OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s nomination of Quebec judge Nicholas Kasirer to fill an upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court brought MPs and senators back to Ottawa on Thursday for a pair of hearings.
Kasirer was questioned by a more than 20-person panel of Parliamentarians as part of a Liberal-introduced open nomination process. The hearing saw legal minds and law students gather across the street from Parliament Hill to hear from the man poised to soon become the next appointee to Canada’s top court.
SHis questioners were members of the House Justice Committee, the Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, as well as representatives from the Bloc Quebecois, Green Party and People’s Party. Dean of the faculty of law at the University of Sherbrooke, Genevieve Cartier, moderated the afternoon session.
Each participant had five minutes to question Trudeau’s pick, and he faced questions on his views related to sexual assault training for judges, victims’ rights, access to justice, linguistic minority protections, and the use of the notwithstanding clause.
Kasirer—a self-described generalist judge and expert in civil law— will be filling the seat left vacant by the coming September retirement of Justice Clement Gascon.
Gascon announced this spring that he’ll be leaving the Supreme Court for personal and family reasons. He briefly went missing in May and was later found safe, citing anxiety and depression as reasons behind his disappearance.
Asked why he wanted to join the Supreme Court, Kasirer said his motivation comes from his love for his work as a judge.
“Some people may apply for a position like this out of a mere sense of duty, that’s not my case. I love my work… I felt that my 10 years of experience at the court, my life at the university, my interest in the civil law were aspects that might be of interest to the prime minister,” he said, adding that it is also a good time for his family. He and his artist wife have three grown children.
Kasirer said he was shaped over his life by his family, law professors, law firm colleagues, and fellow judges.
Earlier in the day, MPs on the House Justice Committee held a meeting featuring Justice Minister and Attorney General David Lametti and former prime minister Kim Campbell, who chairs the Independent Advisory Board for Supreme Court of Canada Judicial Appointments, which provides the prime minister a short-list of nominees.
The pair took questions about why Kasirer was selected to sit on Canada’s top court, and the process of deciding who they’d recommend to the prime minister.
Speaking about Kasirer’s qualifications, both Lametti and Campbell highlighted his “perfect” bilingualism, his past academic experience as the dean of law at McGill, and his experience in on the Quebec Court of Appeal.
“Justice Kasirer, he feels his work in the civil law and in French, really kind of defines him and his connection to Quebec,” said Campbell.
Little diversity in candidate pool
The meeting of the House committee featured many questions about the importance of collegiality on Canada’s top court, as well as how to enhance the diversity of applicants.
The latter topic was prompted by Campbell’s testimony. She noted that in this nomination process there was just one female contender, no Indigenous people or self-identified minorities who put their names forward for consideration.
Campbell suggested that the government should have a more broad and long-standing approach to scouting potential Supreme Court justices, saying that short-lived nomination periods and little information available about the reality of the job are detrimental to women and nominees.
"If this were an ongoing conversation as opposed to something that we scramble to do just in the face of an imminent departure from the court and the need to recruit a new candidate, I think this might be something that could broaden the scope of the candidates," she told the committee.
When asked Thursday afternoon what more could be done to encourage more women to put their names forward for consideration for jobs like this, and more broadly to reach equality in society, Kasirer said he couldn’t really speak to that, saying equality is a long-term project with no easy answers. Though later on he did reference one of his daughters, who he said is a feminist community organizer and one of the people he admires most in the world.
MPs question minister, former PM
At the House committee, Lametti and Campbell also fielded other justice-related questions from Conservative MPs, who used Thursday’s special summer meeting to raise past controversies including the SNC-Lavalin scandal, a leak around the same time related to a past Supreme Court pick, and what they see as the contentious return of Gerald Butts to the Liberal fold.
Speaking with reporters ahead of Thursday’s meeting, Conservative deputy leader Lisa Raitt said that the meeting gives the opposition “an opportunity today as well to talk about things that we've been hearing about in our constituencies and things that we've been monitoring here in Ottawa.”
The opposition questions were largely batted down by the minister, whose answers the offered little new information.
Raitt attempted to revive a study into the past Supreme Court leak— centred on sources saying that former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and Trudeau disagreed about her recommendation for a vacancy in 2017—but her motion was defeated.
In particular, Raitt was critical of the privacy commissioner—who was looking into the leak—not being able to question the prime minister or the justice minister or either of their political staffs, given the way the office has been set up. She called it a “massive hole” in the commissioner’s investigation.
When asked if this would be something a Conservative-led government would change, Raitt couldn’t say, but vowed that an Andrew Scheer-led government would not get itself in the position of having this kind of probe take place.
During the meeting Lametti asserted that he imposed more stringent confidentiality measures to ensure the latest Supreme Court appointment process was absent of any leaks, and Campbell said she was confident the members on the advisory panel were not the sources for the story.
Speaking with reporters after the meeting, Lametti said he was unsurprised by the Conservatives’ line of questioning, but wouldn’t have been how he would have used his time if he was a member on the committee.
