Scotty

LOL. Paul Martin had no principals! He seized on the gay agenda not, I agree, because he was any great proponent, but because it was a great issue to use to make himself and his party seem, well 'liberal' and to portray the Alliance as nasty, hatemongering and intolerant.

It would be useful, but not nearly as useful as legal acumen and shrewd judgement. And what you keep ignoring is the fact that outside specific regions almost nobody is bilingual. That means pretty much all SC judges would have to come from Montreal or western Quebec, NB or eastern Ontario.

A Quebec judge. Yeah, okay, which is the complaint people made, that all the judges would have to be francophones or Quebecers. Thanks for proving our point.

Wow! There are two bilingual lawyers in Canada! Right on! I guess we don't need to worry then! And the judges on the SC are already, often enough, second rate. The best person rarely gets selected because the party in power wants someone with their particularly ideological viewpoint, adn they have to be from a particular province, and often enough, there are other factors like "Oh, wouldn't it be nice to appoint a woman/lesbian/handicapped/eskimo" or other. Paul Martin, as an example, sought only one primary requirement for his two appointments; that they be in support of his pro-gay agenda. Neither judge had a particularly impressive resume when he selected them for Supreme Court. He passed over everyone else for crass political opportunism. And now you want to add on that they all have to be fluently bilingual! Wonderful. How about we add on that they're all bisexual too, so that they're equally unbiased against gays and straights? And how about they have to dye their hair in streaks just in case a blonde or a brunette might want some empathy? Anything else you'd like to throw in there while we ignore actual legal knowledge and ability?

I'd be willing to see a tax increase to bring down the deficit. I've said so. Add the 2% back onto the GST. I'm okay with that. What an Ignatieff/Layton/Duceppe government is FAR more likely to do is hike taxes enormously so they can implement scads of feel-good social programs. By way of example, McGuinty hiked taxes enormously, but Ontario still has the largest deficit in its history because he hiked spending by more than 60%. Much of that hike came in the form of big raises for the public service unions he wanted to maintain peace with. More came in the form of pie in the sky environmental programs.

I used to know lots of seniors, and believe me, they're not in bed at 7:30. And unlike high school kids, they vote. Even the few young people who do vote are generally too obnoxiously self-assured of their own moral brilliance to vote Tory. If they were the electorate Layton would have a whopping big majority, with the Greens as official opposition.

Not actually true. A very big chunk of the electorate pays no income taxes because their income is too low. I believe it's something like 40% of the population excluding children. Government pensions have the same system in place, deducting CPP. What's that got to do with this? That's either petty or very petty. No election fraud has been found yet, there's no findings on Carson of any wrongdoing, and it will probably emerge he did nothing, Soudas is a mere accusation, without a shred of evidence of wrongdoing on his part. I'm still not seeing the scandals, the millions or hundreds of thousands stolen from the taxpayer as the Liberals did. I'm not seeing the 'authoritarian' Harper try to use the RCMP to put someone in prison for defying his orders.

Does anyone seriously think the tories are going to put in place some kind of rigid cap and trade scheme? All Harper is saying is if the Americans do something we'll look to imitate it. Anyone think the Americans are going to put in something which seriously threatens their oil producers? Anyone heard of any big moves to install a cap and trade system in the US lately?

"Just" as importantly? Most people would consider an excellent grasp of criminal law, common law and civil law" the bare minimum required to even get on a list of candidates for judge. A record of sound judgement, temperament, and ability to act without bias would come on top of that. What some are suggesting is - forget all the above, start out with who can speak French. And only then do you assess which of that small group comes with the best knowledge and abilities.

Looks like they acted very responsibly and with great respect for the rules and law. After Carson was hired on a temporary contract they realized that the potential existed for a conflict of interest as he was only on a leave of abscence from his other job. They isolated him from all items which could bear on his employer, notified the CPCO that Carson was no longer to be contacted with regard to the budget, and did all this on their own, without any outsider even suspecting there might have been any opportunity for a conflict. In other words, they acted exactly as we would have wanted them to. Globe and Mail

That was your own incompetent police force, guy.

We should start seriously examining what a cap and trade system will cost Canada. It's in the Liberal campaign book, and you can bet the NDP and BQ will insist it be implemented, probably in a stronger, tougher manner than the book promises. I don't believe any oil producing nation has put such a scheme in place before, and I'm wondering what that's going to do to the oil and gas industry. Since Ignateiff's pie in the sky provincial counterpart Dalton McGuinty has already pretty much wrecked Ontario's economy by hiking taxes and doubling electricity prices the oil industry is what's driving our economy. Now ignatieff wants to put a muzzle on it, halt all further development, and see how many punitive taxes he and his socialist brethren can load it down with. What's that going to do to Canada's economy?

