Emmett Macfarlane, Poli Sci Prof, UWaterloo. Constitutional Law, Public Policy & Cdn Politics:
Law is politics, people. Never forget.
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Image above from social media
Alberta purges judicial vetting committee for former Tory cabinet ministers, political supporters, Minister appears to be appointing people ‘closer to the government,’ expert says by Rachel Ward and Charles Rusnell, CBC News. Jun 15, 2020
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Alberta Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer purged the entire committee that vets potential provincial court judges and recruited new members through a closed process that experts say is outdated and increases the chance of partisan appointments to the court. 
I expect the process has been as corrupt as it can get, for decades already. There’s no such thing as “justice” in Alberta. In my view, UCP wants committee members that can’t think or remember anything; they want/need members that will not remember UCP names or their crimes.
Schweitzer rescinded the appointments of seven public members of the Provincial Court Nominating Committee (PCNC) through a generic email from his deputy minister on April 29. No reason was given. Some members had a year or more remaining in their three-year terms.
Several new appointees told CBC News they never applied for a seat on the committee and instead had been recruited.
Former finance minister Pat Nelson, who served under premier Ralph Klein, said she can’t remember who from Alberta Justice called to recruit her, nor can she recall who conducted the “short” interview with her or if she was asked to provide references.
David Ross also told CBC News he had not applied to serve on the committee and had been recruited.
“I have just found out that I’m apparently the chairman, and I have no idea about anything more than that,” Roaring laughter! said Ross, who is one of the founders of the conservative Edmonton law firm McLennan Ross LLP, where he specializes in management-side labour law.
“We don’t even have meetings, can’t have meetings,” he said, referring to COVID-19 physical distancing restrictions. “I’m 83 years old. I’m told to stay home.”
Appointment process called outdated
“I have not heard in 2020 of people picking up the phone and inviting people. That is not a proper committee composition,” Of course it’s not proper, it’s UCP (with it’s leader still under RCMP investigation for election crimes) in judicially corrupt Alberta. More abuse and corruption is what KKKenney/Harper’s extreme base demands! said Richard Leblanc, a professor of ethics, governance and law at York University in Toronto.
“Proper committee composition is interviews, a long list, a short list and independent arm’s-length relationships.”
University of Guelph political scientist Troy Riddell, who has spent years studying judicial appointments, said the province should take regulatory steps to formalize the appointments process and prevent the mass replacement of a committee.
“Alberta is not alone in not having necessarily good statutory protection for these committees, so it leaves a lot of discretion in the hands of the minister.”
He said the province has a disproportionately higher number of government-appointed judicial vetters than ex-officio members when compared with other provinces.
For instance, B.C. has four government appointees and five ex-officio members. Ontario has seven government appointees and six ex-officio members. Alberta’s PCNC has eight government appointees and three ex-officio members.
The PCNC is responsible for vetting and recommending applicants for Alberta’s provincial court after they have first been screened by the province’s Judicial Council.
Under the previous NDP government, openings on the committee were advertised. People who wished to serve were required to apply, provide references and submit to an interview.
Several said they waited for up to a year and were only appointed after a current member’s term had expired.
‘Really disrespectful,’ member says
Lise Gotell, a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said she had more than a year remaining in her term when her appointment was rescinded.
“It made me angry,” Gotell said. “I thought it was really, really disrespectful to rescind appointments.” Imagine how angry you’d feel if Encana/Ovintiv illegally secretly frac’d your water supply, AER lied about you to discredit you and violated your charter rights to try to scare you silent, with Supreme Court of Canada intentionally smearing you and lying about you in their ruling.
Gotell has repeatedly asked for the ministerial order that she said by law must be issued to rescind her appointment but Alberta Justice has so far ignored her requests.
Conservative supporters recruited
Schweitzer also appointed former Klein-era solicitor general Harvey Cenaiko to the committee, as well as several other supporters of the governing United Conservative Party and the now subsumed Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties.
Cenaiko, Nelson and Ross have each donated thousands of dollars to the UCP and the PCs. But Elections Alberta records show Ross also made a $1,000 donation to the New Democrats ahead of the 2015 election.
New member Christa Nicholson, a lawyer with JSS Barristers in Calgary, has donated nearly $8,000 to the UCP in recent years, including $2,000 in 2018 to the party’s riding association for Calgary-Elbow, now represented by Schweitzer. She declined an interview request. AER’s outside counsel in Ernst vs AER, Glenn Solomon, is with JSS Barristers too.
In an email, Schweitzer’s press secretary, Jonah Mozeson, said, “[The UCP’s committee] appointments are based on merit, including a broad spectrum of skills and experience. Pffft! Who believs what Alberta’s Justice Minister Scweitzer says or writes!?
“Prior political involvement — including exercising the right of all Albertans to donate to a political cause — neither qualifies nor restricts one from serving their province on a public body.”
Mozeson pointed out that several NDP appointees had donated to the party, including Anne Wilson, who he said gave $25,905 to the party and was a “perennial” candidate for the Alberta NDP.
Elections Alberta records also show NDP appointee Kanchana Fernando donated nearly $2,700 to the party over the past three years.
In an interview, former committee member Linda Many Guns readily offered that she had run unsuccessfully for the NDP in Red Deer South and had written to former premier Rachel Notley’s office asking to be appointed to any committee.
Diversifying the committee
The appointments of Gotell, Wilson, Fernando, Many Guns and others to the PCNC were part of an attempt by former NDP justice minister Kathleen Ganley to diversify the committee.
The nominating committee appointed by Ganley included six women and one man, with one seat open. Four of the seven members were people of colour, including two Indigenous people. One was a member of the LGBTQ community. All had backgrounds related to the law.
