Canada's "independent' Judges

[Argus]

I think the most irritating thing about Trudeau and his party are how self-righteous they are in their virtue signalling - and how phony it all turns out be every time you get to peek under the rug. So it is with their judicial appointment process, much lauded by Trudeau as selecting independent people not affiliated with the Liberals but selected on merit. Well, a small chink in the curtains appeared and we got a look at a narrow time frame in how it works. And how it works is that the Liberals look for those who support the Liberal party, and not only consult widely for approval with their MPs and ministers, but with LIBERAL judges who are supposedly independent but clearly are nothing of the sort. So as with senate appointments, we find that everything Trudeau has said, and all his self-congratulatory posturing, is so much bullshit.

The Liberal government relies on a large network of party officials and supporters to decide which lawyers receive sought-after judicial appointments, e-mails obtained by The Globe and Mail show. Liberal MPs, ministerial staff members and even party volunteers have been involved in candidate vetting since the federal government revamped the process in 2016, after having accused the previous Conservative government of politicizing appointments.

The dozens of e-mails between ministerial staffers from 2017 and 2018 detail widespread partisan involvement in the selection of new judges, offering unprecedented insight into the inner workings of the current judicial appointment process. The e-mails also show clear tensions during that time frame between the minister of justice’s office, which handles the appointment process, and the Prime Minister’s Office, which collaborates on those decisions.

The e-mails reveal that Colleen Suche, who is a judge on the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, and her husband, former minister and current MP Jim Carr, supported identical lists of candidates in separate communications with the office of Ms. Wilson-Raybould in 2018. In relation to an appointment to the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, an e-mail says Justice Suche informed Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s office of her hope that Ken Champagne would not be given a “leadership position” such as associate chief justice.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-e-mails-reveal-network-of-liberal-officials-involved-in-judicial/#comments

[mowich]

Thank heavens Pug no longer has any relevance whatsoever.  Sitting in the nosebleed section of the HoC is exactly where she belongs.