fail rating for judicial nominees. A spokesman for his office could not be reached last night.

"That is a transparent attempt to broaden his discretion and reduce the power of the committees," Mr. Addario of the criminal-lawyers group said last night. "Inevitably, you get more patronage and less qualified appointments."

In principle, the idea of police representation on the advisory committees isn't a bad one...though there's no reason at all why that couldn't be achieved through a consultative process (with due regard for other interests which may need to be represented) rather than by fiat.

But the other planned change doesn't seem to have any reasonable basis. Surely a government looking to appoint the best possible candidates to the bench should want to receive a more specific ranking on each prospective judge, rather than a mere pass or fail rating. Instead, the Cons appear to be headed further down the road toward less information and more patronage. And that can only draw the rightful ire of both the current judiciary, and Canadians in general who want competence rather than partisanship to be the guiding principle in judicial appointments.