In the middle of the January 2006 election campaign, Stephen Harper caused a commotion by asserting that the Senate, the senior federal public service and the courts had been “painted red.”
The conservative leader thus sought to reassure the undecided by evoking the counterbalancing, even blocking, power of liberals embedded in the system. In Canada, there cannot really be an “absolute conservative majority,” Harper will even say.
Since 1960, the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) has been in government most of the time. This is the “natural governing party».
Parting gifts
June 29, 1984: Pierre Elliott Trudeau leaves his post as PM by making a series of partisan appointments. Several of his ministers became senators and his parliamentary leader, a federal court judge. In all, some 70 liberals will be “placed” in this way.
Favoritism which will be denounced during the leaders’ debate by the Conservative Brian Mulroney, who will say to John Turner (Trudeau’s runner-up): “You had the choice! […] You could have said no, but you chose to say yes to the old habits of the Liberal Party.”
Two decades later, November 2003: as he leaves his post, Jean Chrétien prepares for what comes next. THE National Post denounces 89 of his appointments in the form of “parting gifts”.
Senate and courts
At the head of a “zombie government” (according to Globe and Mail), will Justin Trudeau respect the tradition of last-minute red nominations? It seems so.
Take the Senate. At the end of August, Trudeau brought in Daryl Fridhandler. However, the latter “co-directed the Alberta campaigns of Paul Martin in 2003 and Michael Ignatieff in 2006 and 2008,” noted La Presse Canadienne.
In September, we learned that Pierre Moreau, former Liberal minister (in Quebec, in the Charest and Couillard governments), was becoming a senator. In 2013, as a candidate in the PLQ leadership race, Mr. Moreau maintained – in a very Trudeauist manner – that the 1982 constitution did not pose a problem in Quebec.
Certainly, J. Trudeau abolished the Liberal affiliation in the upper house. Its flock presents itself as unaffiliated or independent. But unlike the appointments of non-political figures to which we were accustomed (R. Dallaire, J. Lapointe, etc.), those of Fridhandler and Moreau seem very glowing.
In the case of appointments to the judiciary, it is always delicate to link a newcomer to the political color of the person who appointed him. The judge is independent. But we know that when choosing new magistrates, the Trudeau government bluntly used the “liberalist”, a sort of electronic post-it note from the PLC.
One thing is certain, since 2015, they have avoided candidates, even competent ones, who seem Quebec nationalists, decentralizers or advocates of law 21 type secularism. They prefer to appoint to the judiciary those who think like them or who have evolved in their circles.
Moreover, we learned last week that lawyer Mathieu Piché-Messier was joining the Superior Court. His legal career is sparkling, but he has other qualities: a frequent donor to the PLC fund and a good knowledge of Minister Mélanie Joly.
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