Justice committee  I've only been doing this Zoom for over a year, and I still forget to unmute myself. I want to say first of all, Madam Chair and members of the committee, how nice it is to be with you. Madam Chair, you and I have met before. Congratulations on chairing the committee. It's a great honour.

Justice committee  No, it's simply to say that, as the author of the revision of the rape shield provisions in the Criminal Code back in the early 1990s, it's been a source of great frustration to me that many of those principles often do not seem to be applied in the courts. That's a challenge that I think you, as legislators, are going to continue to be addressing, aside from the culture of the courts.

Justice committee  I think that is perfectly appropriate to mention. Again, I want to go back to the point that the committee members were very conscious of their responsibility and desired to conduct themselves in a way that was beyond reproach.

Justice committee  Yes, it did. One of our committee members had served in a firm. I don't want to go into too much detail, but he recused himself from the conversations about that person.

Justice committee  This was in the broader questions of their own experience with respect to diversity. We would have an ongoing conversation, but there is no question that there were opportunities for the candidates to discuss this in their own questionnaires—and their references were asked about this.

Justice committee  Not only does the candidate meet it, but the francophones on the committee in fact spoke about his français recherché. He speaks beautiful French. I think you will find that Justice Kasirer feels that his work in the civil law and in French really defines him and his connection to Quebec.

Justice committee  I'm not actually sure whose responsibility it is. I think it might be something that could be done in partnership with a number of different groups—law societies, bar associations. That might be something your committee could look at as well, what the ideal situation is. One thing we have, as a result of nine new appointments since 2011, including Justice Kasirer, is that there are quite a few retired Supreme Court of Canada justices lurking about who might be available to give some honest views about what it really means to serve on that court.

Justice committee  That is an important question. All of the candidates do have references that we consult. One of the things we ask about is how collegial they are in working together. I can give you an example from the very first iteration. When we asked the successful candidate, who is now Justice Malcolm Rowe, how do you do this, what is your approach, he made a very interesting comment—and I hope I'm not breaching confidentiality when I say this because he's already there.

Justice committee  I think you've put your finger on what is the most challenging issue we face. We would welcome recommendations of other approaches. I was neither aware of nor had a sense of anyone not applying as a result of the tightness of the application time. The first time, as you may recall, the applications were until the end of the summer, which was very difficult because people were coming in from their summer cottages and trying to get hold of their assistants to help them put together dossiers of their cases, etc.

Justice committee  There were no differences in the questionnaire. Actually, as the process unfolded, it was very much like the others in terms of the kinds of things we wanted to know from people. Again, going back to the earlier questions about diversity, etc., we looked for the same kind of breadth in people.

Justice committee  I wonder if I could just add the following, Mr. Chairman, to clarify this for the honourable member. The short list is not given with any order. In fact, the names are given alphabetically. In the short list, we do not distinguish among them. I have often said that our goal is to present the Prime Minister with a short list of candidates that will keep him up at night trying to figure out which one of these excellent candidates to select.

Justice committee  The judicial commissioner has developed a series of tests. For example, with the anglophone candidates, they do a test, and I think the criteria are that you have to be able to understand and respond to oral argument and to be able to read without translation, etc. In the first two iterations, we actually lost some outstanding candidates who did not meet the standard of functional bilingualism.

Justice committee  That's a question I can't really answer. You have to follow the cases that go through. I would say that on the basis of the candidates who were presented to us, we felt there was a strong commitment to serve not just Quebec but to serve Canada, and consistent with the existing law of the charter.

Justice committee  In the three processes we had different mixes of candidates, including different types of diversity, but we don't simply leave it at that. One issue we explore when we are interviewing candidates is to draw them out on their experience, knowledge and understanding of the diversity of Canadian life.

Justice committee  If anything, we were sort of tip-toeing around and were often afraid, even among ourselves. When we ate dinner together we went someplace where people wouldn't even realize who we were and what we were doing.