Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her questions. I think she raises some good points. I want to address as many of them as I can in the time allotted.
The first one I would talk about is salaries and the issue of pensions for women and the lack of women judiciary in the country. This is an important issue. As a practising lawyer married to my spouse who is a practising lawyer at Nova Scotia legal aid, I say to the member that if she thinks that the rules for pensions are arcane for the judiciary, she should see what some of pension plans for the legal aid lawyers or crown prosecutors look like. In some cases they are a substantial bar to appointing women to the bench.
We need to go beyond that and this ties into the next point the member made and that is public confidence in the judiciary. I believe the member would concur with me that the reality is that part of the reason we do not have as many women on the bench or that we do not have as representative a bench as we should have is that the appointment of the judiciary in this country has for a long time been a reward for political favouritism. That is the reality and we may as well say it.
I could go through the annals and point to the members of the judiciary who have been appointed not because they were the best lawyers or because they had the best minds, but because they collected enough money for the right political party at the time. That is a historical reality we have to correct.
When we talk about public opinion and public confidence in the courts it is not enough until we amend the way the judiciary is appointed. I agree with the Minister of Justice in that I am not in favour of an elected judiciary in this country but the kind of method of appointment that there is south of the border.
When I say there was a missed opportunity, at the same time I think we could have looked at ways of improving the methodology of the appointment of the judiciary to take into account the needs of women lawyers and minorities and to ensure that the bench was better represented and that the public had confidence in the method of appointment.
The problem with political appointees is that even if the appointee has been involved in politics and would be a good judge, and there are some of those, they wear the disrespect of those who everybody in small communities particularly know climb their way to the judiciary because of political favouritism.
The hon. member has asked for clarification on the reason I do not support the bill. First of all on just those narrow issues, it does not go far enough to help public confidence in the judiciary. It does not go far enough.
She said that the NDP has always been a party that is proud to ensure that people are properly compensated. That is why I belong to it. At a time when the government has told us all and sent a message across the country that we cannot afford some of the essential things that we as Canadians have always believed were important, to turn around now and say that we have money to increase judiciary salaries by 8% or 13% and not provide money for legal aid and not provide more money for the crown prosecutors is why I cannot support it.
I said at the beginning I do not mind the judges making money so long as every other service is increased proportionately or more so where the need is greatest. That has always been our strength as a party in terms of social justice, in terms of making sure that the resources are fairly distributed. Because they are not we cannot support the bill.