Le rouge et le noir

“More than 60 per cent of the 93 lawyers who received federal judicial appointments in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan since 2000 donated exclusively to the Liberal party in the three to five years before securing their $220,000-per-annum posts," the Citizen's Cristin Schmitz reports.

More than 70 per cent of those appointed since 2000 to the Ontario Superior Court by [Justice minister Irwin] Cotler and his predecessors Anne McLellan and Martin Cauchon donated money only to the Liberal Party of Canada. Forty of 56 lawyers gave just to the Liberals. Only two of those appointed donated solely to the Conservatives. No donations to the NDP were found.

In other judicial patronage news:

Nearly 60 per cent of lawyers appointed to the bench in Quebec by the federal government since the 2000 election contributed to the Liberal Party of Canada in the years leading up to their appointment, The Gazette has learned.

Hmmm. I wonder where The Gazette "learned" that? But the Gaz has more details:

If professors and public servants are factored out, the proportion rises even higher. Of the 29 law firm lawyers appointed to the Quebec Superior Court or Quebec Court of Appeal for the first time during that period, 21, or 72.4 per cent, had made individual contributions to the Liberals. In fact, The Gazette's investigation reveals that the overwhelming majority of contributions made by those later named to the bench was to the Liberal Party during the 10-year period of contributions studied. Donations to other political parties were negligible. Out of roughly 100 individual contributions identified, there were less than a half dozen possible contributions to the Bloc and even fewer to the Conservatives. Moreover, the largest and most frequent contributions appear to cluster around the period from 1996-97 to 2001-02. That is roughly the same period in the spotlight at the moment in the probe into the sponsorship scandal. Many candidates who had never contributed to the Liberal Party before that or who had made relatively small contributions suddenly began after 1996 to contribute, or to give significantly larger sums. In several cases, the contributions appear to start only three to five years before the individual was named to the bench.

It even names some names:

Michel Deziel of Blainville, appointed to the Quebec Superior Court in 2003 by Justice Minister Martin Cauchon, is one of the few who made any contribution at all to the Bloc - $184 in 1996. The following year, however, he switched to the Liberals, contributing $1,000 in 1997 with his contributions generally increasing each year until they reached $3,573 in 2003. Deziel's appointment came despite the fact he was charged in 1998 with receiving illegal campaign contributions on behalf of the municipal Action democratique de Boisbriand party in the 1994 election - charges that were dismissed in 1999. Daniele Mayrand, appointed to Quebec Superior Court in 2001 by then justice minister Anne McClellan, also made increasingly large contributions during five of the seven years before she was named to the bench - from $238 in 1994 to $1,475 in 2000. Mayrand was a lawyer for the trustees who ran the company pension plan for Paul Martin's bus line, Voyageur Colonial. In 2003, the Ottawa Citizen reported that the trustees pressured the federal pension regulator (the office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, an agency that fell under the finance department) to change a report on the fund's 1997 collapse and suggested shredding part of the document to hide it from public view. Jean-Francois Buffoni, appointed to the Quebec Superior Court in 2002, contributed annually to the party over several years, gradually increasing his contributions from $109 in 1996 to $1,000 in 1997, rising to $1,658 in 2001. Some of those nominated were longtime Liberals, such as Gaetan Dumas, who contributed to the party during seven of the 10 years studied and who served as president of the Liberal riding association in Sherbrooke. Several, however, contributed to the Liberal Party only in the three to five years leading up to their appointment. That was the case with Claudette Tessier-Couture (who also ran twice for the Liberals and served in official capacities with the party), Kirkland Casgrain, Marc De Wever, Michel Delorme, Clement Gascon, Bernard Godbout, Denis Jacques and Marie St-Pierre.

I don't know how many pillars of the legal establishment I've read in recent days, Cotler among them, insisting there's no story here, that party affiliation plays no part in judicial appointments. These numbers are persuasive evidence to the contrary. Even if it's shown that patronage -- or worse -- played no part, it's disturbing that the bench should lean so pronouncedly in one direction. (Flagged by Spector.)