Paul “Inkless” Wells points out that the hyperventilation over the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Etobicoke Centre election case is just a tad overblown:
There was some chatter on Twitter this morning, after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the election results in Etobicoke Centre, to the effect that Stephen Harper has finally succeeded in stacking the top court with corrupt thugs and we are now fully entered into a post-democratic era here in KanuckiHarperStan. My hunch is that this overstates things.
First, this was actually the Harper government’s first good day at the Court in a while. The Supremes have more often been in the habit of handing Harper trouble, as with the Insite supervised-injection site case and Jim Flaherty’s dead-parrot project for a national securities regulator. In those highest of high-profile cases, Harper appointees concurred with their colleagues in unanimous judgments.
Today there was division, and it didn’t follow partisan lines neatly. (I’ll cut to the chase: I think it’s simplistic to presume a justice appointed by a given PM will consistently rule in ways that please that PM. This has simply never been the case in Canada, to the dismay of a succession of prime ministers.)
