I don't know if there's much point at this time in my attempting to analyze appointments that were made by the previous government, or what motivations went into them, and I should point out to you that I'm not proposing a new system. A system is already up and running that was proposed and implemented by my predecessor.
I should be very clear about how these judicial advisory committees work. They're not part of our adversarial system. In many ways, we generally think of decision-making in this country along adversarial lines. We can think of the House of Commons: we have the split between the government and the opposition parties. If you attend in court there is the crown attorney--or the plaintiff--and the defendant, or the accused. We are used to an adversarial system and so we assume that is the way things are organized.
That's not the case with the judicial advisory committee. My experience at this point is that these committees overwhelmingly come to a consensus one way or the other, and it's not a question of having the government against any other particular group. These individuals work together, and I believe they do work together. We can be very proud of the individuals who have been appointed to the Superior Court bench in this country, and we shouldn't apologize for it. I don't think we should fret that somehow something has gone amiss when in fact we have an excellent system, an excellent process, and we have great individuals who have stepped forward to serve their country.