Roundup: The torqued six attendees

Posted on by

The National Post’s series on judicial appointments continued apace yesterday, with the torqued and misleading headline that “High-level judges may have paid to meet Trudeau before their appointments,” and members of the pundit class and commentariat swooned with disbelief, and social media was blanketed with caterwauling about “corruption” and “bribery” and so on. Some of the excitable far-right fanboys started ranting about the whole judiciary being corrupted and needing to be bulldozed (because how better to enable fascism?)

But if you read the piece, and put it into context with the previous work, it says that as many as six out of 1308 lawyers who later got judicial appointments may have attended Liberal fundraisers that the prime minister or other Cabinet ministers attended. Which is…nothing. And yet, the framing and the headline suggests that they paid for access and that said meeting resulted in their appointment to the bench, in absence of any evidence to the contrary—just innuendo and correlation that has no relation to causation. This kind of journalism tends to be bullshit.

I have made this case before, and I’ll re-up it again—we absolutely do not want or need purity tests to be applied to applicants to the bench, and we should not bar anyone who has ever donated to a party from receiving an appointment. Donation is a necessary form of civic engagement, and lawyers tend to be more engaged in their communities, and often have the means to donate. This is important—we need people engaged in the system, and if we bar them from promotion because they have donated at one point in time or another, we are losing talent from the judiciary. The process as it stands is working (albeit slow for other reasons), and we don’t need concern trolls dismantling it for the sake of purity tests.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Three Ukrainians were killed in an overnight Russian attack on Poltava, and two others were killed in shelling later in the day in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials have confirmed that they have liberated the strategic settlement of Robotyne in the country’s south, as they are pushing further in the area as part of the counteroffensive. Russians are claiming that they scrambled jets in response to two US drones flying near occupied Crimea.

Good reads:

  • Arif Virani announced fourteen judicial appointments yesterday, but that still leaves around 67 vacancies that still need to be filled as soon as possible.
  • Health Canada is contemplating a temporary approval mechanism to bring more infant formula into Canada while they overhaul the broader framework.
  • The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security points out that Russia and Iran are acting as safe havens for hackers, and assist in their operations with near impunity.
  • A PHAC study shows that racism and lack of primary care providers are partly to blame for why Indigenous women have poorer health outcomes.
  • An internal RCMP memo shows that some in the senior ranks are aware of the calls to apologise for the disastrous handling of the Nova Scotia mass shooting.
  • Pierre Poilievre has been jumping on the “parental rights” bandwagon (which is a dogwhistle about opposing rights for LGBTQ+ students).
  • Blaine Higgs’ government is trying to muddy an Indigenous land claim by attempt to protect private land owners in the area.
  • Ontario’s integrity commissioner says that housing minister Steve Clark is being investigated with regards to the Greenbelt scandal.
  • Alberta thinks they are owed $130 million more in fiscal stabilisation from the federal government (never mind last year’s massive budget surplus).
  • The Northwest Territories legislature voted unanimously to delay the scheduled October election because of the wildfire impacts.
  • Paul Wells reflects on the current stasis that the Liberals find themselves in, where they can seemingly find no traction no matter what they do.

Odds and ends:

My Loonie Politics Quick Take looks at what’s wrong with Pierre Poilievre’s demand that Parliament be recalled to deal with the housing crisis.

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.