Not only is it not logical, to go back to the very principle here, it would be exclusionary, only for the province of Quebec.
Madam Boivin makes a good point that while this, for the province of Quebec, may be without precedent, when it come to prior examples of judges having served on the Federal Court and then going to the Supreme Court of Canada, we have judges from outside Quebec, who we've mentioned, who have followed that ascendancy.
I would suggest--it's my opinion--that it would be discriminatory to suggest that judges from the Federal Court who come from the province of Quebec should be excluded from that, when you already have precedent that a judge from Ontario, a judge from Manitoba, has followed that track to the Supreme Court. To say that simply because the person is from Quebec and was on the Federal Court, they are not allowed to serve on the highest court in the land.... To me, that and the example provided by that professor who suggested that the one day that you served on the Federal Court suddenly becomes a barrier for a Quebec jurist, an eminent individual, to go to the Supreme Court of Canada, creates more than an anomaly. In my view, that creates a very prejudicial effect for lawyers from Quebec.