We spoke to chief justices; we spoke to at least two former justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, and most of those consultations came as a result of their being references for other candidates, but we also knew there would be a process of consultation by the Minister of Justice afterwards. The consultations took place and whether they could have been broader is another interesting question. We certainly consulted as broadly as we thought we needed to, but I think that a committee with a longer time horizon might want to rethink, and perhaps the timing of it could even be changed.
We thought the consultation with the Chief Justice was the most important because it related to what the successful candidate would have to do, and it is a demanding job. Work on nights and weekends is the norm. There's the fact that a justice on the Supreme Court of Canada has to live in the national capital region. That's not always easy for people from far afield. The nature of the job, the isolation sometimes, and then the collegiality, all these kinds of things, I think, are very important, and the Chief Justice could tell us about them, and even talk realistically about how French works in the court. You can talk about it, but we needed to know how it really works for an anglophone working in French or a francophone working in English. That gave us a better sense of what that meant.
She was extremely helpful in terms of the individual candidates we considered as we were trying to narrow our list.