Madam Speaker, the Liberals have one thing among them of which we can be sure: that they will always help their friends to jump the queue, to secure that sole-source contract, to get that insider access and to make sure they are always appointing Liberals to the bench.
Time and time again, the names that are found atop the list of judicial appointments are also found atop the Liberal donor list. This time, the justice minister let it slip that one of his own major donors, not just a donor to the general election fund, but to the minister's nomination campaign and then to his local election campaigns directly, will be receiving an appointment to the bench. This creates the appearance that if lawyers want to be a judge in Canada, they had better start giving to the Liberals instead of focusing on the quality of their work.
Canadians want judges to be appointed on their merit, not on how much they have donated to the Liberals and, specifically, not on how much they have donated to the justice minister. Canadians want a culture change in Ottawa, one that shifts appointments and contracts away from Liberal insiders and back to those who, on their merit alone, are the most deserving. Canadians deserve better.
We have seen it over the last six years. Very notably, as the government spent all kinds of money in aid to folks during the pandemic, the Liberals found themselves at the front of the line. It was not just the WE scandal, the former minister of finance being besties with the Kielburgers or the Prime Minister's ill-fated trip to billionaire island. What about the then fisheries minister and “clam scam” or the then finance minister and his forgotten French villa. On and on it went with ethical lapses of “Oh, I forgot” and “We're not really that close friends and that's why I thought it was okay.”
Here we have a situation where the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, for a second time, has found himself on the front page of the newspapers because his donors find themselves on top of those appointment lists. Most notably in this more recent accidental outburst of honesty from the minister in a now-deleted tweet, we see a donor to the minister's nomination campaign. To outsiders, that might not mean anything, but folks know that when they run to be the candidate of record for a party, it is usually friends and family who find themselves donating to those nomination contests. First is the donation to the nomination and then the donation to the local election campaign. The link is quite clear.
What Canadians want and what Canadians deserve are judicial appointments that do not give the appearance that they are based on anything other than merit. It does a disservice to the lawyers who are nominated, it does a disservice to the Canadians who bring their cases before the courts and it does a disservice to this place when there is the appearance of anything other than the most upright and forthright actions by all members in this place. Canadians have grown tired after six years and now they demand better.