Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to follow my good friend from British Columbia who, in his last number of months in Parliament, has been a strong advocate for Atlantic Canada.
In his role as fisheries critic for the Conservative Party, he has brought attention to a range of issues, which shows that if someone is a parliamentarian with knowledge and passion, that person can represent all Canadians and, indeed, a region on the other side of the country that has not received such representation despite having 32 members of Parliament.
Every single member of Parliament from Atlantic Canada is a Liberal. I am going to highlight some of the hypocrisy that some of those members are demonstrating with their lack of commitment to equality for Atlantic Canada in one of our key institutions, particularly the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice, who regularly feigned outrage in the last Parliament if one touched the Supreme Court Act. He now describes the longstanding constitutional convention to have an Atlantic Canadian jurist on the top court as just a custom. Before, he had expressed it as a requirement of our diversity as a country.
It is profoundly disappointing. I do like a lot of the members from Atlantic Canada. As someone who has spent a lot of time there myself, I know they are well-intended. However, it is about time that they start to speak up to their Prime Minister and their Minister of Justice to correct this major omission and start showing that there is more than just a silence of the lambs in Atlantic Canada.
I am passionate about this, as members can tell, because I am a product of the outstanding legal system and legal education system in Atlantic Canada, in my case, Dalhousie University. Dalhousie Law School, now known as the Schulich School of Law, is the oldest law school in the British Commonwealth, founded in 1883. In fact, the graduates from the early classes at Dalhousie Law School in Halifax became the deans of most of the early law schools across the country, including in Alberta.
Alberta still has a tradition of sending a number of great young minds to Halifax for law school, starting with many people like Joe Lougheed, son of former premier Peter Lougheed, and my friend, Luke Day.
That mix at Dalhousie, one of the finest schools, produces great legal minds. It is the law school for Newfoundland and Labrador. There is a special admission provision.
Between Dalhousie and the University of New Brunswick, they have some of the best legal education in the country. From the early days of our country, those lawyers, those judicial minds, have forged Canadian law here in Parliament, in legislatures, and at the Supreme Court of Canada.
For the Prime Minister to just wave that aside is rather insulting. For someone who claims that diversity is a fundamental tenet of his government, geographic diversity and the tradition of an Atlantic Canada seat to secure that geographic diversity seem like an afterthought.
Atlantic Canada's first justice, William Johnstone Ritchie, a Nova Scotia-trained barrister who became the chief justice of New Brunswick and was an appointment from New Brunswick, was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada by Alexander Mackenzie, the first Liberal Prime Minister.
Let us—including the 32 members from Atlantic Canada—study the history. It was Sir John A. Macdonald, when he returned to office as a Conservative, who made Ritchie the first Atlantic Canadian chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. Some of that early jurisprudence is still referenced today.
These are important traditions in our country. To think that they can be so callously swept aside, even when the entire Atlantic Canadian region is represented by the government party, is astonishing. I would ask them to think about that. They could visit the grave of Justice Ritchie at Beechwood Cemetery here in Ottawa, which is emblematic of the significance of the Supreme Court to this country.
Sir Robert Borden, a Nova Scotia-trained lawyer and my favourite Prime Minister of this country, who held the country together through the challenges of the great war, started the Canadian Bar Association.
Atlantic Canada blazed the trail for common law jurisprudence and our legal education and judicial structure in Canada. There is no question about it. It punched well above its weight since the earliest days of Confederation. In fact, Joseph Howe, the father of representative government, granted to Nova Scotia the first stand-alone representative government of a British colony at that time. In Howe's tradition, I would ask the 32 members from Atlantic Canada to start speaking up, because they are not living up to the ideals of the men and women who have come before them.
Most recently, I had the honour of meeting Constance Glube, who just passed away this February. She was another Dalhousie law grad and the first female chief justice of a superior court in Canada.
I could go on, but it is disappointing that I have to give this primer to the Minister of Justice, because she, and particularly her parliamentary secretary, should not disregard this important tradition and convention as easily as they are doing.
I will show the hypocrisy from the last Parliament. The MP for Charlottetown, who is a lawyer like me, and who practised for a time at the same firm, said this in February 2014:
I say that because the Supreme Court of Canada Act is also a piece of legislation that should be considered of the utmost importance given how the Supreme Court influences all our institutions.
That is when he was complaining about changes to a private member's bill.
We have no bill before this House. We have the Prime Minister's decision on a whim to erase a century of history, yet the MP for Charlottetown seems quite fine with that. At least with a private member's bill, we had debate in this chamber. We had to bring this debate here through an opposition day motion.
The member for Charlottetown then went on to say in that same debate:
In normal times, when matters regarding the appointment of a Supreme Court justice arise, we would be assured that the process would unfold in a manner that was inclusive and meaningful. Canadians also expect matters related to the Supreme Court to be treated in a non-political way, and we expect appointments to be made to ensure a proper linguistic, gender, and regional balance as part of the process.
That was the MP for Charlottetown, who is taking part in this debate today, who now calls this just a custom, that there was a custom to have a judge once in a while from Atlantic Canada. I would ask him to stand up. It is time for a couple of them to do so, including the Minister of Fisheries, another graduate of the Atlantic Canadian legal education system.
In June 2015, the member for Charlottetown also complained that there was an amendment to the Supreme Court Act in the budget implementation bill, and he feigned quite a bit of outrage at the time about that.
We do not even have legislation before this chamber. The Prime Minister feels that he can do what he wants, and so far the 32 members from Atlantic Canada are allowing him to govern that way. Nothing highlights it better than a legal action brought by the trial lawyers of Atlantic Canada, stating that the Prime Minister's conduct constitutes an amendment to the Constitution of Canada. What the Liberals are doing is, in the view of leading Atlantic Canadian trial lawyers, unconstitutional. Where is the member for Charlottetown on this? This legal action was filed on September 19. Specifically they cite paragraph 41(d) of the Constitution Act, on the composition of the Supreme Court of Canada.
As an essential feature of our constitution directly and through convention, the Supreme Court has had for over a century Atlantic Canadian representation. Justice Cromwell, a distinguished jurist, was just the most recent example of that in the long line that goes back to Chief Justice Ritchie. It concerns me that among the photo ops and press conferences he has had, the Prime Minister feels that not only can he disregard a century of constitutional convention, but that he can also disregard the profound and leading impact of Atlantic Canada in our modern judicial system, and claim that he is doing this with diversity in mind.
Diversity is as much in our regional differences and our viewpoints that come from our lived experience in these regions. That is why it is a convention. It is just one seat. To take that away from the part of Canada that gave us our modern common law is atrocious, and now is the time for the 32 members from Atlantic Canada, led by the MP for Charlottetown, to show some backbone and say no to this Prime Minister.