With the stroke of his pen, Prime Minister Paul Martin officially appointed his first two nominees to the Supreme Court of Canada [http://www.news.gc.ca/cfmx/CCP/view/en/i... ]. Despite the grumbling of the opposition parties about the process - recently improved, according to the Prime Minister's Office - Ontario Court of Appeal Justices Rosalie Silberman Abella [http://www.ontariocourts.on.ca/court_of_... ] and Louise Charron [http://www.ontariocourts.on.ca/court_of_... ] will soon vacate their Osgoode Hall offices in Toronto for the red and white regal robes of Canada's highest court. The highest level appointments the Prime Minister can make came after months of speculation following the unexpected retirement announcements of Justices Louise Arbour, who leaves the court to head the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and Frank Iacobucci, who stepped down at the end of June and is now interim president at the University of Toronto. The appointments bring the court back up to a full complement of nine jurists on the nation's uppermost bench.
Like most things Paul Martin has done since taking the Canadian helm, the attempt to make significant improvements to a long-held, closed door practice was done half-arsed, as my father would say, or at the very least, communicated very poorly.
By tradition - that's right, tradition - appointments to the Supreme Court are at the sole discretion of the Prime Minister, at least since 1947 when the Supreme Court in Canada replaced far away London as the final arbiter of Canadian jurisprudence. Despite the PMO's claims to the contrary, however, the Prime Minister's appointment of Supreme Court Justices is by convention; technically speaking the constitution calls for Supreme Court appointments to be formally declared by the Governor General (egads! not her again!).
But at least Mr. Martin, in promising greater transparency in the process of selecting the nation's top legal interpreters, did not fall prey to the calls for a vetting process that would have parliamentarians be responsible for approving any candidate for Ottawa's Wellington Street tribunal.
At the risk of sounding anti-American, such a process would be, well, too American.
Our democratic brethren to the south in many ways have much greater democratic safeguards than our parliamentary governance affords Canadians. Apart from the fact that just about every public figure - from District Attorneys to state judges to urban transportation officials to the local sheriff - faces some form of direct election, appointments to senior positions of the executive branch of government and to U.S. Supreme Court are first vetted by committees of the legislature, or Congress as its known there.
