Bill C-3 passed the Senate yesterday and received royal assent. Many of you will know this as Rona Ambrose’s bill to mandate sexual assault training by judges, and it’s been a weird little ride through the parliamentary process, starting with Ambrose’s original bill in the previous parliament, dying on the Order Paper at the election, and the current government resurrecting it in principle, but not the same bill. Why? Because the original bill was blatantly unconstitutional in how it infringed on judicial independence, and was entirely unworkable in terms of how lawyers who wanted to apply to be judges needed to conduct themselves.
Bill #C3 has received Royal Assent, which will take effect once the House of Commons has been advised: https://t.co/UY0G2Axpfn #SenCA #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/7zYwRZWYbm
— Senate of Canada (@SenateCA) May 6, 2021
In order to make the bill palatable, it had to be rewritten as a hollow shell – essentially a suggestion for future judges, because anything else would be untenable. So we now have a useless but symbolic bill on the books that will do very little to solve the problem that Ambrose perceived, but instead will have new unintended consequences – namely, as former Supreme Court of Canada Executive Legal Officer Gib van Ert outlines here, that it has opened the door to new bills demanding that judges take training on any other area of law or policy that is the flavour of the day, and while they may be important in and of themselves, it is corrosive to judicial independence because it portrays them as being beholden to the whims of the government of the day rather than maintaining a distance and independence from that government’s wishes.
The more concerning aspect of this bill’s particular path however was just how uncritically it was treated by media outlets around the country. Ambrose would appear on the political talk shows every few months to complain that it was being held up by the “old boys’ club,” and not once did anyone mention the list of valid and legitimate complaints and concerns about the bill, in particular its dubious constitutionality. Not once. The first time it happened, I timed myself in that it took me twenty minutes to review Senate testimony at second reading to compile the list of problems that were raised. Twenty minutes of homework, and not one report or producer of a political show bothered to put in the work, and they simply let Ambrose talk about her bill uncritically, and unchallenged. Not one. It’s kind of alarming that something as important as judicial independence was quite literally ignored by every major outlet in the country, because they wanted to promote a feel-good bill about sexual assault training. That’s pretty concerning.