Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll speak in English. I'm a professor who's spent a good part of my life studying how judges are appointed in Canada and elsewhere in the world. I've always been interested in improving a process. I have been following with great interest the discussio

Justice committee  I'll catch that. I wouldn't use that term, but we have barrels of evidence of surveys of police officers, as compared with the rest of the public, that they have a set of attitudes generally that have a special focus. They are more likely to want very severe penalties than the

Justice committee  My figure is from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics and an article written by two criminologists, including Cheryl Webster, from your university, and Anthony Doob. It was published in The Criminal Law Quarterly some years ago and will be in a book that I have edited, cal

Justice committee  I have never seen it. As an ideological test, certainly political background has been important, both for the Conservative governments and the Liberal governments. We did an empirical study of the judges appointed under the system, and we found—

Justice committee  The federal level.

Justice committee  Oh, I'm sorry.

Justice committee  I can say this. In Ontario it's a 13-person committee. I was its first chair. There was a very careful attempt to balance the committee. We did have lay people. If we had someone from business, we also had someone from the labour area. If we had a defence counsel, we also had may

Justice committee  Not at all, and I would think police officers make good members of these committees. But to say that is the one group we have to get on these committees and just zero in on them is very foolish. These committees have to assess judges for all kinds of roles. A police officer will

Justice committee  I don't know that, but five people spending years and years in jail for crimes they didn't do is five too many. And what it underlines is how important it is to find the very best. That's what I don't hear anyone talking about. Why do you throw out the role of a committee to adv

Justice committee  What I said I'm very unhappy about is the whole idea that these advisory committees are going to be kind of partisan, adversarial things in which a vote of four to three.... Imagine a vote of four federal government appointments against three. There won't be any role for the judg

Justice committee  To me it's very unfortunate. The subcommittee worked on this for many months. They had submissions, not just from lawyers and judges--they certainly had that--but from people who aren't lawyers and judges but have a lot of experience and interest in how to choose good judges. The

Justice committee  I'll just deal with your final question. I'd be in favour of a legislative confirmation at the highest level, the Supreme Court. I might even be interested in it possibly for courts of appeal. I know that's anathema to a lot of the legal community, but I think those are such imp

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I do have an opening statement.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Porter screwed up this morning. They'll probably sue me...and cancel. No, they're usually pretty good.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I am very pleased to be here, Mr. Chairman. The question before us is one of profound importance to Canadian parliamentary democracy, the rules of which are not written in law books or the formal Constitution; they depend mostly on agreed-upon principles, practices, and conventi