OTTAWA — Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould says the Liberal government is going to stick with the selection process that led to the nomination of Newfoundland and Labrador justice Malcolm Rowe to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“A modern, dynamic, 21st-century court needed a modern, dynamic, 21st-century selection process,” Wilson-Raybould said Monday as she defended the new selection process during an appearance before the House of Commons justice committee.
The Liberal government revealed changes to the way it would appoint Supreme Court justices in August, saying it wanted to bring more openness and transparency to the process, while also encouraging more diversity and requiring functional bilingualism among judges on the high court.
It was also the first time that Canadians were invited to apply for the job.
Wilson-Raybould and former prime minister Kim Campbell, who led the non-partisan advisory board tasked with coming up with a shortlist of candidates, appeared before the committee to explain the process and defend the choice of Rowe as one of the contenders.
On Tuesday, MPs, senators and even law students will get the chance to put their questions directly to Rowe when he sits down for a question-and-answer session at the University of Ottawa.
“This is historic and it provides an opportunity to invite Canadians into a process wherein they will have the opportunity to get to know the next Supreme Court of Canada justice,” Wilson-Raybould said of the session, which will be moderated by McGill University law professor Daniel Jutras.
However, Conservative and New Democrat MPs on the committee pointed out they would have liked to be involved in the actual creation of a shortlist.
“It has no legal standing,” NDP MP Murray Rankin said of the Tuesday event.
Wilson-Raybould said she would take any and all feedback from the justice committee into consideration, but stressed that having an independent, non-partisan advisory board be the one to come up with a shortlist is a central part of the new selection process.
There will be much fodder for questions Tuesday.
The government published the questionnaire Rowe completed as part of the application process, detailing his views on issues such as diversity, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, aboriginal treaty rights and the role of the court in a constitutional democracy.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had such a document about anyone who’s gone to the Supreme Court of Canada,” Campbell told the committee.
The fact that Rowe is a judge from the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal is also likely to be a topic of discussion.
The Liberals had been coming under fire from the opposition for saying their selection process would not necessarily follow the custom of regional representation, which would have ordinarily meant the successor to retired Justice Thomas Cromwell, from Nova Scotia, would be from Atlantic Canada.
Campbell, who said she understood the terms of reference to mean the advisory board needed to come up with at least two candidates from the region, said they had no trouble finding them.