Month: May 2007

This just in from the University of Guelph:

New U of G Study Shows Politics Affects Judicial Appointments

When it comes to judicial appointments, politics appear to be influencing selection, according to new research by a University of Guelph political scientist.

Troy Riddell examined 978 judicial appointments between 1988 and 2003 and found at least 30 per cent of judges appointed during the Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien years made donations to the political party in power.

“That seems high, especially when you consider that less than one per cent of Canadians donate to federal political parties,” Riddell said. “Although individuals with political ties can be very fine judges, it does raise concerns that sometimes weaker candidates are appointed because of patronage.” <>

The study, which is scheduled to be published in the University of Toronto Law Journal in 2008, also shows that most of those judges made a donation within two years of being appointed to the bench.

These results raise larger concerns about the legitimacy of the judicial process, said Riddell.

“Every once in a while you hear stories about people appointed as judges as a reward for their political service,” said Riddell, who worked on the project with Lori Hausegger of Boise State University and Matthew Hennigar of Brock University. “So we wanted to test that out systematically and try to figure out how the selection committees were actually working.”

In response to accusations of partisan influence, the federal government changed the judicial appointment process in 1988 by setting up screening committees, said Riddell. These committees are supposed to objectively evaluate the applications and recommend to the minister of justice who should and who shouldn’t be appointed.

“Patronage appointments were supposed to be addressed with the creation of the screening committees, but that obviously hasn’t happened to a satisfactory degree,” he said.

One possible reason is that, under the current appointment process, the committees screen names provided by the government rather than collect the names of candidates independently, he said.

The issue of patronage appointments is becoming increasingly important as Canadian judges continue to gain more legal authority, he said. Judges now have the power to create policies and strike down laws under the Charter of Rights.

“They have the power to decide on issues ranging from the legalization of marijuana to abortion to healthcare and anti-terrorism. Even in non-charter cases, they make decisions that impact people’s lives.”

A quartet of Quebec-based academics took a look at the coverage of four newspapers during the most recent Quebec provincial election campaign and found no evidence of bias:

Quebec voters who selected their election season newspapers based on the expectation that their
paper’s news coverage would be tilted toward favoured candidates were disappointed, according to a campaign news analysis conducted by McGill University’s Observatory of Media and Public Policy.

The study took a look at coverage in Le Devoir, The Gazette, La Presse, and Le Soleil .  While the study’s authors praised the neutral tone of coverage, they felt that the newspapers they studied focused too much on the “horse race” aspect of the election and not enough on some of the policy issues debated during the election.

Voters reading any one of the four papers throughout March learned a lot more about the polls than they did about where any of the candidates wanted to take Quebec if they won the election. Vital issues like education, immigration, the environment and national unity were all given short shrift in favour of an overemphasis on daily poll standings. . . .[but] The results of our study suggest that Quebec’s leading newspapers deserve high marks on the fairness of campaign news coverage, but far lower marks for their treatment of policy matters.