It does make you attractive, but it's not the only factor. I have trouble understanding why commissions attach so much importance to that. I know of many public servants with legal training who work in departments all across Canada. In administrative tribunals, an area I am relatively familiar with, there are many remarkably talented people. Some of them become judges.
Have you considered the fact that many lawyers are earning high fees in areas of the law that do not prepare them very well for ordinary practice? Lawyers working for corporations, for example, are very often more like business people. They work on boards of directors, among other things. Imagine that from one day to the next, these people are suddenly sent to preside over a trial involving family law, which requires having some psychology, and other skills.
Indeed--and Mr. Cotler can confirm this--a great many of these lawyers from large firms in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal would not agree to a career in a superior court, except perhaps in the Appeal Court or the Supreme Court, because it would not suit them. Their professional practice has nothing whatsoever to do with the work of a justice of the superior court, who has to hear a great many cases involving family law, private law or trade law, for example.