Mr. Speaker, the comments of my friend from the NDP were very good comments. There are a couple of matters I want to point out to him.
He mentioned something about it being easy to criticize the courts in Canada. I know it is easy to criticize an umpire or a referee in a hockey game and to deal with that, but I can say as a practising lawyer myself that one has to be very careful about what one says about judges and their judgments. It is far easier to say things in the House than it is outside the House, unless we want to find out what the rules are for contempt of court. I point that matter out.
I want to put something in perspective too. Comments were made about the American system of justice. I can think of a lot of great supreme court judges in the United States: Justice Holmes, Justice Warren and Justice Marshall. They were appointed but went through a very rigorous appointment process. They have a lot of power like the judges in Canada. The public there believes it has a right to know what agenda these people are bringing to the courts. This is vetted and is publicly dealt with.
A person who I personally and politically had a lot of admiration for during the Reagan era was Robert Bork. He was turned down in that process. That would probably make my NDP friends happy. It did not make me happy but it showed that the system worked.
In our system we do not get any scrutiny on that. Basically, my own reading of how one gets to be a judge on the Supreme Court of Canada is to be a good donator. A person who earns $110,000 a year is going to have a lot better chance of getting into our Supreme Court of Canada or our courts of appeal. Another thing would be to be a good fundraiser. That means being a lawyer, but if someone has one of those criteria and is with the right party, chances are pretty good he or she will be there.
I am not exactly sure the public or anyone else would say that is the proper way of determining who should be in the courts. I want to put a few of those points in perspective. There have been a lot of excellent judges on the supreme court of the United States over the years. We can criticize that system all we want, but I think the level of judicial decision making that has come out of the U.S. supreme court generally has been far superior to our system here.
I want to perhaps get my learned colleague's reaction to these comments. I do not think we are advocating electing Supreme Court of Canada judges but we are talking about having a good independent system in place to make sure we get the very best men and women as our judges.