I'm guessing you don't pay taxes. Got Alzheimers, do you? Some kind of mental defect which doesn't allow you to remember anything done more than five years ago? Tell you what, I'll pick three liberal scandals at random and you match them with the Tory scandal that was as bad or worse. Does that sound fair? Sponsorship. The Liberal party repeatedly let contracts for no work to companies which then kicked back a percentage of the profit to the Liberal Party of Canada. This money was given to Liberal bag men at dark Italian restaurants in plain brown envelopes. The temperature at the restaurants was turned up so people would take off their coats and wires could be detected more raadily. BDBC. Jean Chretien personally called Francois Beaudoin, then head of the Business Development Bank of Canada to pressure him to loan a quarter million dollars to a business associate of Chretien's, an ex-con who had bought the hotel next to the infamous golf course. Reluctantly, Beaudoin agreed, but the ex-con never paid a single penny back. After multiple missing payments, Beaudoin moved to foreclose and Chretien immediately despatched his number one hatchet man Jean Carle to take over. Beaudoin is forced out after negotiating a severance deal. The next month, the bank renegs on the severance deal and the RCMP spend $4 million trying to have him arrested and imprisoned. A quebec judge later terms the way Beaudoin was treated an "unspeakable injustice". Not one penny of the quarter million ever gets repaid to the public. Chretien's buddy is charged with arson in burning down the hotel, but is acquitted. Assault. During an outdoor speech in Gatineau, Chretien became incensed at hecklers, jumped off the stage and stormed off, not even waiting for his RCMP bodyguards. One hapless protestor, a head shorter than him, wasn't fast enough to get out of his way and Chretien assaulted him, grabbing him by the throat breaking his glasses and chipping his tooth. Chretien later blames the mounties. You go right ahead and find the Tory equivalents.

That's okay. I've come to not expect anything more of you than absolute minimal effort.

I'm not saying a knowledge of the other language might not be helpful on occasion. My concern is that outside parts of Quebec, BC and eastern Ontario there are exceedingly few lawyers who are fluently bilingual. I do not want the Supreme Court to start taking in third rate legal minds simply because all the best ones, outside certain geographical areas, are unilingual.

Take two recruiters looking for top legal knowledge for their companies. One gets to recruit from among 1,000 lawyers in the province. The other has to recruit from only those lawyers who are fluently bilingual, or about 2%. That's 20 lawyers available to him to select from. Which recruiter is likely to get the top legal brains?

The point you fail to take into consideration is that that same judge, who is bilingual, will have a tortuous time trying to understand french legalese because his knowledge of his second language is almost certain to be highly imperfect. Does the above not entirely cover that?

Weren't the Newfies supposed to be building a big new refinery? It'd make more sense to do that and ship the oil east than ship it overseas or to the US.

Legaleze IS English, and without a mastery of English you can forget about understanding fine technical points of law. These translators are extremely knowledgeable about legal terms in both languages and have used them for years. The point you fail to take into consideration is that that same judge, who is bilingual, will have a tortuous time trying to understand french legalese because his knowledge of his second language is almost certain to be highly imperfect. I have had to endure speeches by 'fluently' bilingual people in the past and I shudder at the thought of them making complex decisions based on documents and arguments only heard in the other official language. And yet just to get judges with this extremely imperfect second language skill some want to narrow down the available field of legal applicants by 98%?!

I don't have an anti-immigrant bias. I'd explain to you the difference between anti-immigration and anti-immigrant but I'm not sure I could do it in single syllables and this site doesn't allow me to use crayon drawings.

But I don't deal with them, any more than you do, so I'd prefer they be hired and promoted due to competence, not their fluency in a language they don't need to communicate with a public they don't ever see.

And if statistics didn't show that members of certain minority groups did not commit a greatly disproportionate amount of crime regardless of social circumstances you might have a point. As for Muslims, they have social attitudes I don't like, so I don't see why we should be bringing more of them into our society. Aside from that, my problem with immigrants is no one has managed to show any evidence that bringing in masses of them helps individual Canadians nearly as much as it hurts them, or if so why so many of the immigrants we bring over wind up in public housing or in jail.

Maybe some of us who have already done that want to keep Canada from going down the same route...

You go out to meet a potential MP and your big question is about line-ups in Hong Kong?? Why do you care so much about lineups in hong kong... buddy?

Whether you consider yourself 'not so bad' or not is irrelevant. You are capable of writing in English to a much better degree than most bilingual Francophones, and yet your English writing skills, and presumably your reading skills, are far too weak to ever be considered to be fluent enough to be reading and writing complex legal decisions in English. The reverse is true of bilingual Anglos, of course. Far better to have top notch translators than to drastically limit our selection of judges to those very, very few who, like you, are 'bilingual' and then have them try to understand and reply to complex legal arguments in a language which they do not truly understand.