Christie Blatchford isn’t a fan of the secret and convoluted way that our Supreme Court is staffed:
According to the latest serious rumour, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson are poised to make two appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The two will be chosen from a secret short list of six names produced by an all-party selection committee which whittled down a bigger secret list (given to them by the Justice Minister after his officials mysteriously came up with what is believed to have been 12 names) and only after consultation with unnamed officials from provincial law societies and law schools and unnamed senior judges.
[. . .]
The lack of openness is a particular concern with the Supreme Court, which, as has been evident recently, and even in its current ostensibly non-activist form, is plenty activist about telling government when it is wrong.
I refer of course to the Insite decision, which effectively told the federal government, particularly the former health minister Tony Clement, that its policy against this particular supervised injection site was arbitrary, ill-conceived and violated drug users’ rights to “life, liberty and security of the person” as defined by the Charter of Rights.
As it happens, in the end I reluctantly concurred with the result (that Insite stays open), but there’s no getting away from the bottom line that a group of unelected judges over-ruled the elected government and effectively legislated policy, albeit in a specific case.
[. . .]
Canadians are comforted by the fact ours isn’t like the American system, where presidential appointments to the Supreme Court have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate (such an unseemly business, such a circus) and where, o! the horror, some lower-court judges actually run for office.
How is it better to have kings emerge from a secretive inside-baseball process, for all we know involving a witches’ chants and eye of newt, than to vote for them?
