We looked for all of the above. You know, it's interesting. Judges who serve in very small communities often find that when they go to the bench, they are advised not to be too involved in the community organizations, as many of them were before they were elevated to the bench, because it creates the possibility of conflict of interest in small communities. You see the judges move back and forth because they have a lot of conflicts. It's very situational.
What we found with the candidates with whom we felt most confident was that there was an interest in the world outside their own role as judges, that they cared about the community, that they cared about issues that might be on an international level often before they went to the bench. Many of them were people—Justice Rowe is one of them—who came from quite modest backgrounds, often very poor backgrounds, but who just had that wonderful remarkable intelligence and resilience making them great Canadian success stories. It was wonderful to see their humanity.
We looked for that kind of humanity in people, because it's not an abstract exercise. Real people are affected. We very much looked for evidence of that. It came in many different ways, depending on the nature of where they lived and what they were able to do.