Who's afraid of the Commons Justice committee?

It's not clear what reforms the Martin government is going to bring to the present secretive, top-down process of appointing judges to the Supreme Court, but what we've heard so far doesn't sound promising. Worse, from the sounds of things they want to rush something through in order to make way for a spring election: a major reform to one of our core institutions of government, plus two appointments, all in a matter of weeks. What was that about a democratic deficit? Predictably, everyone's having heart palpitations at the thought of prospective appointees being quizzed by a committee of MPs -- let alone making such appointments subject to Parliament's approval. So instead we're being told it could be done by a panel of distinguished jurists, or that MPs could interview the minister of Justice instead, or even that the questioning could be done in secret. (Given their track record, how long do you think they could keep it secret?) After all -- all together now -- we wouldn't want it to turn into one of those degrading partisan exercises like they have in the US. Oh please. It's my blog, so I'll commit the unforgivable and quote myself:

One imagines what the response would be if MPs were not elected, and someone were to propose that they should be. Elected! Are you out of your mind? Just look at what goes on south of the border. Do we want that sort of American-style circus here, people calling each other nasty names and so forth? Think of the expense! Think of the uncertainty! It would politicize the system of government. It would make it impossible to get good people to go into public life. It would pit brother against brother, province against province... etc. etc.

For people who worry that open hearings would politicize the process: it's political now. We just don't get to see it. For people who worry that good people would refuse to put their names forward, rather than subject themselves to a little political scrutiny: a) If they can't stand the heat, we probably don't want them in the kitchen. b) I don't notice any shortage of qualified jurists on the US bench, nor any obvious superiority in the quality of our own: has the Canadian Supreme Court anyone to match, say, Antonin Scalia? The Supreme Court of Canada is a mess, wandering from judgment to judgment without clear philosophical anchors of any kind, quoting the likes of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in one famous example, or on more than one occasion (the secession ruling, Delgamuukw) making it up out of whole cloth. Perhaps a little public scrutiny beforehand might have weeded out the more obvious chowderheads. At the very least, it would give the Court the political legitimacy it now lacks, and might therefore free it from the temptation of tacking back and forth for fear of alienating this or that constituency, as I suspect is now the case. That is, it would make the court less political, not more. For those who worry about US-style partisan circuses: a) The US has a different political culture than we do: though our parliamentarians are certainly capable of behaving just as badly, everything's magnified by the intensity of the media focus. b) Even in the US, the kinds of circuses people remember, a Bork or a Clarence Thomas, are rare -- that's why they're remembered. Relax. Come on in. The democratic water's fine. FOR MORE: Here's a piece I wrote on the subject back in 1998. We've made no progress since.