The latest series of judicial appointments to Quebec Superior Court federal Justice Minister Arif Virani have stirred a tempest in a teapot after some French media outlets castigated Justin Trudeau’s government for appointing Liberal donors and supporters to judgeships in Quebec.
The Journal de Montréal and the Quebec legal publication Droit-Inc noted that four judges appointed in the past year by Ottawa were donors to the Liberal Party of Canada. Between January 2024 and January 2025, federal Justice Virani appointed some twenty judges to the Quebec Superior Court, a fifth of them who had contributed to the federal Liberals or campaigned in favour of their positions.
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The Journal de Québec had some particularly harsh and unfair comments about one of the new judicial Quebec Superior Court appointments — Robert Leckey, former dean at Faculty of Law of McGill University and research director for the Bastarache Commission, a 2011 inquiry into alleged political interference in the nomination of judges in the province.
Under the rubric “anti-21 (and) anti-96 missile,” the daily tabloid implied that because Justice Leckey was an ardent campaigner against two controversial laws passed by the Quebec government that his “appointment is almost a caricature of what is what is wrong with the system for appointing judges” in Canada.
“In Leckey’s case, given his militancy against Bills 21 (An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State) and 96 (An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec), we are entitled to question his ‘ability to maintain an open mind while listening carefully to the arguments of the various parties’ (one of the criteria for evaluating an appointment),” wrote the Journal de Québec (Journal de Montréal’s sister publication).
That prompted Alexandre Forest of Gowling WLG and former bâtonnier of the Montreal Bar to declare that “the line between legitimately criticizing a system and attacking its integrity had been crossed.”
The Canadian Bar Association, Quebec division (CBA-Quebec) chided the publication for publishing a series of articles that suggest some judges are not fit to sit in complete impartiality because of their academic background, their activism, their political contributions or their past political positions.
“While a debate on improving the judicial system is always welcome, it must be conducted with rigour: reducing a judicial appointment to a political manoeuvre, without regard to the skills and integrity of the magistrate appointed, is a simplification that undermines the objectivity of the debate,” noted Jonathan Pierre-Étienne, the head of the CBA-Quebec, in the opinion piece published in the Journal de Montréal.
Besides Justice Leckey, Court of Quebec Judge Alain Trudel was appointed to the Superior Court of Quebec in Shawinigan, and Quebec Superior Court Justice Christian Immer was appointed as puisne Judge of the Court of Appeal of Quebec. Justice Immer replaces Justice Mark Schrager, who chose to become a supernumerary judge effective March 2, 2024.
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