Mr. Speaker, had I had time to do a little more research, I would have checked to see if the school of law at McGill, where I know my friend taught for many years, had as its early dean a Dalhousie graduate. I would go out on a limb to say I think McGill was one of the later law schools to adopt the case law approach trailblazed at Dalhousie. Dalhousie followed the Harvard tradition, so it really goes back that far.
As the member well knows, our constitution is both written and by convention, and that convention is reinforced the longer the practice is maintained. In this case, I would suggest, and I hope he would agree with me, that in terms of constitutional convention, that also fits with the spirit of paragraph 41(d) of the Constitution Act, 1982. This is probably one of our oldest and most profound constitutional conventions.
I highlighted the word “custom” because in the last Parliament the MP for Charlottetown found that the diversity of having the Atlantic Canadian justice on the Supreme Court of Canada was fundamental. Now he seems to be backing away from that. For someone who is a well-spoken and thoughtful MP, trained in the legal system by Atlantic Canada, he should now stand up for it.