Wilson and former chair Mona Duckett are veteran criminal defence lawyers. Lise Gotell is a leading expert in how the courts treat sexual assault and is the past chair of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund.
Linda Many Guns taught Aboriginal law at the University of Lethbridge. Kanchana Fernando is a federal prosecutor who has taught at the University of Alberta law school and chaired the federal Justice Judicial Industry Department’s diversity council.
Another member, Reena Hussein, is a child-abuse investigator.
Under Ganley, the ministry developed vetting guidelines for the committee that included directions to consider candidates’ diversity, their legal and community backgrounds, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and other elements relevant to the justice legal system.
Leading governance scholar Richard Leblanc said the former committee appeared to have been independently appointed based on merit.
“If that is the case, then why wouldn’t that have continued?” said Leblanc, editor of the recently released The Handbook of Board Governance. “You want independent, arm’s-length committee members, especially when it comes to judicial appointments.”
Party affiliations
Political scientist Troy Riddell said that “by replacing the existing committee members, it seems that the minister is trying to appoint people that are potentially closer to the government.”
Riddell said governments naturally want to appoint some committee members who share their world view, but there must be a balance to ensure quality and fairness in judicial appointments. Oh CBC! Alberta hasn’t had fairness in judicial appointments, ever. It’s rich old racist misogynistic white abusive patriarchal privilege screams at us every day.
“If it appears that the reason you’re appointing someone to the PCNC is because of party affiliation, then that might send the signal that they themselves are to be looking for judicial candidates who are also affiliates of the party.”
Refer also to:
2014: Harper government appoints two far right law profs as judges to Ontario courts; One is Grant Huscroft, reportedly “anti-Charter [of Rights] and basically, anti-equality rights” Keep in mind that Harper leads KKKenney by the nose & CAPP ‘n the oil patch by the penis.
2015: White, male lawyers should say ‘no’ to judicial appointments
2015: Scary! Stephen Harper’s courts: How the judiciary in Canada has been remade
And we got that while the anti-charter dictator was in power. 7/9 Supreme court of Canada judges that heard my appeal against AER were appointed by Harper. No wonder our charter was pissed on by the court.
Patriarchal “justice” runs rampant in Caveman Canada, not just in Neanderthal ‘Berta:
2019: “It’s the judges!”nabling rape and murder of women. No kidding. In Canada too.
2019: Where has Justice gone? Into pockets of law-violating politicians that appoint the judges?
2020: How low can a Minister of “justice” go and how thick grows rot in lawfirms?
Below is excruciatingly FUNNY; relates well to the outdated, ignorant, bigoted, sexist, misogynist, mean-spirited, hate-promoting & Canada dividing, wanting to steal our CPP to give to the dying polluting law-violating bankrupting oil patch to piss away, old white privileged UCP-Harper team and their base:
In August of 2019, “relationship coach” Noah Revoy logged in to Twitter.com and stated that he thought women needed the patriarchy because, without it, we would malfunction and destroy civilizations.
Please see exhibit A:
Women need the boundaries of the Patriarchy and a mission in life which is usually a husband, children and home. Absent such structure they malfunction and destroy civilizations. #RestorePatriarchy
Now, he was dragged on Twitter at the time, and you’d think it’d make him take a look at his stance and either keep his bad opinions to himself or at least see that maybe he’s wrong, right? Wrong. Here’s more from just recently, as he prepares to speak at the “Make Women Great Again” convention (the speakers for which, listed on their website, are predictably “100% pure male speakers”):
High quality men prefer women who are:
– attractive (fitness, clear skin, long hair).
– debt free
– virgins
– have domestic skills
– want to be mothers
– no tattoos
Be as close to that as possible and your challenge will be choosing from amongst the men who are pursuing you.3
This is just Revoy’s personal sexist views on women, but ones he’s making a career (and book deals) out of trying to spread and bring up a larger issue that needs to be addressed: men thinking they have the right to tell women what they need to do to be the best woman they can be. In Revoy’s mind, I’m already out because I have absolutely no domestic skills other than cleaning from time to time (oh, and also, you know, the tattoos, and I have debt, and a ton of moles and freckles, but you get the point).
Revoy is not the only dudebro on Twitter who wants to share his “tips” for women and try to make a movement out of them. It’s a very dangerous trend that we’re seeing more and more—like with this one from the “1st President of The Manosphere,” the online misogynist movement/hate group. We’ll call it exhibit B:
Trying to be a Strong Independent Woman® is a guaranteed life path of misery for most. If you in any way support this concept as a man or woman, you have been conned and successfully lied to by feminists.
Maybe it’s because I come from a family where my mother was the breadwinner, and without her, we’d have been f**ked. (Nothing against my loving father, he just was not the one who made the money or took care of us all in that way. He was my movie buddy who I love to hang out with.) But seeing stuff like this, I have to laugh.
Are men that fragile that if they’re not the “head of a household” or feeling like they’re in charge of a woman, they need to tear down the idea of a woman having any sort of independence?
What I want to really talk about, though, is this idea that if women did not have men telling us “no,” that we’d malfunction and “destroy civilizations.” Now, speaking personally, I’m almost always malfunctioning and destroying civilization, but that’s just because I’m a Scorpio.
Do these men realize that, in most other civilizations outside of the United States, women have been in charge and the civilizations are doing just fine? Or do these dudebros think only of America as a civilization? Anyway, the point is, women wouldn’t “destroy” civilizations if the patriarchy didn’t exist. I would willingly destroy men who call themselves a “patriarch,” but that’s different.
“If only things had happened this way.”