Continuing on the theme of our judiciary, it's fascinating that these comments did not receive more coverage (the story is from February, but I'm just coming across it now):
in an interview in his Ottawa apartment, [former Chief Justice of Canada Antonio] Lamer said he thinks some judges these days are too lenient and some prisoners, such as drug traffickers, are up for parole too early. "I will candidly say I have been looking at some sentences and I have found they are not what they should be. They should be more severe," said Mr. Lamer. "These words coming from me might surprise some people, but I mean them." To that end, Mr. Lamer said, he agrees with some of the Harper government's tough-on-crime initiatives. [emphasis added]
Those comments are... I'm not even sure what word I would use to describe my reaction in reading them. As the story notes, Lamer "was part of a voting bloc that tended to side with the accused in criminal cases, earning him a reputation for being soft on crime" - which is an oddly bland way of saying that, at least when I was reading his judgments on a regular basis, you could pretty much bet the house on Lamer giving the accused/convicted a gentle nudge on the wrist and sending them on their way (I swear there were times when you half expected to come across an annotation to the judgment which described him high-fiving defence counsel on the way out of the courtroom). For him to publicly come to the on-the-record conclusion that some judges are handing out sentences which are too lenient is just... nope, still don't have the right term for it. "Flabbergasting" is trending in the right direction, I suppose.
The rest of the article is just as interesting, mostly because it shines the proper light on the kerfuffle late last year and earlier this year about changes to the judicial appointments process, raised mostly by an organized bar intent on protecting its privileges:
Mr. Lamer also denounced the much-criticized system of appointing judges to the 1,100-member federal bench, saying the process is "flawed" and there is no good reason that either police or community members should be involved in selecting judges.
... Police, as a special interest group, should be excluded, and members of the public simply don't know enough about the job of judging to competently select candidates, Mr. Lamer said.
... Mr. Lamer said judges should be screening judicial candidates seeking promotions and lawyers should be vetting other lawyers who want to sit on the bench because they are the ones who know what the job is about. "If I were on a selection committee to pick the head of neurosurgery, I wouldn't know anything," he said, by way of comparison.
... Mr. Lamer said he takes no issue with the partisan nature of the appointments as much as he does with the fact they are not from the legal community.
"Why not have lawyers and judges on the panels picking the chief of the firefighters?" he asked.
At least give him credit for honesty, a trait much lacking in the pronouncements on the matter from such outfits as the Canadian Bar Association: the entire issue is about the legal community protecting its own interests and its nearly feral reluctance to share power or allow non-professional oversight. Note that Lamer isn't just complaining about the injection of the supposed "special interest" group of the police onto the Judicial Advisory Committees: he doesn't think anyone except lawyers should be involved (which would be a rather dramatic change to the system which has been in place for the last twenty or so years). The bad analogies to neurosurgery and firefighting just serve to illuminate how the judiciary views itself: not as exercising a governmental power derived from the citizenry, but as a group of specialized technocrats. It also shows that Lamer does not understand quite how governance works: at least in the province of Ontario, fire chiefs are appointed by the elected members of the relevant municipal council (see section 6(1) of the Fire Protection and Prevention Act, 1997 (Ontario)) - to make the irony that much more poignant, a significant number of those municipal council members are likely to be lawyers.
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